Yesterday, the Town of Collingwood sent out an email trying to rationalize the town’s budget and tax increase. That release underscores in so many ways why townhall desperately needs both a person and a plan to oversee and guide its communications. And this is coming from someone who also believes
Continue readingTag: user fees and costs
Scripturient: Council’s Affordable Housing Con
A recent story in CollingwoodToday has the headline, “Town considering increases to development charges.” Everyone knows that increasing the development charges (DCs) adds to the cost of a new home, making housing even more expensive and less affordable. Right now, it’s extremely difficult to find anything even close to “affordable”
Continue readingScripturient: Council’s Frenzied, Deranged, and Expensive Obsession Over the SVJI
Three hundred seventy-nine boxes and one hundred binders. That’s what EPCOR has delivered to town hall for town staff to comb through looking for… well, no one knows yet. Maybe heffalumps. And it will occupy a considerable amount of the time for the town’s $216,000-a-year CAO to go through them
Continue readingScripturient: Council Rewards Its Friend. Again.
Our council has found yet another way to reward its friend, despite the recommendations in the report from the Saunderson Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (aka the SVJI) warning about “apparent” conflicts of interest with friends. Page 7 of the full SVJI report states (emphasis added): Councillors and staff should avoid providing
Continue readingScripturient: The $100 Million Mayor?
In a story on CollingwoodToday, our mayor, Brian Saunderson, shrugs off the costs of his Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (the SVJI) as being but a drop in the bucket for the town’s annual budget: He noted the town’s annual budget is nearly $100 million, and the inquiry costs amount to less
Continue readingScripturient: A Municipal Challenge to Democracy?
Collingwood has joined other local municipalities asking the province to revamp its Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (MFIPPA; a guide from the Information and Privacy Commissioner to the Act is also available here) to make the process more restrictive and less open. While some of those
Continue readingScripturient: Small town rules
In their book, Small Town Rules (Pearson Education Inc., USA, 2012), authors Barry Moltz and Becky McCray explain seven rules for businesses that use the model of a small town to offer advice on growing and maintaining a business n the “connected economy.” And while most of their rules are
Continue readingScripturient: Doherty’s Magic Money Fairy
At 3:55:20 in the video of Monday’s Collingwood Council meeting, Councillor Deb Doherty utters the self-congratulatory claim that she is “glad” the costs of the upcoming judicial inquiry to pursue the Block’s maniacal conspiracy theories are not coming out of “taxpayer funds on an annual basis.” I can hear your
Continue readingScripturient: Alectra says no: The Block screwed us again
The headline on the media release reads, “Alectra selling its shares in Collus PowerStream to Collingwood.” What it should add is that Collingwood residents and taxpayers were betrayed by members of their own council and administration. After a three-year campaign to screw us, The Block have won a major victory
Continue readingScripturient: The Block are privatizing our public assets
So Brian and his Block minions want to sell our airport. Our publicly-owned asset. And they’re doing it without even the pretence of the courtesy to tell us why. No public input, no public engagement, no open discussion over it. In the flaccid Connection story, it notes, In November, 2016,
Continue readingScripturient: Utter contempt at council
Utter contempt. That’s what The Block showed for process at council, on Monday night. And for ethics. And for you, the residents. Utter contempt. But when they want to give benefits to their friends or themselves, boy do they rise to the occasion. Which of course they did, Monday. Anything
Continue readingScripturient: The test of integrity
I’ve been complaining all this term that Collingwood’s standing committee system is broken. It is redundant, ineffective and expensive. It continues in use only because it was the brainchild of the interim CAO who The Block worship. But it is about to come under a test: one that will determine
Continue readingScripturient: EPCOR’s rate hikes create unrest
It seems EPCOR isn’t the most beloved utility service out there, despite the glowing comments the interim CAO made to staff recently. I was given a recording of his hour-long talk (aka sales pitch) for EPCOR and I can only say I hope no one listening fell for it (I’ll
Continue readingScripturient: Monetizing our public assets
In the town’s disingenuous press release (really just a sales pitch for EPOCR) about its obsessive drive to privatize our utility services, it has this paragraph: The Town’s RFP process solicited proposals from a wide range of potentially interested parties that could maximize the value of the Town’s remaining investment
Continue readingScripturient: Will the Block’s hypocrisy never cease?
Last term, when they were raising their pitchforks to storm the bureaucratic castle, the members of today’s Collingwood Council – those we disparagingly refer to as The Block – were loudly castigating the former council for having once done a sole-source deal with the company that was the only Canadian
Continue readingScripturient: Collingwood Council’s missed initiatives
The word initiative derives from the Latin word initiare “to begin.” Since 1600, it has meant “introduce to some practice or system,” “begin, set going.” While any sort of action or engagement, positive or negative, can be classified as an initiative, generally one refers only to positive enterprises when describing
Continue readingScripturient: Council is privatizing our utilities
Collingwood council and its administration are planning to privatize both our water and electricity utilities. All, of course, without consulting you, the public. Some members of council have even stated – with a straight face, mind you – they would ask for your input at a later date. A date
Continue readingScripturient: Collingwood’s own Gong Show, part 1
Has there ever been a more inept, ineffective group at the council table in Collingwood? Certainly not in the 26 years I’ve been here. Not in the dozen years I covered it for the media, not in the 11 years I served on council have I seen anything so comical.
Continue readingScripturient: Those pesky costs The Block forgot to mention
Who sends out your water bills? Collus-PowerStream. It’s all part of the shared services agreement. Yes, that simple little agreement that for 15 productive, cooperative years linked our water and electrical utilities with mutual resources. That same agreement The Block dismantled and handed over to the interim CAO two years
Continue readingScripturient: 322 reasons why we’re better off with PowerStream
$322. More. Every year. $322. That’s how much more the average consumer household using 750 kW/month pays a year when connected to Hydro One, compared to the same household connected to Collus PowerStream. That means YOU will pay that much more, …
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