After reading an article in our local paper on Rothesay Council’s “Priorities” document (available here), I decided to look more closely at both the priorities and how they were developed.
Readers of this blog might be forgiven for wondering, as I did, about the timing of the newspaper article. It was printed more than a month after Council’s priorities were adopted and without fanfare at the tailend of December’s Council meeting.
You might also wonder if the Mayor and Councillor Maguire were speaking, in the TJ article, on behalf of all councillors or just themselves. If they hadn’t been asked by Council, then why weren’t the views of more Councillors covered in the TJ story?
Had you attended the December open session of Council you might have been struck by the lack of any real discussion or the lack of any substantive revisions before the priorities were accepted by Council. Perhaps that was because the real discussion had been held behind closed doors? I believe the staff memo below has the answer.
Jarvie memo – “Background Council has met on several occasions to develop goals and objectives contained in the attached document…”
We must wonder if at least the spirit of the Municipalities Act is being fully complied when a council meets behind closed doors for so much of their time. The requirement to hold meetings of Council in public can be found at subsection 10.2(1) “Subject to subsection (4), all regular and special meetings of a council shall be open to the public.” (The full text of the Municipalities Act can be found here).
One thing is clear, there was little in the TJ story that would answer the questions above and so readers were left to wonder how Council arrived at their 10 pages of priorities. That is surprising when the paper trail above points to an obvious conflict between the priorities setting process and Mayor Grant’s promise of “Open Government”. A headline that reflected that would be one way of holding politicians accountable…
At a more pragmatic level, if the public had not been excluded from the process before that open council session the public might have understood why, once again, they were being burdened with another tax increase.
Instead we were left with a filtered message about what those 10 pages mean from the perspective of the Mayor and just one Councillor. Were they promoting Council’s agenda or their own?
Whatever the answer is to that question, this falls far short of the more robust public processes employed by Quispamsis and Saint John in the development of their own Municipal priorities. The other members of Rothesay Council should not be happy with two of their members getting out ahead of them and moving an agenda along that includes items like a new $18 to $ 19 million Arena. That is something this Council has yet to endorse.
The priorities adopted in December are Council’s priorities and without public engagement they are not yet priorities of residents. Any developer of public policy knows that the time for getting buy-in from stakeholders is not after you’ve made decisions, but before. That is the essence of Open Government.
I predict an uphill and unnecessary battle with constituents if Council continues to make major policy like this behind closed doors and then leak out selective versions of what they really mean.
The public apathy and a less than inquiring media means this strategy will only work as long as indicidual councillors let themselves be pulled along for the ride.
Comments are always welcome at editor@oneRothesay.com
Next up is the first in a series of blog posts looking at Rothesay’s priorities for each of the priority areas.