An Administrative Disgrace

I cannot watch Council meetings "live" anymore. I cannot stomach the way that they are carried on. The amount of time wasted is unbelievable for the results achieved. Rather, I tape them and then view the Meeting later by fast-forwarding the tape to try and see if there's anything of significance in those hours of talk.

It almost seems deliberate to chase people away from watching what Council is doing. I can almost hear the start of the debate to hold the Council meetings every other week again soon.

Take Monday night's Council meeting as an example. Please, as Henny Youngman would say!

It was an Administrative nightmare and certainly did not leave me with any confidence that anyone at City Hall knew what they were doing. If you want to know when Eddie is tense, Monday was a good indicator.

Eddie has a switch such that when his microphone is turned on, all the others turn off. His Chairman's microphone was on and off so many times cutting off people in mid-sentence that they were sometimes not understandable. Just watch the red light in front of Councillors and see when it goes off while they are talking because then you know Eddie is about to intervene. The earlier that the red light goes off the more upset Eddie is. It is a terrific barometer of his feelings.

It is so clear that there is no respect given to the public anymore by this Mayor, Council and Administration. Frankly, their attitude almost seems to be why bother with Council meetings anyway. Sometimes for meetings even amongst themselves.

A report on the purchase of hybrid buses is presented in the last possible minute and never posted on the City's website for the public to read. One Councillor, Councillor Dilkens, asks for the matter to be deferred for a week so that he can actually read the Report so that he can understand what he is voting for. It is only an $11 million transaction but his request is defeated if you can believe it.

It seems that Councillors are not supposed to read but just to approve. In the end however, Councillor Dilkens was successful because procedurally, the Report should have been sent out previously and since it was not, then the Mayor said that the matter would have to be deferred.

In case you are wondering, Steve Vlachodimos took the hit on that one. I'm sure that you've noted that Councillor Postma made a point of mentioning that the Report was presented with sufficient time to Administration. She did not want to be scolded by the Kindergarten teacher for doing something wrong.

What was also interesting to me was that the Chair of Transit Windsor confirmed that they had spent a long time working on the project but that the matter was put together quickly and brought forward to the Council in the last-minute for reasons frankly that are still not clear to me.

Doesn't anyone understand what is going on with these kind of deals, especially when the City already had an existing contract with the bus provider for diesel buses? What is clear is that whatever happened required immediate action because the Transit Windsor Board had just announced almost a week before:

• "Councillor Caroline Postma, chair of the transit board announced today that there would be no Board of Directors meetings for July and August.
  
  The next scheduled meeting takes place on: Wednesday, September 10, 2008."

What about the matter with respect to the Ovations food area preparations revisions. That is a half-million dollar item increasing the East End Arena costs. I do not recall seeing anything on the public agenda about that matter either. In fact, in order to get it in front of Council, various steps under the Procedural Bylaw had to be taken.

Of course, when it was discovered that there were no final engineering plan so that no one knew what the actual cost would be, this matter had to be deferred again. Of course, Council had spent time talking about a matter that they will now have to talk about all over again.

In that light, I noticed that none of the Councillors picked up on what CKLW did, namely that the cost of the asphalt for the parking lot for the arena is going to be increased by an amount I am sure is in the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars since the price of the 17,000 to 18,000 metric tonnes of asphalt needed will have to be increased by about $20 a tonne. Some of the cost can be absorbed but not all of it.

I will talk about the Tunnel deal in another BLOG. However, Councillor Marra had to record as a Council question what he had asked for I assume as a Windsor Tunnel Commissioner back in September, 2007 with respect to the transaction but which has never been answered to date.

Finally, the McHugh Street Extension Phase II matter went on the Consent Agenda if you can believe it. Another cost overage for the arena matter, although the multimillion dollar cost is not considered by Council to be part of the arena cost, and hardly any debate.

Councillor Valentinis did ask the obvious question about why the contract had to be increased when the tender document was accepted only about a month ago. There was an answer given, but I do not have the faintest idea what was meant by something to do with a typo in the Report.

These meetings require a makeover, an extreme one. Perhaps like the one that Councillor Halberstadt had after his trip to Sudbury. I still wonder what he was fishing for there.