News out of Waltham this week reveals a few challenges that are undoubtedly common to other local municipalities, and for which there are a few readily-available remedies.
One is the opportunity available to all mayors, councillors and directors general to improve their understanding of their roles and responsibilities in carrying out the business of their municipalities. It comes in the form of presentations made by the Quebec ministry of municipal affairs (MAMH) and is free for the asking. Any municipality that has not requested these presentations should do so, aussitôt que possible.
Elected officials are accountable to the public for their decisions on how they spend our money. This requires tracking of all the steps from the moment a council passes a resolution, through the procurement process and ultimately payment for the contracted goods or services.
Documentation that makes it possible to verify that proper, legal and fair procedures are being followed is the standard. It is the responsibility of municipal staff to ensure this standard is met, and the responsibility of elected officials to ask tough questions whenever there are doubts about how the business of the municipality is being conducted.
Not only must councillors, mayors and staff become better-educated on the standards by which our municipalities should operate, so must we, the electorate. How else can we as voters, ratepayers and citizens know what to expect of our municipal councils? How else can we feel confident that they are conducting our affairs properly, or recognize improper conduct when we see it? In other words, how can we hope to fulfill our responsibilities as citizens in holding our elected officials to account?
The processes of local government must be more transparent and there must be opportunities for the public to ask questions about those processes. We can no longer afford meetings of elected officials taking place in camera. We cannot afford the text of resolutions not being made available to the public at council meetings to enable us to be fully informed of the issues under discussion and equipped to provide meaningful scrutiny. We cannot afford minutes of meetings taking weeks or longer to be published, nor for them to provide anything less than clarity on what is said and by whom.
All the activities of our councils on behalf of their ratepayers must be fully accounted for and made transparent, with the possible exception of discussion of issues that clearly require privacy for well-established reasons such as staff issues, proprietary information or security matters.
Many of our municipalities are too small to support the level of professionalism that is needed. Too much responsibility rests on the shoulders of too few people whose time is, inevitably, spread too thin. Rather than 18 municipalities, Pontiac County should have five, which could be formed through the merger of fairly obvious clusters of communities. Then the resources could be amassed to recruit the professional staff required in each municipality.
Several of these remedies could be achieved through decisions at the very next meetings of our municipal councils. Moving from 18 to five municipalities, on the other hand, is a bit more difficult. Who among our current crop of elected representatives would support a campaign that would see their municipality merge with several others, resulting in something like 35 mayors and councillors across the county instead of the current 110 or so. It’s a question of how we get there from here, which is not entirely obvious. Any ideas?
But one thing is clear. Procedural lapses justified by the explanation that this is the way things have always been done can no longer be acceptable. This county and its municipalities have an uphill climb to put this place onto an improving socio-economic trajectory, and we need our councils to be firing on all cylinders in order for us to get there. We can no longer indulge the old practices, however convenient they may be.
