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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
BILL TIERNEY: Is there a reason to go to town meetings?
posted by BOFarrell at 19h59
by Bill Tierney
According to a West Island journalist, only six Pointe Claire residents showed up for the adoption of the town’s 2010 budget on Jan. 18.
What do empty council chambers tell us about Pointe Claire’s democracy?
Should Mayor Bill McMurchie and his band of councillors conclude that the 30,339 Pointe Claire residents who didn’t show up are delinquent? Should they be fined maybe?
Obviously not. Our democracy is optional: you don’t have to exercise your rights and privileges. You don’t even have to know what they are.
Should the council then conclude that they must just be boring grey men (no women of course) who can’t compete with the Habs floundering again in Florida?
Or should they just conclude that they are being paid to do the job and no one has a major beef with them.
According to this line of argument, the councillors are there because they are paid to be there. They are public employees, for better or worse.
And the budget is their main tool for getting things done. It’s their business, not ours.
Does it mean then that residents don’t care how their taxes are spent?
Some councillors moan about empty council chambers but it probably means that the good citizens of Pointe Claire are happy with their council and confident in their leadership. They have elected their council and they are prepared to let them get on with making a budget and governing the town.
That’s certainly what councils dare to hope.
Would a notice of a meeting sent door-to-door increase attendance? Or maybe a sensational blog or a Twitter or a simple email? Free wine and cheese? What would it take to put concerned residents in the seats?
I guess the main reason residents don’t come to meetings is that they are satisfied.
Obviously all the decisions have already been made and they are simply being adopted. There’s a question period but there isn’t much chance of participating in the decision-making. It’s all been done by the people you pay to do it.
Take the budget: the town administration has been working on the budget for six months and council has pored over it in several long meetings. The battle to keep Montreal’s tax-greed under control continues and mayoral fingers have been publicly pointed at Mayor Gerald Tremblay.
So your council isn’t going to start making changes in the adoption meeting. The hard decisions regarding tax increases have been made and excuses have been lined up and rehearsed.
“Blame being put on Montreal,” reads the headline.
So when they do take their places in the council chamber, the six Pointe Claire (here you can substitute your own town or borough) residents are told that their residential taxes are going up 6.97 per cent, which is a tiny fraction better than 7 per cent.
So how do the six residents react to the news, which has been leaked since before Christmas, that Montreal is to blame? Montreal is boosting the Agglomeration cost, half of their tax bill, by 12 per cent. The local component is only going up 2.15 per cent, which could be called inflation.
All our mayors are blaming Quebec City for allowing Montreal to overcharge us for “downtown” expenses and double-charge us for water. Peter Trent, our knight in re-cycled armour, is repeating what suburban mayors have been saying since 2000: we need stronger regional government. The merger on the island won’t solve Montreal’s funding problems.
Even an independent councillor in the downtown borough of Ville Marie, Karim Boulos, in a Gazette letter agrees with our mayors that “there needs to be a better and fairer mechanism for collecting taxes from off-island suburbs to support downtown and Montreal in general.”
Our six residents will hear the same complaint and the same solution: but when will someone do something about it?
No wonder citizens don’t come to meetings. Do you blame them?
Bill Tierney is the former mayor of Ste. Anne de Bellevue.