Today I received a letter in the mail, with no return address or personal identifier anywhere on it. I must say that I’m always tempted to dispose of such suspicious letters immediately, and always open them in a well-ventilated place! So to whoever sent it, in future please just give me a call, I’m happy to chat.
Inside was a printed Facebook post from someone from a different community, directing their concerns toward Brighton residents. I’ve been off of Facebook for a few years now, so I hadn’t already seen it, and I usually know better than to respond to posts of this kind…except that this one isn’t targeting me, it’s targeting staff, and doing so very unfairly. The questions are clear, and clearly answerable, so for the sake of clarity for residents and in defence of our staff, here goes. I’ll summarize the questions, rather than reposting the text here (again, because these questions take the form of accusations against current members of our municipal staff, and I won’t name them).
Financial Reporting
The first few paragraphs mention concerns about financial reporting and a lack of transparency. Apparently this other municipality has had some unsatisfying financial disclosure, though I can’t verify that. What I can do is state unequivocally that our council, and our staff, have been thoroughly transparent. Our last meeting of the term was to receive audited financial statements! You can see the agenda, including the staff reports and auditor’s report, here. Any delays in financial reporting have come from staff turnover more than anything, and the auditor thanked our staff for being so supportive through the audit process.
Delegated Authority
The post goes on to discuss delegated authority and changes to procedures. I can confirm that we’ve had a significant amount of changes to our procedures here in Brighton over this term, but I don’t relate these at all to the staff members in question.
Procedural By-Law: Every municipality has a procedural by-law that governs the way that our meetings work. It is a good practice to update this every term, or at least every other term, to make sure that our meetings are working well for our purposes. Our Clerks initiated some changes, and Council initiated some changes, and all changes have the approval of council. Some of the changes have to do with the way that committees of council operate, and I’m very excited to see how that will turn out in the coming term as our committees enjoy more support, communication, and freedom to get their hands dirty (in the case of the Environmental Sustainability Committee, quite literally!). Other procedural changes were a result of the province implementing Strong Mayor Powers against our will: some things that used to be done by council as a whole are now being done by the Mayor (particularly preparing the budget), and not even the Mayor gets a say in that.
Site Plan Control: Council agreed to delegate authority for site plan control to our Planning department, in the wake of provincial changes that allow that to happen. The provincial government has been trying, all term, to get “more houses built faster,” which has led them to change the planning framework once or twice a year for the past four years (to the point where I led a delegation from Northumberland requesting that they slow down so that we can catch up and update our own policies to align with them!), and one of the better ideas that came out of that was to delegate site plan authority to staff. Site Plan agreements are a part of the development process in which the municipality gets fairly granular with a development proposal, working with the proponent to plan out exactly where the proposed building will be, which way it will face, where trees and landscaping will be, driveway locations, drainage plans, etc. That used to require a council decision, which I think was actually inappropriate: council is supposed to make strategic decisions for the community, not police driveway locations and dictate specific tree plantings. Delegating these choices is not only appropriate, it’s overdue. The complaints in the Facebook post include development delays, moving goalposts, and inconsistent interpretations of the rules; I can attest that all of those things seem to happen everywhere in this rapidly changing environment. Like I said, we had to ask the province to stop changing the rules to allow us to catch up (and they did not stop changing the rules anyway). Staff are as frustrated by all of this as anyone else is.
Spending/Procurement Thresholds: Every organization that spends money should have rules about how that money is spent, and in an organization as large as the Corporation of the Municipality of Brighton there are a lot of people with spending powers. One of the ways that spending is governed is through materiality thresholds, which are dollar figures over which someone needs approval from someone else to make the purchase. Not all employees have any spending powers at all, and those who do have limits over which they need to ask their Manager, Director, or CAO, with significant purchases also requiring Council approval. While nobody should have to ask permission to buy a pen or paperclip, nobody should be able to spend a million dollars without say-so. During this term of council, we agreed to increase those thresholds; I blogged about it here.
Each of these decisions to delegate authority to staff does mean that fewer items have to come to council for approval. As I note in the post about procurement I linked above, even though staff don’t have to come to council for approval for spending below $100k, they still choose to. Financial accountability is something that they value too. They know that their work depends on public trust, and that in many ways public trust is their job. It’s the prime deliverable, the chief outcome of their good work. And that hasn’t changed with our changes in staffing, except in places where it has improved even beyond the standards we had before.
Election Changes
The post also includes questions about election integrity, and associated these questions with the move to online voting, which they acknowledge we used in the last election too. They mention concerns about “voter-list accuracy, duplicate voter information cards, election safeguards, service providers, and how the integrity of the process is verified.”
- Errors surrounding the voter list are extremely common and almost unavoidable, because the voter list is determined by address, and people move all the time, which is why we are always prompted to register to vote so that the existing list can be adjusted. But this year in particular we expected to see errors because of yet another provincial change: the voter list used to be prepared by MPAC, but the province decided that it should be prepared by Elections Ontario this year instead. As much as I have confidence in Elections Ontario, I didn’t expect them to knock it out of the park on their first swing.
- I’m not totally sure what is meant by “election safeguards”, but our Clerks are responsible for the integrity of the election, and they do a great job.
- Our service provider, Simply Voting, was chosen after their excellent performance in our last election and after staff research showed them to still be the best choice on the balance of security, ease of use, and cost.
- Regarding the integrity of the process, our Clerks are doing a great job of reminding us candidates what we can and cannot do and when; and Simply Voting as a third party digital process remains arms-length of our staff and candidates, and holds security as a top priority. We will receive a report after the election reviewing how it went, including matters such as turnout and any concerns that arose through the process.
Integrity Commissioner
Finally, the post questioned why this council chose to appoint a new Integrity Commissioner “six months early,” suggesting that it was a rushed decision that bound the next council until 2029. It was a very easy decision to make, and two points of context show why.
First, while we had a great relationship with Principles Integrity (I relied on conversations with Jeff Abrams to find my footing early in the term, learning what I can and can’t do so that I could feel confident in my role), that firm is winding down. Jeff would have seen out the rest of the contract period, but we had the option to let him off the hook so he could transition into retirement, and I saw no point in delaying the inevitable.
Second, we benefit from being part of Northumberland County in many ways, not least of which is that Northumberland municipalities often work together, even aside from the County’s structures themselves, to align our purchasing and service contracts. That sometimes gets us good deals, and sometimes streamlines or simplifies matters by reducing the number of third parties involved in the region. The County had picked a new Integrity Commissioner, and our choice was either to jump in on that procurement or to go it alone. It seemed beneficial to stick together with our fellow Northumberland municipalities.
Conclusion: Chaotic Times, and Systems vs People
I almost feel like it’s a mantra of this blog: change is hard. In this case, many changes to the environment in which municipalities operate have created a lot of challenges for our staff and councils. Staff are working hard, but where there are challenges, errors, or failures, people notice.
One particular quirk of humans is that, in the absence of clarity, we have a tendency to be suspicious of other people. And our systems are anything but clear. I don’t expect a single resident to understand the Planning Act, much less to understand how much it has changed over the past four years! But if they’ve been working on a planning proposal, it’s likely that they’ve been at it for more than a year, and it probably feels like the goalposts are shifting…because they are, by provincial statute. But in the absence of all of the background knowledge of the shifting goalposts, it may seem like planning staff are being difficult, rather than having difficulties of their own. It might seem like they’re interpreting the rules inconsistently because they’re playing favourites, rather than scrambling to figure out how to interpret rules that change every six months. I know of some residents who seem to genuinely believe that our staff are unkind or malicious to them, and that breaks my heart, because I know that our staff (who are generally normal, kind, thoughtful people) are just doing their best in a system that prioritizes control over customer service.
My heart breaks for my residents, who feel pummelled by a system that feels arbitrary, inconsistent, and at its worst, corrupt; and my heart breaks for our staff, whose jobs are even more thankless than council’s and are increasingly politicized and made subject to suspicion and undue criticism.
So to be absolutely, crystal clear: these concerns are warranted, because they touch on real challenges that municipal staff everywhere in Ontario have been facing. Similarities between municipalities are not because they have had some of the same staff, but because they relate to province-wide changes made by the provincial government. Our staff here have my complete confidence, and they’ve been fantastic about improving our systems and their accountability and transparency. We are better now, as a municipal corporation, than we were at the start of this term, and I am grateful to all of the staff who have helped make that happen.
If you see anyone interacting with the Facebook post in question, or asking similar questions, please share this blog post with them. It’s a good thing to ask questions! It’s better to ask questions before casting suspicion. And it’s even better still to share answers to help allay your neighbours’ concerns.