By Staff
December 20th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
Communicating is more than two people talking at each other. It requires some listening as well.
Anne and Dave Marsden have been frequent delegators at City Hall who have found that they are not being heard and have run into hurdles on a number of cases when they want to make a point.
City Manager Tim Commisso along with City Solicitor Blake Hurley will meet with Ann and Dave Marsden in an attempt to resolve a number of issues – one being the diverting of their email to the Office of the City Clerk instead of the person the email was addressed to.
After considerable effort on their part they have managed to arrange a meeting with senior staff members.
The Gazette was recently informed that Anne and Dave Marsden have been advised that City Manager Tim Commisso, City Solicitor Blake Hurley and interim Executive Director Human Resources Ms Evfremidis, are prepared to meet with them by end of January, 2024.
The meeting is to try to resolve significant complaints affecting city and council transparency and accountability, with a financial impact of millions of public resources.
Resolution would mean avoiding an expensive Ombudsman complaint.
The Marsdens are asking the city, as an act of good faith, to end, before the New Year, the practice admitted by Clerk Kevin Arjoon in August of 2023, of having all their emails to staff and council diverted to the Clerk’s office for their actioning of a response.
Just reading an obituary on legendary comedian Tom Smothers, one half of the Smothers Brothers. In 2008, when they won a lifetime Emmy for their decades-ago work, Tom dedicated it to “those who feel compelled to speak out and are not afraid to speak to power and won’t shut up and who refuse to be silenced.”
Frankly, if we had more people like this, we might finally overcome abuses of power everywhere. But if we dismiss it as “constant complaining”, we won’t.
Not very thoughtful or productive Glenda. You should be happy they refer to your comment as “an opinion”, which implies a conclusion thought out yet open to dispute with intelligence.
I don’t see any of your reasoned thinking supporting your conclusion. All I see is echo chamber insult – an attitude of mind or bias, an un-reasoned and unfair distortion of judgment against the Marsden activism in their opinion, and in response to your uninformative sweeping accusation.
Marsdens gave you their reasoning, like it or not. Please give us your reasoning so readers can see where you are coming from with more than 9 words of simplistic bias.
In my view, the Marsdens, indeed all of us, deserve some respect.
Marsden’s always and constantly complain about one thing or another
You are, of course entitled to your opinion. However, thank goodness there are those in this commumity who realise the seriousness of a city administration that fails to recognize the rules behind the decision making and like us are determined we need to have the same means to deal with stopping the flushing of millions of our dollars as they do out West. Researching why an Albertan Mayor, three councillors and senior staff were fired by the provicial government has shown the accountability issues very well credentialled Burlington and knowledgeable taxpayers have took the time to put on the record are far more serious,.
You may well be in a position to slough this off, many are not and they need a municiapl govrnment that does its job which is to act in the best interests of taxpayers and within the law that governs their actions.
Members of the Burlington and Halton public should know that we have been trying to arrange the meeting that is the subject of this article for a significant amount of time. We were informed by Clerk Kevin Arjoon from the outset of our efforts, that “neither Mr. Commisso nor the city solicitor had an appetite for such a meeting”. The recent response from the city in terms of the need for a 2 hr. meeting and the diverting of our emails to end prior to the end of December, 2023 certainly seems to support Mr. Arjoon’s position.
We are told Mr. Commisso’s inability to accommodate a 2 hr. meeting is the reason we cannot have such. The meeting is to determine if very significant issues financially impacting millions of public dollars can be resolved. If not, the Ombudsman has been informed of the need to ensure an appropriate investigation of several staff members’ actions, including Mr. Commisso’s. There is also the question of how long Mr. Commisso will be available to try to resolve these matters he has avoided meeting over, given his very suddenly announced plans to retire.
We have also been informed the Act of Good faith we requested in terms of the diversion of our emails, terminating by end of 2023, which we believe is inconsistent with the city’s public engagement criteria and is questionable in terms of having any lawful authority, will not happen. However, we were assured diversion of our emails will be on the city agenda, circulated in advance.
Our response to the city controlling the agenda for a meeting we called in the best interests of the city in terms of millions of public resources, that took so long to set will be: “we called the meeting and the agenda to be discussed will be ours. We will have this agenda in your hands one week prior to the meeting.”