By Pepper Parr
February 13th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
City Council will meet today and zip through their agenda.
The folks in Shoreacres will delegate – but Council was pretty clear, the owner of the lot that has a single house on it at 366 Appleby Line wants to tear it down and put a semi-detached structure on the property which would add to housing available. The argument that housing was needed did it for this Council: from that point forward it was a done deal despite some impressive delegations. Another community lost out
The interesting thing on the agenda is in the CLOSED session stuff;
This is something you want to keep an eye on.
If the numbers were positive City Council would be letting you know real quick. When they go behind CLOSED doors – you know something is wrong. Keep that in the back of your mind going forward.
Reserves are mandated by the province – you can’t cheat.
There was a time when the Reserve balances were available – one of the gifts City Manager Tim Commisso gave the city was bundling the reserves into groups making it difficult to dig down into the numbers.
We’ll keep an eye on this one.
“Reserves are mandated by the Province – you can’t cheat.” Our audits show the city has a long list of actions taken or not taken contrary to their knowledge of the Provincial and Federal legislated mandate. Just getting a conversation going on accountability for such is a long and arduous task never mind actually fixing the problem as the Publisher, ourselves and many others well know.
Getting the matters before, for example the Audit Committee whose duty is ro review and report to Council on all internal and external audit matters along with compliance with such legislated mandates etc. should be something which are welcomed,i.e. Audit Committee public submissions. However, experience, evidence and city records, show they are not.
Albert Faccanda and others directly affected (which in our opinion is all COB residents in this case) by the city non- compliance with the planning legislated framework through lack of a by-law (for over 20 years) that confirms our OP position on semi-detached homes, is a prime example of how we all should be able to utilize our Audit Committee. After all we can all utilize the election contributions Audit Committee if we believe there is an issue with compliance with this legislation.