By Pepper Parr
September 24th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
What do you do when your council member holds a meeting in which they Mayor takes part to talk about the forth coming budget and they don’t tell you the truth ?
Salaries and wages along have increased bu just shy of $10 million
They fudge the numbers to make the budget increase look lower than it actually is – AND they are talking to you about expenses the city faces when they know that there is more information coming that will increase the amount of money the City has to spend.
In this instance Council is waiting for a report from Staff on what is going to be required to handle future flooding – similar to what took place early in July.
What do you do when the Mayor says the first budget meeting she gave was great – a lot of people were in the room – there were less than 25 people – that did not include the ten or so that included Council members and staff.
Budget meeting March 2011 – this was one of 11 tables. Citizens will show up for a meeting if you make it interesting enough and promote it effectively.
The Mayor said meetings like this had never taken place before – not true.
What do you do with people like that? Return them to office in October of 2026?
The people who pay the taxes have a lot of hard thinking to do about the way the city is governed. There are members of the current City Council who do not know what their jobs are – check out what Councillors Galbraith and Nisan had to say about a major development. Link to that embarrassment is below.
The sky was the limit for these two. The developer who provided the script loved it
The one that got me was when the Mayor said they were not holding Council meetings in the evenings so that families would have more time to be together. The evenings are the only time most people have to delegate at a Council meeting – have you ever heard anything as cheeky. The disrespect for the people who voted for Meed Ward is atrocious – yet they put up with it and take every opportunity there is to have their picture taken with her.
This is what can happen in Burlington when the voters want to see a change. Will we see something like this in 2026?
What do you do when …
Well, the first thing that seems to come to mind is to plant friendly faces with accolade statements in the audience. In the first meeting, Ward 4, the “plant” was the highest ranking officer of Burlington Green, an organization that receives “benefits” from the City. In the second, third and fourth meetings (Wards 1, 2 and 6) the person of interest was the Mayor’s good friend from monthly Senior Centre breakfasts and the campaign trail. In each case the statement made was to the theme of ‘Burlington is a wonderful City to live, work and play in and the taxes ain’t so bad folks’. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but this travelling roadshow of self-interested Mayoral groupies is a bit much.
Lying by omission is deceiving and dishonorable. Something MMW is an expert at. Looks like some councillors are now using her playbook, making nice with the developers. This is corrupt and shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
I’m just wondering who, as an example, would possibly put themselves in the unenviable position of running against our Mayor at this point? Who would be brave enough to run the gauntlet of an ever-increasing basket of perfectionist ideals that have come to complicate a society driven by empty virtues?