After spending 4 months monitoring City Council I first wanted to get a feel for how they do things down at City Hall. What I sense from watching the politicians, city administrators and public dealings with them is that there is a serious lack of transparency and accountability from a council which only talks of such things but their actions speak differently.

Their words promise that all is well. “I guarantee you will like what we are doing to the park when it’s done”, but in the mean time residents property is adversely affected.

When answering “I don’t know if you can record council meetings, but I will find out”, council, under the table so to speak, passes a Bylaw prohibiting recording of council meetings. They never did get back to me until I forced the issue at a council meeting. And even then they passed the buck to the City Manager with not one of the council members having the courage to answer me in public when they all knew the answer as they all voted in all three readings to ban recordings by the public a month earlier.

When speaking to Alderman Rothe, he said he felt that we should be able to record meetings. Which lead to the question, then why did you vote to ban recordings? His replay was, “Oh that was a mistake”. Again what can we believe words or actions?

Rumour has it that the real reason that council does not want to be recorded is that they do not want to be embarrassed by some one taking a clip of recording out of context and putting it on the internet. Well let me tell you, you don’t need recordings to do that. Besides guys, no one made you sign up for this job.

It’s all too easy to take statements out of context and embarrass anyone. For example, at the last meeting I attended and after a strong presentation from concerned Property owners having been forced to collect the cities utility bills Alderman Acker stated “Business is apparently apart of this community”. From that statement you would conclude that we have an Alderman that is unaware that business was indeed part of a community. But that would be unfair, as that was not his meaning. If you had a recording of his whole statement you would understand his intended meaning. These kinds of statements happen all the time at council meetings.

Statements like this can be fun of course, but shallow, as it is at someone else’s expense. But more importantly they are just words. When we hear or read them we must take them with a grain of salt. What we really need to take count of is actions. Transparency could be equated to the difference between words and actions.

Here are some of Councils actions:

• City Prohibits recording of council meetings.
• Changes planned park development adversely affecting resident’s property with out notice of change.
• Passes Bylaw that passes the buck to property owners to collect the Cities utility bills. Council say they will re-examine the issue.
• Post office is built in the most inconvenient location. Who approved the building permit?
• New Dog Park is also being planned for a location that you have to drive to.
• Council passes Bylaw allowing Administrators to borrow up to $5,000,000 at any time with out notifying council.

It seems to me that Council speaks to transparency and accountability but their actions prove different and even appear self serving at times.

I am not interested in the stupid things council members my say as humans we all say stupid and regretful things from time to time. Words are not important on their own. Actions on the other hand can be. But if combined, comparing words to actions is the thing that trust is built upon.

Words, actions and time will tell us whom to trust or not.