Did The Voters Make A Grave Error Last November
Monday, October 15, 2012 @ 3:45 AM
On the eve of their first anniversary in office, the Mayor and Council of the city of Prince George continue to baffle one’s imagination of what they might do next.
The latest move by Mayor Shari Green and council is a trip to China to speak to our proposed "twin". Cost according to their own figures, $30- to 35 thousand dollars. The money will come from the economic development fund which will allow Councillor Hall, Wilbur and the Mayor to attend.
It speaks loads about a council that simply does not care about the taxpayer who they were elected to represent.
Let’s take you back to the beginning. You may not want to recall if you voted for Shari Green, that she was making the rounds at this time last year suggesting that under her watch she was looking for savings of up to 10%. Now did she mean the city’s budget? It certainly did not refer to council and their budget.
(1) To start off their term, council gave final approval to a raise for themselves
(2) The Mayor announced a trimming of staff, well sort of, shortly after the Mayor hired herself a personal assistant.
(3) The Mayor joined forces with a number of other municipal Mayors to see in large measure how they could cut the cost of operating their respective cities.
(4) The Mayor and Seven councillors headed off to Victoria to attend the annual Municipal meeting
(5) The Mayor and two of her councillors look for council support to take a trip to China.
Buried amongst all that was a trip to Ireland by Initiatives Prince George in an attempt to attract workers from that country. Suddenly Initiatives Prince George had taken over a federal and provincial responsibility.
Sandwiched amongst all of this is a Core Review which, according to the Mayor and Councillors will show us ways to save money in the city. That exercise will cost $350,000.00 dollars and unless we are reading it all wrong will not touch any of the areas where the council has spent money.
It was suggested that we ought to shovel our own driveways as a means of saving money. If those savings are designed to be passed onto a Mayor and Council who seem to view the City Coffers as their personal slush fund then back last November we made a grave error in judgment.
I’m Meisner and that’s one man’s opinion.
Comments
Since the details of the proposed actions were not put forward, we did not have enough information to make a judgement on, in my opinion.
However, we knew most of the characters involved from their past public presence.
I voted for 3 people. I have not voted for a full ballot for many elections.
I voted for all based on my past knowledge of their record not on promises since that is all that they ever are.
I voted for two incumbents who were not returned. Ao, I got 2 out of 3 right …. ;-) … but that is littl consolation.
I am starting to see that with the way politics is being played these days, we may need to reform our method of selecting representatives and, better still, an improved recall system may have to be devised.
And Skakun is seen to be the bad guy …. LOL
BTW, we opted out of the Winter Cities efforts. We were supposed to host one of the conferecnes nd ended up not doing so.
There is absolutely nothing pushing us to have a sister or brother or cousin city.
There was also absolutely nothing that was pushing us to have winter games.
We have to learn what is important to maintain and what is expendable. The current crew still does not get that and does not have the faintest clue of what a process should look like going about making such decisions to meet the wants/needs of the majority.
There is a definite lack of trust for the last elected City politicians.
Not only do some of them treat the public purse like it belongs to them but they think our neighbourhoods are also theirs to do what they feel is right but run under the pretences that every member of Council is a member of the public and a resident of this community, selected by our community to do this work on their behalf.
What does this mean?
I assume that it means that they know best, Shut up and keep paying tax. If you elect us once every three years gave council THE GREEN light to stomp on you silly fools and how dare you question it. Things that appear out of sorts are just a figment of the public’s imagination.
Buried amongst all that was a trip to Ireland by Initiatives Prince George in an attempt to attract workers from that country. Suddenly Initiatives Prince George had taken over a federal and provincial responsibility.
How did this fly under the radar? Who attended?
So if I understood this properly!! We are not only paying provincial politicians to travel abroad to drum up business but now we are paying ALSO for city politicians to travel abroad to do the same type of work!!!!!! Is that not double dipping into the tax payerâs pocket?
That is exactly what it is 007. Municipal politicians double dipping the tax payers pockets to duplicate provincial and federal responsibilities (eg IPG), meanwhile essential services like timely pot hole repair, parks maintenance, and a sewer line to every city street in the city are ignored.
I agree with Gus, some form of recall should be available. Maybe a 60% threshold via online voting would be a fair way of going about it. Of course for that we would need a modern day Elections BC and that is half the problem. How could you keep the citizens right to a private ballot, and still verify that the person casting a ballot is a rightful voter?
I would think if you loose a few councilors or a mayor over a term then so be it. Council goes on with a minimum of a 5-person quorum before an election is called should be the standard. This way at least the citizens of the city could cut our loses early if need be. Once voted off the council they loose their pay and benefits and the seat sits empty until the next election.
I wonder if there are any Babine or Lakeland sawmill workers, could use those funds the city is throwing away to be retrained?! Noble thought!
Who can bring in a recall initiative? Can they be citizen’s initiatives or does their have to be existing law? Fat cahnce this group will bring into law anything that challenges their security.
This is a council that seems very fond of using the Alternate Approval Process to attempt to ram through its pet projects.
May I suggest that the APP is the very form of a Recall process that could be used to deal with the politicians who fail to properly represent the wishes of the taxpayers.
The cost could be covered by the China trip, UBCM trip, Haldi court cost, council raise fund.
Make that AAP…
If the average citizen ran their home like our Mayor and council run this town, they would be homeless in no time.
If you can not afford a trip to China, you don’t go. It is shameful for them to even be considering such a thing with the roads the way they are and the lawns that went uncut and unwatered over the summer to save money.
I certainly wouldn’t be planning a lavish trip if my home were in a desperate need of repairs.
One item on the council priority list from myPG is to finalize the twinning agreement with Jiangmen. It seems they are sawing off all the items that involve spending a ton of money
-China trip
-District energy system
-2015 winter games
but the hard things seem to be on the back burner:(
-road rehabilitation plan
-3 year budget forecasting
-new revenue streams
-asset management strategy
So sadly they are actually doing something that they had said they would do. If I was doing an annual review on council would have a hard time even grading them at “partially meets” (kiss of death in performance review parlance:)
http://princegeorge.ca/cityhall/StrategicFramework/StrategicPlan/pages/default.aspx
myPG was rolled out as the city’s roadmap to the future, if their website is any indication it is no wonder that the city is floating around like a rudderless ship. The last implementation report from the city manager was presented on Feb 9 2011 and dealt with 2009-2010!
http://mypg.ca/about/Documents/Strategic_Plan_Implementation_rpt_MERGED.pdf
In response to the title of this article, yes!
“Implementation: The first steps toward implementing the ICSP-myPG, are underway with âPrince George 2.0â: advancing the Cityâs communication and engagement practices from successes learned and test-driven in the myPG process, Councilâs approval of social, economic and environmental sustainability strategies, and the Official Community Plan update.”
It is said that laughter increases life expectancy, thanks myPG that one statement alone must have added 2 years!
Prince George 2.0!!!! 2.5years:)
Fetterly for Mayor.
Chees
How many times have the Chinese delegates from our propsed “sister” city visited Prince George?
Let them check out our lovely parks and roads… actually just send them some nice calendars and stickers.
How much will an interpreter cost for this trip? Unless the mayour or councillors can speak Chinese/Mandarin.
Can’t take responsibility on this one Ben, did not vote for half of them….IMO the folks that had better things to do other than exercise their right to vote, after attending a couple of open forums followed by making an informed decision, are the ones to wear it. Don’t make the same mistake again.
Rounder
Quick search of the city website shows that the city has hosted a delegation from China. What it does not show is if anything other than tours and photo ops were accomplished on any of the trips that now require another one to “finalize” twinning process.
IMO the mayor has seen the writing on the wall and wants a junket or two in her single term regardless of the optics(core review, etc)
http://princegeorge.ca/Pages/SearchResults.aspx?k=Jiangmen&a=%20Scope:City2
Interesting…
“The name Jiangmen is often the butt of jokes because its Cantonese pronunciation is identical to the scientific word for anus.”
“after attending a couple of open forums followed by making an informed decision”
Oh come on now. Nobody really believes open forums are the place to get information from, do they?
In my opinion one needs to know the people and their actions in the past. Election talk is just that, talk.
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What is needed on such projects as the Chinese sisterly love affair is to open it up as a project with purpose, objectives, timelines, costs, benefits, etc. viewable by all.
Mr. Stolz is one who has asked for similar information on IPG’s projects and I agree with him on that one.
Lead the way Councillor and Council. Show em how it is supposed to be done!!!!
BTW, I would like to know what it is about the China trip that would be privileged information. It is not a national security issue. Names do not have to be blacked out. Documents are safe to give to Councillor Skakun on this one â¦. ;-)
Maybe the Councillors could earn money for the trip by shoveling driveways… Then take the trip in 2015 or later…
Hey Ben you mention just a few of their missteps. The one I heard that tops it all off was her trip back east early this year to pick up some award the city won. I think it was for the city’s environmental efforts and was at a national conference on sustainability or something.
I hear, she flew in, went to the cocktail party, got the award, and flew home the next day.
Of course she picked it up on behalf of the environmental division that had done the actual work and who, ironically she had just laid off days before flying back east to get the award. LOL.
This is probably out there already but, is there or has there been any formal reports shown that outline cost versus benefits of this twinning endeavour? My question, seriously is, what do the citizens of PG gain if this was to go through? Thanks
“after attending a couple of open forums followed by making an informed decision”
Oh come on now. Nobody really believes open forums are the place to get information from, do they.
LOL Gus, the latter part of my statement above was meant to be extrapolated from i.e. do your homework, in addition to attending forums – how else can you catch people talking from both sides of their face when it is time for action? Agreed, though, a track record of Actions are much better than wooing Words;)
Bets that the trip to China gets voted down tonight? Council seriously cannot be that crazy…..
Done deal:( Guess they are that crazy
Loved listening to Wilbur speaking of his economic development chops in making our runway the third longest in the country……there have been 2 planes FFS and one was bribed to land here.
With those kind of credentials will not get hopes up too high that anything will come out of this trip other than air miles.
I think it is scandalous what Mayor and Council do in the name of Priority for the City. Going to China and Ireland and Core Review are just a few examples of simply wasting our seemingly scarce and sacred tax dollars.
Of course voters made a mistake. But the election was bought and paid for and puppet Ms Green is doing exactly what her financiers are telling her to do.
Why be so surprised? Look at the election spending numbers (and those not fully reported) and you’ll see marketing works!
I just don’t like the bill of goods we’ve been sold.
Off with their proverbial heads. Lets make a new council next time round.
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