Upheaval in McBride Council
That leaves just Mayor Loranne Martin and Councillor Rick Thompson as the elected officials, but with only two remaining, (Councillor Robert Callaghan had resigned some time ago citing health concerns), there is no quorum, so they have no authority to conduct business for the community.
Mayor Martin says she wasn’t totally surprised that Councillors Sharon Reichert, Ralph Bezanson and Edith Tracey decided to call it quits, the writing was on the wall in the weeks and months prior to their tendering their resignations.
The issue, says Mayor Martin was one of attendance. There had been a number of meetings where Councillors were absent says Mayor Martin, and because of that, the meetings had to be cancelled because of lack of quorum, which, in the case of McBride, means three elected officials would have to be present in order to conduct business.
Martin says she had contacted the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development prior to the resignations to ask for direction, “This came down because Councillors must attend meetings” and that “Several meetings of Council have been cancelled recently due to lack of quorum which has resulted in Council being unable to perform its legislated duties.”
A Council meeting that was to take place tomorrow has been cancelled, the Village of McBride website has already been changed to reflect the resignations as only Mayor Martin and Councillor Thompson are listed in the ‘bios” section of Mayor and Council.
Mayor Martin says the Ministry has been advised of the situation and she is awaiting a response. “It is my understanding that the Ministry can either issue an order that the remaining Council members will constitute a quorum or appoint representatives until there can be a by-election.” A decision from the Ministry is expected soon.
Mayor Martin says she didn’t expect this kind of thing to happen when she made the decision to run for Mayor two years ago “You expect that over the term they will do their job, they will read their material and be prepared for intelligent debate when you sit at the table, but you have to get to the table to get to that point.”
Comments
Interesting. No doubt we will hear more on this issue.
I wonder if perhaps there were simply too many meetings? The last company I worked for had meetings just for the sake of having meetings I swear. Once a meeting was called at 4:00 pm on the Friday of a long weekend that could have waited until the following week, this was done just to send a message as to who was in charge. Not saying this is the case here but who knows. People have lives outside of work no matter what their occupation
Having meetings gets so bad in some companies that it is necessary to have a meeting to determine when meetings should be held, where they should be held, and who should attend.
I would suggest that in most cases meetings could be cut by 50% and those meetings that were cancelled would never be missed.
And then a meeting to find out why nothing is getting done!
The three resigned councillors should be responding.
There’s a lot more to this than just “meetings”……..
These are the regular scheduled council meetings that these three councillors were not showing up for. You would think there would be an obligation to notify the Mayor or administration that you can’t make the meeting and that was never done.
You would think if a councillor comes forward and is elected to serve the community that they would have a moral obligation to fulfill that commitment? This is strange. Even if the resigned councillors disagreed with the Mayor or were somehow frustrated with the process, they owed it to the community to carry on.
The councilors who resigned have apparently written a letter to the Minister explaining what caused them to resign. We may soon find out more about exactly what the problems were.
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