Very few issues town council grapples with are black and white. There are divergent viewpoints to consider, not to mention concerns about setting a precedent that might come back to haunt the current council or a future one.
And of course, there will always be someone who doesn’t agree with this decision or that.
There’s been a disturbing trend of late, however, in which council either has backtracked on a previous decision or rejected a recommendation of one of the executive committees and went back to square one.
To be fair, the decision to freeze a previously-approved wage hike for the incoming council came after Premier Dalton McGuinty and Finance minister Dwight Duncan appealed to municipalities for restraint in the face of the burgeoning provincial debt due to the recession.
But council was forced to backtrack on a decision to remove the east sidewalk along part of Portage Avenue (as part of the biomass road project) because it hadn’t realized residents along there had just finished paying their share of the local improvement to have it replaced a few years earlier. Then in March, in the wake of some flak, council flip-flopped from allowing wedding receptions at Sunny Cove Camp to just allowing the four that already had been booked for this year, ensuring the issue will have to be rehashed down the road.
And just this week, council not only reversed a decision to cap the town’s contribution to the July 1 fireworks at $5,000, instead agreeing to fund up to $5,000 more, it also tossed out a recommendation to keep the due date for the first instalment of the Fort Frances Curling Club’s tax arrears at July 31 and now will weigh again whether to extend it to Sept. 30, when the club has a better cash flow thanks to membership dues.
This isn’t to say all those decisions were wrong, but it makes one wonder why all these variables—and possible solutions—weren’t taken into account at the committee level before the matter came before council for a final vote.
Clearly that isn’t happening otherwise decisions would be right the first time.
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