Dear Editor,
In his June 8 letter, Mr Cameron expressed his concern that management of the roads department had spent $187,000.00 without following proper procedures of the purchasing bylaw in regards to the repair of one of the three graders owned by the municipality. Essentially, Mr Cameron wrote that roads management circumvented the purchasing bylaw inventing an emergency situation that, in his opinion, did not exist.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines emergency as, “an unforeseen combination of circumstances or the resulting state that calls for immediate action”.
To put some facts in context, the municipality owns two of the largest graders John Deere makes, 892G (2016) and 870 (2013), and one model 770 (2013). Grading freshly delivered gravel is a regular operation of the graders, whether it is new gravel or maintenance of gravel roads.
The timeline of events does not support the exclamation “it’s like staring down the barrel of a gun”, by the Manager of Operations during the May 15 council meeting.
March – Repair done in late March because the invoice for $187,827.28 was sent to the municipality.
April 5 – Repair invoice received by municipality.
May 15 – Instead of going through proper procedures of a report to council recommending the repair and cost, the unapproved repair was added to the annual budget surplus as reported by the Director of Finance. The CAO tried to explain to the council the urgency of the repair where no emergency existed. The Manager of Roads Operations even tried to add a little drama to the situation by exclaiming that the emergency created by the grader repair, “was like looking down the barrel of a gun”. The purchasing bylaw allows the CAO to approve payment of the bill in an emergency.
May 31 – News Release notifying residents of granular road resurfacing would start in the month of June.
Over fifty (50) days passed from the repair in March to the start date of June 1 for the gravel deliveries. In my opinion, the timeline of events does not meet the definition or support an emergency.
In the future, in my opinion, the terms of the Purchasing Bylaw must be respected by employees of the municipality to ensure taxpayer money is spent in a transparent manner.
Respectfully,
Douglas Robinson, Leith
