As I mentioned in last week’s editorial, I had nearly completely written an editorial for this week, chronicling my months’ long quest to obtain a public document from the municipality, that document being the municipal hiring policy.
However, with the departure of Meaford’s CAO, who had been the roadblock to accessing that document, announced by Mayor Ross Kentner at the start of Monday’s council meeting, this municipality is once again without a leader in the administration office. Council is currently without the one employee that they can hire or fire, so they will no doubt be using that hiring policy in the coming weeks, or possibly months, as council searches for a new Chief Administrative Officer.
I say it could be months before council finds a replacement for the CAO, as after the previous CAO parted ways with the municipality on July 31, 2023, it took nearly ten months before a replacement CAO was hired on May 15 of this year. Now that CAO is gone, and council will once again be on the hunt to hire a new leader for the municipal administration.
It is never good for a municipality when a member of senior management departs, particularly a CAO to whom all other municipal staff ultimately report. Such a departure creates upheaval, confusion, and often frustration as projects and initiatives can be delayed in the absence of a CAO.
The absence of a CAO, and the need to fill the position, is also a distraction for council who now have to add recruiting and hiring a CAO to their 2025 to-do list, something I’m sure they would all prefer to not have to do.
The departure of the CAO comes at a most inopportune time for council, in the middle of trying to cobble together a budget for 2025. That process has already created great frustration for council as the draft budget presented to council in early November calls for a double digit increase for Meaford ratepayers next year. After three full days of budget discussions earlier this month, council had grappled with the budget presented, for the first time ever presented as a ‘core budget’ along with some 49 ‘electives’ for council to consider adding back into the core budget. As initially presented to council, the draft budget would have required a 36 percent rate increase in 2025, although after three days of discussions and debate, last week council had sent the CAO back to the drawing board for ‘version two’ of the budget that, with the electives that council had voted in favour of adding back into the budget would have required a 21.48 percent increase. The ‘version two’ edition of the budget had been expected to be presented to council on December 9, which would have been followed by more council discussion and debate as they would have attempted to whittle that version two budget down to a more palatable increase for Meaford ratepayers.
But all of that hard work done by staff and council thus far could well have been wasted with the departure of the CAO. We might very well be heading not just back to the drawing board, but back to the very beginning of the process.
In the 16 years that I have reported on Meaford’s council we have seen a half dozen CAOs come and go, some serving as interim CAO, while others filled the position full time, and we have also gone for long stretches with no CAO at all. Prior to this most recent CAO, Rob Armstrong had been in the position for five years, a significant portion of that as interim, dividing his time between his Planning Department duties and CAO duties before taking on the position full-time.
Finding a new CAO can be a challenge. As mentioned, it took some ten months the last time around, and ultimately there were only two candidates, former municipal Clerk Matt Smith, who had been serving as interim CAO, and Buckham, whom they ultimately hired. So after a ten-month search last time around council had two candidates from which to select their new CAO. Hopefully this new search for a replacement CAO will take much less time, but it can be impossible to predict.
Without a CAO at the helm, the pressures on council will continue to mount. The 2025 budget aside, there are many important issues facing this municipality at the moment, from the pumped storage proposal to the massively expensive, but ultimately necessary, expansion of our wastewater treatment plant, not to mention council’s desire to implement a regulatory system for short term accommodations in this municipality, a major undertaking itself. With these and other major issues facing this municipality it will be important for council, and for the ratepayers that councillors represent, to fill the CAO position as quickly as possible.
While the departure of the CAO creates some new headaches for council, the absence of a leader at the top of the organization also causes frustrations for municipal staff, as well as for ratepayers who no longer have a leader to turn to, a top dog at the municipal administration to call upon.
Challenges are nothing new to any municipal council or administration, and there is no doubt that council will face this new added challenge of finding a new CAO, and a budget will ultimately be prepared and approved by council for next year; it might just take much longer than had been anticipated just a few short weeks ago.
As I have written before, I do not envy the seven councillors who represent the residents of this municipality. The challenges are many, and there can often be surprises along the way. Hopefully the departure of the CAO, who had only been in the position for a little over six months, won’t create too many new headaches for council or the community, and a new Chief Administrative Officer can be found relatively quickly.
