Editor,
I received a letter from the Municipality of Meaford, dated April 2. Some background to this event is needed.
From my early teens, for more than twenty years I was employed in municipal road maintenance and construction. While my main career veered elsewhere, the connection to roads operations never completely ended.
In the last few years, I’ve been increasingly alarmed at our roads operations here. In most every other municipality in Southern Ontario, the same basic practices and standards of maintenance are very similar, as they’ve been for more than my lifetime, never changing, for the simple reason that they work well. But Meaford is a whole different scenario. I will be the first (and I’ve made this clear) to applaud anyone who finds new, better methods to get the job done, but the different methods here are having the opposite effect. Potholes that are rarely filled, roads that are partially graded (not to proper grade) infrequently, damaged signs taking months to repair, if ever, and most alarming, machine operations that endanger the public and our operators…the list goes on.
Over four years ago, I started to attempt to communicate with the roads department, and council. Answers, or interest, was rare. Any answers were meant to pacify, not address the problem. Of the very few answers I received from our large roads management team, all ended with an invitation to file a formal complaint or contact the Ombudsman if I didn’t like the responses. A rather strange default position, I thought. Emails or calls to the general roads lines were ignored.
I filed a formal complaint, one which was swept under the rug by our former CAO. It was a couple months after the closure of the complaint that I was provided the employee comments to my complaint, comments which actually fortified my statements rather than argue them. I can’t make this up.
Last summer, as the standards and productivity seemed to noticeably drop even further, I decided to involve council in the communications. I began emailing a particular roads manager every time I saw something destructive, dangerous, or terribly inefficient. Many of these emails included photos of damage to the roads or ditches; hoping to remove any doubt of the statements being made. This translated into an average of three weeks between emails, which were copied to council. One councillor almost always responded, a couple others had a question or two, but from the rest, silence. The manager responded three times, with answers which were usually contradictive. I foolishly thought that once council was aware of the problems (they drive these roads too…how could they not be?) there would be some pressure on management staff to act in a productive manner. I was encouraged in this by a call last fall from Mayor Kentner to tell me my concerns were being investigated. Fast forward to April 2, when another phone call from the mayor informed me that my concerns would be looked at. Which is it, already under review, or will be? The answer, as we should know, is that nothing will ever happen.
So, that week, I received a ‘cease and desist’ letter from the municipality, regarding my ‘harassment’ of a roads manager. If I decide to ignore this letter and email this person again, there will apparently be legal action. This is how a democratic society works, I guess. A department funded by the taxpayer, operating far below practical standards and not willing to discuss the issues at any length (I’ve requested meetings with lead hands, management, anybody…can’t have it.) is apparently completely immune to public scrutiny. So, for any taxpayers, myself included, who foolishly believed the part of the definition of a municipal council as stated by the province of Ontario, that of ‘representative of the residents’, we were wrong. Between this incident, and previous experiences watching taxpayer input regarding spending and efficiencies ignored, it appears that the taxpayer has little influence here; staff takes priority.
Bill Cameron, Bognor
