October 30, 2013 Town Hall Meeting at Canton

(originally published in the Fourth and One Fifth November 2013 issue)
 The thrice-yearly town hall meetings are one of the best ideas that our current council has implemented. They give citizens a chance to get things off their chests and talk directly to them without any intervening bureaucracy. In spite of a motion to cancel these meetings (moved by Councillor Ellis, seconded by Councillor Austin) cooler heads prevailed and they have continued with a new set of guidelines and a five minute per question time limit. Obviously residents agreed and packed the Canton municipal building,
 
​The overall tone this time was much calmer than previous meetings which could get a little rowdy at times. The biggest change was in the behavior of council. In earlier town halls it often seemed that council wasn’t listening. Some councillors would simply state that they were elected to make the decisions. Period.
 
This time councillors not only listened, but they talked, and talked. So much so that after the first fifty-two minutes of the two-hour meeting only three people had been given the opportunity to speak. All told only fifteen residents managed to make it to the podium. This was a 25% reduction from the previous meeting that did not have the five minute limit, so this limit appears unnecessary. Perhaps we should try a limit for council.
 
There were three topics of interest. Twelve people (eleven from Ward 2, one from Ward 1) talked about the current area rating “can of worms” (to quote Deputy Mayor Gilmer). Two talked about the Entech-Rem incinerator proposal. One talked about the strategic financial plan.
 
The major concerns with the area rating proposal from Ward 2 residents include the lack of sufficient facts to justify a 46% tax increase and a switch from a service usage based tax model to an access based model. The lack of services and deterioration of services was a common theme. The only Ward 1 resident to speak mentioned that his ward also suffers from service issues, but he agrees with the access based proposal. Councillor Burns and Deputy-Mayor Gilmer had some new information and ideas concerning the area rating issue. There seemed to be a lot of pre-election posturing by many council members. I suspect this issue will get punted down the road until a compromise solution is found.
 
Those who spoke about Entech-Rem pointed out that the Australian company that developed the technology had never built or operated anything, and that there were many planning errors in the screening report that were not caught by the peer review team or the municipal planning staff.
 
This was a valuable exercise in democracy. At least one councillor seems to have changed his approach from being elected to make decisions to being elected to make informed decisions.
 
Elections are only a year away.