Jumping the gun on City budget meeting

Every year before the City holds its mandatory public-input session on the budget, most of the councillors and some of the staff chip in five bucks apiece and organize a pool on how many citizens will show up.

Last night, it was time for the annual dog-and-pony show and, true to tradition, they put their money down. The winner was CAO Randy Diehl, who correctly guessed that 10 people would attend.

That seems like a dismal number considering the tens of millions of dollars of our tax money the City spends each year, but it’s not all bad. If there were any major issues, more people would probably brave the chilly night to drive to the Henry Grube Centre, but staying warm and watching sitcoms is a more attractive prospect than sitting on a hard chair looking at graphs and pie charts.

Some people say the City should stop wasting its time, a position with which I disagree. For one thing, it’s now the law for the City to hold such a meeting. For another, it’s one of the City’s inherent responsibilities to offer up information for those who want it. You can’t judge the desirability of such a thing based on how many people take you up on it.

I wasn’t one of those who attended, though I was tempted to just to count heads and see if I could get in on the pool. I’m told Bronwen Scott wasn’t there either, though she’d planned to attend to protest the cost of the Noble Creek water extension.

If she wasn’t, it’s the second time she missed the meeting in two weeks. Last week, she fired off an angry email to City utilities manager Tom Marstaller, the gist of which is this:

“I went to to the Henry Grube Centre tonight and there was no public open house regarding the city budget as per your message to me. . . . If the city decided not to go ahead with this meeting, it would have been decent of you to inform me. The fact that you didn’t I consider rude and inconsiderate. I live on the outskirts of the city, so had to hang around town after work tonight waiting for this non-meeting. There are better ways to get rid of a taxpayer with uncomfortable questions than to fob them off with a promise of a non-existent public process.”

A short time later, Scott followed up with a second email sheepishly acknowledging that she’d jumped the gun and gone to the Grube Centre one week early. 

“That’s what I get for ignoring my own best advice about sending emails when I’m irritated,” she says.