1978 City council’s faux pas just kept on coming

FROM THE CLIPPINGS FILE: Dusting off old columns to prove I’m no more cynical and rude than I used to be, and that no matter how bad things look, chances are they used to be worse.

Originally published in The Kamloops News, Jan. 18, 1978.

Council’s faux pas keep on coming

By MEL ROTHENBURGER 

If one were to compare the current Kamloops City Council with its post-amalgamation predecessors, one would have to say there is little comparison.

The councils of the late Mayor Gordon Nicol and ex-mayor Al Thompson were (whatever the leadership capabilities of those two men) hardly renowned for their harmony or their efficiency.

Kamloops City council was a great source of news copy in those days. The aldermen went at each other like cats and dogs. City Hall staff was often rife with discontent. Confidential information poured, not leaked, from City Hall as the mayor of the day looked around desperately, and fruitlessly, for the nearest plumber.

Yep. You didn’t have to go further than one of City council’s own meetings to get a lead story back then.

Oh, today’s council has its moments, as Howard Dack and Nelson Riis chip away at the New Establishment. But there just isn’t the same atmosphere of total incohesiveness and inability to cope that there used to be. No longer does it seem from day to day that City Hall may crumble into dust.

But if City council has, at least relative to councils of the past, gotten its act together in terms of personal relationships within itself, something is seriously wrong in its dealings with others.

Taken one at a time, the flare-ups with other public and para-public groups might not seem unusual or significant but, taken together they make for an alarming situation.

This City council seems to have a definite knack for offending people.

There is the Campbell Creek industrial development, for example, which was the subject of prolonged disagreement between our council and the government people trying to get it started. That same subject resulted in a major confrontation between the council and the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce, with the chamber going away with very hurt feelings.

The council has failed miserably to find much common ground with the Kamloops Indian Band, despite the long history of close cooperation between the Band and the City which went before. Besides the Halston Bridge hassle, the KXA lease and servicing of Band land have caused a lot of extremely bad feelings.

During the last couple of weeks downstream municipalities have expressed displeasure that the Kamloops council didn’t bother to inform them of its application to more than double sewage outfall.

Neither has the council had notable success in the area of labour relations. Bitterness has been caused through Council’s method of dealing with its management people as well as with its approach to relations with the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

The latest faux pas came this week and last in Council’s dealing with the Kamloops School Board, and it was a double-barrelled blast. The council came up with the brilliant idea that it should help the board fix up its budget. City council’s concern about the board budget comes up every year whether or not the board holds the line in expenditures.

There are usually some mutterings from within City Hall about the high cost of education, but this year the Council went a step further and decided it should become more directly involved. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to inform the board, except via the media, of the plan.

Needless to say, the board wasn’t impressed.

Neither was the board pleased with Mayor Mike Latta’s condemnation of a tenure clause in the board’s tentative contract settlement with CUPE. While Latta called his council’s plan to help the board budget “super,” he referred to the tenure clause as “welfare.”

These two instances were preceded by a few weeks by an attempt by the council to tell the school board how to run its elections. That didn’t endear the council to a lot of trustees, either.

The board, more or less, has told the council to bugger off.

Latta’s reference to “milk-sops” in connection with the board’s contract undoubtedly hasn’t made him any more popular with his own CUPE workers. There’s a personal angle to this, too. Board chairman Doug Kirk engineered the board’s negotiations along with personnel manager Simon Mason. Kirk acted out of his own concept of what was right, just and reasonable. Latta’s remarks about the settlement, before its terms have even been fully divulged, constitute an insult to Kirk.

Council obviously isn’t to blame for all of its problems with relations with other groups, but it does have a knack for making things more miserable for itself than necessary. It is the general lack of concern for etiquette, for extending the courtesy of personal consultation that causes so much of the problem.

While council seems to have cleaned up its own house to a fair degree, it still has a lot to learn about going out in public.