By Don Rennick,North Bay
After being confronted with irrefutable evidence of his involvement in the Knox golden handshake deal, the mayor continues to tap dance around the issue by claiming he was not “aware of that title”.
These semantics on the mayor’s part do not address the issue of the $200 thousand plus agreement authorized by him and council following Knox’s departure.
The mayor says staff was directed to prepare the agreement, that he was not involved in the process and did not see the agreement. Are taxpayers supposed to believe that the mayor provided no direction to staff and the terms of the agreement were left up to staff and to Knox? Is the mayor trying to point the finger at senior staff? Using staff to distance himself and redirect responsibility for this fiasco is indicative of the type of person we are dealing with. I suppose the irony of blaming senior staff and then announcing the promoting and assigning of new duties to those same senior staff members is lost on the mayor.
Additionally, how comforting is it to taxpayers to suggest that he and council did not direct and were not aware of the details of this agreement?
The remarks by the mayor appear to be a face saving effort to avoid responsibility at any cost.
During the 2014 audit of the Memorial Gardens renovations Peter Chirico indicated that he had informed Mayor McDonald and Mr. Knox of pending cost overruns but both men denied the conversation took place.
During his election campaign the mayor promised to tell the truth. I think people can judge for themselves what weight should be given to that statement. Rather than come clean, the mayor has been busy engineering a shake up at city hall described as “an important step to align our departments for growth”.
This comes across as another attempt to change the narrative by creating a diversion.
One of the first diversions, a number of years ago, was the report to be issued by CAO Knox after an examination of all city departments to find efficiencies. The report never materialized.
Then we had the arena project which was sold to taxpayers on the basis on increased revenues from promoters waiting in the wings to bring their events to North Bay. That initiative is still costing taxpayers millions in principal and interest payments and increased operating expenses.
Then we had the Mayor’s Plan which continues to take millions of dollars out of taxpayers’ pockets. This fiasco has never been dealt with and the mayor continues to deny the enormous costs of this hapless program.
Then we had the operational review committee that took three years and 48 meetings and whose only result was a comment by the chairman that it was a “learning experience”.
The North Bay 2017 – 2027 Strategic Plan which was introduced with great fanfare amounted to a glorified campaign brochure. It now gathers dust on the city’s website. This latest rearranging of the deck chairs will provide no benefit whatsoever to taxpayers and other than empty rhetoric provides no evidence regarding any or its supposed benefits.
Providing public services required by its citizens at a cost that represents value for money is not rocket science. At this point, there appears to be little hope of that being accomplished by our current administration.
D. D. Rennick CPA, CA
North Bay
