There is governance, and there is management. It is the same in any organization, whether at city hall or in a small enterprise like a housing co-op. Some people are elected to govern the organization, and others are hired to manage it. The governors set policies and goals, rules and regulations, budgets and bylaws. The managers implement the decisions made by the governors.
On Carden Street, the mayor and 12 councillors are elected to do the governing and make the decisions that keep the city moving forward. Staff are hired to help make the government work. An important part of the staff responsibility is to make sure that council has the information needed to make knowledgeable decisions.
Elected politicians do not hire staff members. They hire a Chief Administrative Officer who is responsible for hiring and directing the work of all those who work for the city. She is their boss. The mayor and councillors are not.
As long as both sides stay on their own side of the fence, everything should run reasonably smoothly. The city’s integrity commissioner released a report last week that should have been unnecessary. One of the councillors wanted staff to release incomplete information about the situation out at the composting facility at the wet-dry centre. Or the Waste Resource Innovation Centre, as it’s more popularly known.
A report on the odour issues had been prepared by the provincial Ministry of the Environment. Before passing it forward to city councillors, staff were preparing a background report explaining the context of the provincial report. This is part of what they do. When word of the provincial report got out, a councillor took it upon himself to demand of staff that he be allowed to see it.
Here’s where the whole thing starts to make absolutely no sense. A group of five councillors all put in a dollar each to file a freedom of information request to see the report. But on Saturday, one of them was quoted in our daily newspaper saying “the real problem lies with city policy that prevented an important report from being released to council that he said was already available to the public through the Ministry of the Environment.”
If it was already available to the public, why pay to have it released through a freedom of information request? The report was made available to councillors as soon as the staff supplementary information was completed. Had everyone understood the relationship between governance and management, there would have been no need for intervention by the integrity commissioner.
There is no reason to expect that all members of council will agree with each other. In a democracy, it wouldn’t be healthy if they did. Nor do councillors have to agree with every recommendation brought forward by staff. It is unlikely that all councillors will be good friends with each other and staff. The only thing we have a right to expect is that they respect each other.
That is where the process broke down. It was not a matter of integrity. It was about common decency. The five-dollar freedom of information filing fee that five councillors split among themselves was not about getting information. It was about embarrassing city hall staff.
The commissioner was too polite to say this in so many words, but he did recommend bringing in a facilitator to work on the relationship between council and senior staff. On this point, I agree with Coun. Cam Guthrie. We don’t need to spend money on a team-building exercise when consciences should be the guide.
The key to a clear conscience is respect.