Blinding the Watchmen in Wasaga

Further to this council voting to discontinue the publishing of the monthly cheque register (town spending), a courtesy and a safeguard that has been done for decades, we now see the reasoning for this distressing move was that council didn’t like the social media reaction to their spending.

Incredible. They see that the register is picked through with care and in detail, that it is valued by some if not all residents and they decide to end it because they received complaints? Further to this, it’s basically a bit of a chore for staff and apparently now requires overtime to create? Apparently this cost of overtime is now in the range of $2000 a year, significantly less than say the town coffee bill or the cost of toilet roll for town hall.

Do council still not understand that the town is in service to the residents? That actually doing something the residents require may indeed be onerous, but so is getting up in the morning and going to work.

It doesn’t matter that THEY feel it doesn’t show misspending, it’s US who need the reassurance of being able to see how much money the different departments are spending on legal bills or pens from Amazon. It’s OUR town. McNeil is employed by us and his opinion means squat to the requirements of the residents of Wasaga Beach.

Now McNeil also claims staff are being attacked? Where? The only staff I see being attacked for stupidity is McNeil himself. Get a pair of big boy pants and accept that for your quarter mil salary you need to take some on the chin. We have a RIGHT to criticize how our money is being spent. They don’t have a right to hide what they do with our money. It’s how FRAUD is prevented.

See last council, they dealt with even the toxic concerns about spending. They didn’t hide the information and pretend it was just too onerous for our poor staff to do the job the public paid them to do.

What this is McNeil and Brian Smith protecting themselves from the next election because you can bet we are keeping all of this in mind when we next vote.

REMEMBER. Brian Smith the hypocrite was elected on a promise of more transparency. He wasn’t elected on a promise to sell the Beachfront to Stonebridge for them to build townhouses on OUR history.