The arrogance of a Millionaire

Today I would like to discuss abandoned plans. We touched on one yesterday when we talked about Councilor Belanger’s Point of Order asking for a review of his sanctions imposed by the previous Council for integrity infractions. It never came to the table… just disappeared. (Funny enough, he did get thousands of dollars in expenses he claimed to have forgotten to claim in about the same amount.)

I was prompted today to look back to another issue that had Mayor Smith enraged back in 2023, but after MASSIVE public objection, Council seems to have back peddled or maybe they are just sitting on the issue.

What was the issue? Using Credit Cards to pay your taxes.

Ian Adams wrote about this on March 15, 2023. In his article, he quoted Mayor Smith.

(Next 2 paragraphs are directly from Ian Adams article.)

Mayor Brian Smith said it didn’t seem fair that the 85 per cent of taxpayers who pay by cash or by cheque “are paying for me to have the benefit to use my credit card to get points.”

He added that there was a deeper issue, that if people couldn’t afford to pay their taxes with readily-available funds, “there’s a good chance they can’t afford to pay their credit card debt either.”

To me, that sounds pretty presumptuous. Who was he to judge “why” people use credit cards to pay their taxes? How obnoxious of him to presume they probably couldn’t afford their Credit Card debt either. Why is it some of those who are well off seem to demean those just trying to make ends meet.

Why bring this up now? Simple… we are about to be hit with Brian Smiths big Budget Increases. During these times when they are trying to find ways to increase revenue, they may still go down this path.

Maybe… instead of worrying about how tax payers use their credit cards, Brian Smith should worry about how Senior Staff are using theirs. Before they changed the method of reporting to be less transparent, we constantly saw over limit fees listed as payments on credit cards. I hope these credit cards are at least corporate cards issued to the Town. Is it possible council and senior staff are using THEIR PERSONAL CARDS to accumulate “points” (one of Brian’s concerns about the public).

Maybe when the October Cheque Register is released, we can discuss Town use of Credit Cards…. Again!

Will we continue to be able to pay our taxes and utilities using credit cards? If so, will the Town start to charge back the applicable fees? Maybe, just maybe if they stopped with the sloppy spending habits, we could just quietly accept a near zero percent increase. Wait, with all of the Council Raises this year, we probably cannot afford anything less than 5.9% increase.

Hang in there, there is always tomorrow!