The following letter to the editor was submitted in response to an article entitled Collingwood Council eyes moratorium on new development. Council is due to debate the matter and possibly make a decision during tonight's (April 26) meeting beginning at 5 p.m.
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Editor,
Collingwood is suffering from a lack of effective leadership.
Residents may be thinking quite the opposite when they read things such as, “Council seeking to slow development” when scrolling through the latest news.
The full reading of the town reports however reveals that this “development slowdown” is due to the town being unable to service new developments through our current water treatment plant. This is an infrastructure problem town staff and the mayor have long been aware of and only now, when at a maximum capacity, are they toying with one of the most extreme measures available which is halting all development not in possession of a building permit.
How about a new hospital? Has it been made explicitly clear to the residents by the mayor, the impact this situation could have on our recent notching up the priority list for the province?
Residents should wonder how poorly their town is being run when, perhaps the single most important responsibility of a municipality – to provide its residents with reliable water treatment that can serve current and future needs – has gone awry.
This will do nothing to help our affordable housing crisis. It should never have come to this. It’s reasonable to question if our former and present chief administrators of the town had not been tied up with the mayor-championed Judicial Inquiry if they would have had more time to dedicate to managing our town’s infrastructure needs.
Mayor Saunderson in a (6 to 3 vote) recently directed our current CAO to literally, sift through old file boxes from Epcor searching for something that remains unclear, at least to residents.
The CAO then reported back to council there are over 300 boxes of files to read through. As our highest paid town employee, the CAO’s published salary is $216,000 year, approximately $105 an hour.
The mayor has also decided not to step down from his role as head of council while actively campaigning [for a nomination] to be the MPP for our riding. Mayor Saunderson continues to assure the community there is no conflict of interest to stay in his position and that this is not taking away from his full-time leadership of the town.
I don’t know which is more concerning, the idea that this is the state of our town under his full-time dedicated leadership or that we are to believe that dealing with developers pleading for an exemption for their development’s water needs while running for higher office doesn’t present some puzzling conflicts.
We simply can’t continue under the half-hearted efforts of a mayor who can’t even be bothered to finish his first term in office before jumping at a chance to head to Queen’s Park and now – a water crisis. I shudder to think what could be next.
Our town needs effective leadership immediately. Mayor Saunderson should step aside and let the people of Collingwood find representation their hard-earned tax dollars deserve before this mismanagement gets any further out of control.
Ralph Kunitzky
Collingwood, ON
