Oct 30: Local News + Owen Sound's Engagement Blitz
Plus: Take our community poll on City staff's upcoming open house
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Time to clear your schedules… it seems the bulk of the City’s public outreach and engagement is happening in the coming weeks.
After 10 months of residents complaining that their input has been stymied and that they’ve felt unheard, the public meetings are rolling out fast and furious before the end of the year.
To date, we’ve seen announcements for:
Oct 30 (this morning at 10am, if you can make it) - Tom Thomson Art Gallery Special Meeting on Fundraising
Nov 6 - Tom Thomson Art Gallery Advisory Meeting
Nov 7 - Discover Your City: Owen Sound Community Open House, in which residents can speak with approx 20 City staff members
Nov 8 - Strategic Planning Session #1 for Future Owen Sound – Vision 2050: Fostering Mutually Beneficial and Respectful Relationships
Nov 9
Strategic Planning Session #2 for Future Owen Sound – Vision 2050: Green and Resilient City
Strategic Planning Session #3 for Future Owen Sound – Vision 2050: Safe City
Strategic Planning Session #4 for Future Owen Sound – Vision 2050: Prosperous City
Strategic Planning Session #5 for Future Owen Sound – Vision 2050: Celebrating and Embracing Culture
Nov 10
Nov 13
River District Board of Management’s Public Meeting on the 2025 Budget
Corporate Services Committee Meeting
Nov 14
Strategic Planning Ad Hoc Committee Meeting
Nov 19
Committee of Adjustment
Nov 20
Community Services Committee
Nov 21
Committee of Operations
Phew! That’s in addition to regular Council Meetings.
So, just anecdotally here, as editor of this local publication, I hear frustration coming from both sides, the council and the public.
Councillors are busy – clearly, I mean, just look at the above. Some feel they’re putting in the work and getting nothing but negative feedback from the public. One has expressed frustration that committee meetings are poorly attended, that committees are an opportunity for the public to have their say, and no one seems to want to engage.
On the other hand, many residents say they still don’t feel heard. They speak to Council or a committee, or even invest their time serving on one, and don’t feel their input is valued. They invest substantial time and expertise in proposing solutions, as both Jim Hutton and David McLeish et al have done, only to encounter a brick wall at Council.
The Mayor’s frustration is palpable when members of the public speak too long or go off-topic during the Public Question Period. Members of the community, on the other hand, are frustrated when the Mayor himself speaks out of turn or drifts off into personal opinions that aren’t relevant to the agenda, or when staff overwhelm meeting agendas with lengthy reports and presentations versus succinct, to-the-point recommendations.
None of this disconnect is new – Owen Sound has a long legacy of poor relations with the community to overcome here.
And so it boggles the mind that the series of town halls promised earlier in the year, which seemed like such a reparative first step, has been replaced by a single staff open house. Councilors are not required to attend.
It’s as though the entire Council, or at least the voting majority who approved this staff fair, believe that paid employees of the corporation they are elected to hold to account are some kind of stand-in for the elected representatives themselves. That they are one “team,” and so as long as someone can tick a box to say someone showed up and listened, then the public has been heard by The City: One Entity.
In reality, the roles of staff and Council are entirely different. That is a necessity for safeguarding the integrity of the corporation itself. We cannot forget that. Yes, staff and Council must work collaboratively and cooperate in Council Chambers, but one is no substitute for the other – especially when it comes to the relationship a group of elected representatives has with its constituents.
Looking at the schedule above, the City is right that there are over a dozen opportunities for members of the public to show up and be heard.
And community members are right that doing so has consistently been an exercise in frustration and seems a waste of their time.
In any aspect of one’s life – business, personal, and politics alike – you can stay incredibly busy with all the wrong things and not get the results you’re after. When we have:
15 meetings in a single calendar month, sure to produce hundreds to 1000+ pieces of paper no one person will ever get through,
the City Manager saying (as he did earlier this year) that staff are so busy they cannot possibly look at another issue in this budget cycle,
thousands of dollars and 20 staff members’ time spent on an event that even the person who recommended it said isn’t a good format for engagement…
…we need to stop the insanity and ask what all this busy-work is actually accomplishing.
What needs to change for interactions between the community and the people they elected to represent them – not The Corporation of The City of Owen Sound, but the 9 human beings elected by their peers to oversee it – to become more positive, productive, and impactful?
Many individuals and small groups of community members have shown they’re willing, desperate even, to discuss the issues and take steps in the right direction. It’s past time for their Council to meet them halfway and come to the table, wherever that may be, with openness for a frank talk about what real dialogue and two-way communication looks like.
Spoiler alert: It’s not more of the same meetings with increasingly rigid guardrails to dictate how the conversation must go.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Public Notices
A Special Meeting of the Tom Thomson Art Gallery Advisory Committee takes place on October 30 at 10 a.m. in the Library Auditorium. See the agenda here.
The Municipality of Meaford is hosting Community Connect, a community engagement initiative designed to foster discussion between residents and municipal leadership, on November 5th, 2024, at the Meaford and St. Vincent Community Centre from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Learn more here.
Full subscribers - keep reading for our original + curated local news updates, including:
A report from police on the theft of $96,000 in silver bars from a Meaford residence
An appeal for info as police seek a Grand Cherokee involved in a theft in Chatsworth Township
Details of the 2025 River District Budget proposal ahead of the City’s public meeting
A warning from OPP after a series of attempted break-ins on Grey Road 18
If you can’t see the info below, you’re missing out on what’s happening in and around Owen Sound.
~ Miranda Miller
Editor, OwenSoundCurrent.com
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