EATING AT THE TROUGH

O.K. that title above is stronger than originally intended. I am commenting this morning on an article in Saturday's Waterloo Region Record titled "Councillor's time on local boards costs $160,000". However while getting the link to the Record article I noticed on line that there is another story in today's Record about our local politicians' travel expenses. Therefore my sense of disgust and outrage is probably based upon the two combined.

There are three boards that our municipal and regional councillors get to sit on; all for extra pay of course. These are utilities, police and conservation authority boards. I expect that all three suffer due to the overwhelming influence of politicians while I only have knowledge pertaining to our police and conservation authority boards. They generally stink whereas the utility boards are unknown to me.

At one time our Grand River Conservation Authority was known as the Grand River Construction Authority. They approved or otherwise of things like construction in flood plains etc.. One would think that they would also have to be consulted in regards to gravel pits being built alongside the Grand River and other local waterways. Take a close look sometime at the number of gravel pits from West Montrose down through Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge, along the Grand River. It is nothing short of disgusting and totally unecessary. When you have local politicians dependent upon the goodwill and donations (election time mostly?) of business and industry you will have more exceptions and comprimises than is good for the environment.

I've been writing here for the last year and a half and an awful lot of my postings have involved our Waterloo Regional Police. The list of scandals and personal failures combined with just plain bad management decisions are constant. Recently I've posted about how our Police Board have long kept their heads down and primarily let the Waterloo Regional Police Force manage themselves, to the detriment of taxpayers and citizens. Now that it's clear as to who are dominating these boards (politicians) I'm beginning to understand.

Here is an interesting question. The legislation that enacts these boards probably gives authority to Councils to make citizen appointments to them. I'd just love to know if the legislation mandates that sitting politicains be given first shot at those positions. In other words have our local and Regional Councils simply seen a good gig and passed out the sweets to themselves? Or on the contrary has the Province decided to keep local opposition to a minimum and thus written the legislation expressly favouring politicians for these positions? More shame on our local politicians if they are hogging part time positions that could be better filled with an honest application and appointment process open to all citizens.