Over 90 per cent of eligible municipalities have participated in the Ford governments line-by-line budget review. Cornwall’s Cat hating mayor Bernadette Clement admitted recently at the AMO conference that the city was not one of those to take the provincial funded exercise.
Why wouldn’t she and the city do so? After all we clearly have some red flag issues driving our tax rates into territory this community has never seen with no sight of any improvement.
When I ran for mayor it was clear that our police and fire budgets were grossly bloated and could see a 5% trim without any reduction of front line services.
We have an Economic Development team led by Bob Peters that has oodles of money to spend on vanity videos of our fire chief while our commercial and industrial base crumble.
I mean this is as crazy as setting up a black box theatre on the public’s dime to compete with the three theater’s in Cornwall, or even crazier, setting up a defacto media org in house rather than work with the at least four media outlets in the city?
But then this is a mayor that supported a bylaw that won’t survive a court challenge that wants to force residents to spay/neuter their cats and force their owners to keep them inside unless they’re on leashes when all we really have is the OSPCA pandering for cash and city support and too many locals letting their pet cats out where they cause damage and grief.
Again, this dysfunction and lack of leadership and perspective ends at the top of the food chain, which in this case is our Mayor and CAO, followed by the rest of council and City Management.
And they wonder why so many contractors are building in the counties instead of Cornwall…..