thousandlashesdotca

The Town of Hudson’s reign of error continued at the June council meeting with the revelation this administration won’t hold a byelection to replace the ailing Mayor Ed Prevost. Councillors appeared to be divided on whether to hold a byelection to replace dissident councillor Rob Spencer.

Neither Spencer nor Prevost have attended the last three council sessions. Article 317 of Quebec’s cities and towns act says a municipality MAY hold a byelection to replace council members if they miss four meetings and if more than a year remains to the end of the current mandate. That would be in November 2017.

But Article 317 is rife with weasel words and wormholes. The town is under no legal obligation to replace the missing council members if the remaining councillors agree it would be in Hudson’s interest to continue as is. Town clerk Vincent Maranda told residents he checked with the municipal affairs ministry (MAMOT) to nail it all down and they said it was kosher. I checked with Quebec’s director-general of elections and got referred to MAMOT. I asked the legalists at MAMOT whether citizens had any say. They told me I could file a complaint. Translated, there’s screw all anyone can do. In Quebec, municipal democracy is an oxymoron.

I get that the mayor may need the medical insurance that comes with the job. So be it. But what’s it say to you if this administration opts to keep Prevost on the payroll out of mercy and guns Spencer because he took Prevost before the Quebec Municipal Commission?

Likewise, I’m struggling with the word to describe this administration’s statement that Hudson’s business sector supports the installation of water meters in the commercial sector. This prevarication was delivered during question period by councillor Ron Goldenberg and town manager Jean-Pierre Roy, who as far as I can determine, attended none of the meetings where this was discussed. It was in response to my accusation the town has done nothing to prepare for this summer’s incipient water shortage and the inevitable ban on all lawn watering other than to restate its determination to stick it to Hudson’s hapless commercial sector yet again.

One of the local rags subsequently reported the exchange verbatim without fact-checking. In fact, businesses had reluctantly agreed to  water meters back in 2014 as a concession to arrive at a solution to the water tax crisis (engineered by the current council). Not that most residents care, but businesses were (and still are) being grossly overcharged for water in comparison to residents. (How many businesses have bathtubs? Swimming pools? Automatic lawn sprinklers? 2.5 bathrooms? Dishwashers? Laundry rooms?)

In 2014, Goldenberg gathered a water tax committee which consisted of both business owners and residents to review and make recommendations with regards to installing water meters. From the outset, business owners and commercial landlords were led to believe the entire town would eventually be metered and that they were to be the first step in the process. So the consensus was that businesses would be the guinea pigs. In exchange, the town would agree to meter some 50 residential properties to establish a comparative sample to properly measure consumption. Furthermore, public buildings would also have to be metered, including schools, churches, town buildings, etc. (Basically anything that is not residential).

The only part of those 2014 discussions to have survived was “businesses agreed to be metered.” The rest? Conveniently forgotten.

Also conveniently forgotten was council’s vow to post details of the litigation embroiling the town (50 grand this month, I’m told.) There was a Gazette story reporting the vow in early March. There was a repeat at last week’s council meeting. Unless they’ve artfully hidden the list somewhere on the town’s expensive new website, it’s still not there.

 

All this to say there’s a good reason why transparency and accountability are nowhere to be found on the town’s $5,000 mission statement. Old-fashioned virtues have no place in Hudson’s new branding. Take solace in the growing assurance that meters are no more likely to this inept administration of dreamers and schemers than the Mohawk performing arts centre or the wholesale giveaway of public greenspace. Fair trade, my ass.

I have been Blog Squatting here as a continuation of my self-admitted local democracy experiment. I would like to thank Jim Duff as my benevolent Bloglord (blog landlord) victim for his indulgence, his turning a blind eye, or simply a lack of interest that has allowed me to indulge myself and experiment here.

Blogging can easily become narcissistic blathering. For the time being, I am hereby evicting myself from being an uninvited main voice on this blog that is not mine. I lack the skills, time, commitment and wider social connections needed to build this Blog towards anything resembling truly relevant discussion. Perhaps in modern times building that sort of relevance is becoming close to impossible. I will try to explain later in this post.

The basic questions I have been trying to answer recently are: How will small communities, lacking a politically involved local newspaper remain involved in their own politics and municipal destiny and what new modern tools are available to fill any gaps left by the disappearance of that local paper? I have yet to find a good answer, and I believe that the tools do not yet exist to replace good local journalists. Communities like Hudson who lack good local papers will diminish in some ways we don’t yet fully understand. Such change will come first to small communities, but where we once had multiple Montreal English dailies we now have one mostly branch office English paper. More of our media is controlled by fewer corporations, never a good omen for having balanced insight among citizens.

I’d like to thank those who have followed me on this period of the blog, an interested and interesting gathering of people who think and care about Hudson’s future and are willing to contribute their thoughts at the risk of judgement. You are quite unique within the municipal political landscape; even participating is a small group discussion can be a scary task in a small town divided into factions and social groups. Very few will like a post, fewer still will discuss it positively and contribute something, and even fewer will ever reasonably object to a position taken and almost no one will circulate a link to all their friends. Debate towards consensus eludes most of the modern world, so bullies will dominate the decision making.

The real control of municipal direction has always existed within an interested subset of any community and their willingness to get involved in any issue, either constructively or destructively would dictate the relative success of failure of successive Councils.

The cycle seems to repeat, driven by an almost insignificant part of our population that becomes disproportionately noisy for what they see as good reasons. One hundred citizens at a monthly council would represent less than 2% of citizens and half are there for constructive comments and initiatives. Ten angry hecklers at the last council represent less than 0.2% of citizens angry enough to debase themselves with inappropriate action. Only a very tiny percentage will form small groups to circulate angry emails and Facebook posts calling to dismantle and replace the Mayor and Council.

It’s easy for me to draw the logical conclusion that 98+% of Hudson citizens are happy enough with the government by a few elected fellow citizens to just not get involved. An alternative question is: If only 1% care, why should I? As I better understand this process, I begin to question whether what I write will be constructive or destructive. Am I better serving the 1% or the 99% and how might I ever balance both sides when one side remains mostly silent? Am I promoting peaceful progress or fomenting dissatisfaction and disruption?

We need dreamers and idealists. But, it can be too easy to get caught up in passion and belief and begin to lose sight of what is possible within the confines of past failures, existing constraints and the overbearing laws that govern municipal governments. None of those are the responsibility of any current council; government is in fact the political science of bureaucratic checks and balances that limit any government’s ability to move off course too quickly. The system is designed to prevent bold actions that happen in less than the time between elections when the people can speak again. It is painfully easy to overwhelm a municipal government drowning in past problems and red-tape with good ideas or well meaning demands and it is absolutely possible to freeze them to failure with only a small group of angry citizens.

I thank and admire all who serve our community, those have served us and those who will serve in the future as Mayor or Councillor. You undertake to dream of a better future for our town, and to work for low compensation and too little respect within a system designed to keep you from doing anything significant without massive support of a silent majority, while enduring the slings and arrows of a tiny minority. Without citizens like our Mayors and Councils, we’d suddenly cease to govern ourselves and quickly be absorbed and homogenized into a bland mediocrity completely unlike Hudson of past times.

Will Social media, including blogs like this one, improve local politics? I believe that social media will not easily join us into causes or drive progress based on broad vision and consensus. Especially in a small town environment with tightly woven social structures that can become quickly judgmental.

We who create blogs or Facebook groups risk dividing ourselves into significantly smaller and smaller groups of like minded people on narrow focused single issues. Until we find a formula that actually engages significant portions of a population into real respectful debate and discussion towards consensus, we will fail to make ourselves relevant.

I suspect that Bloglord Duff may come back in the near future and that his hiatus may have been pondering many of these same issues. Perhaps, Jim will have found some answers that elude and frustrate me, if so I will happily support his efforts to engage and educate more people in discussion.

There are very few dummies among us, but today I’m attempting to distill the essence of Hudson’s strategic plan to a few simple sentences.

• Hudson can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing because we’re slowly failing financially and not keeping up with the requirements of the bureaucracy of the MRC and Quebec.
• Hudson needs better government, responsive, open, fiscally responsive and completely transparent.
• Hudson has deep passion for arts and culture and has many involved citizens.
• Hudson values the beauty of the nature around us and has many involved citizens.
• Hudson will need more tax paying residents to pay our bills, but we must grow in a planned and controlled fashion that fits Hudson’s image and way of life.
• Hudson needs be more attractive and better maintained, to be a better place to live, to attract more visitors and entice more future residents to buy homes here.
• Hudson needs to encourage and enable transitional living options so that residents can age well in Hudson for as long as possible.

This is basically my simple summary of everything Council has resolved to do when they accepted the Strategic Plan at April’s public Council meeting. The rest of the strategic plan is professional, competent, and comprehensive.

The plan shows that they’ve spent a lot of time and thought this out, put some numbers together and set a timeline and plan for staged implementation. Since it affects our future I suggest everyone read it. My previous posts shared the links to the documents or just go to Hudson’s website.

A meeting May 12^th will provide much more information and form committees on various points.

For the fearful among us, Council can’t simply start spending borrowed money wildly or making deals or rezoning without public approval on anything major. If they did, they would lose the trust and respect of the people and violate one of their own strategic plan pillars.

I will dig deeper into some of the key Hudson Strategic plan issues in future posts, so casual visitors should check back often. As always, we need more discussion and more voices, so please speak up and comment.

I’d like to thank Mayor Prevost and all Councillors for gathering our comments and listening to citizen’s concerns and then spending the countless hours it takes to prepare such a complex and well thought out framework for the future, especially during a time of extreme duress and complex challenges within our municipal government.

The Prevost administration is the first in decades to undertake such a major plan for our future, they deserve our respect and in return we should take the time to read and understand what we need to do together to make Hudson’s future better.

If we fail to plan for Hudson’s future, Hudson will surely fail.

An old sales manager who worked for me often said that the reason God gave us two eyes, two ears and only one mouth is so we can look and listen twice as much as we talk.

I’m trying to build bridges; so I’m asking all sides to leave all baggage at the shore of the swamp that divides us and walk gently and quietly towards common ground.

Hudson tends to be a passionate and opinionated community, so debate can become dangerous at times. Based on recent events, I believe that before we review our future plans we should review some basic rules of engagement for respectful discussion and debate.

Our leaders are our neighbours and friends, the pittance we pay them makes it as close to volunteer per hour as you could imagine. They ask little of us while walking among us and we too often ask the impossible from them. If we continue to waste their time, attack their ideas without fully understanding them, or treat them with disrespect or suspicion at every turn we eventually won’t have leaders willing to run for election. Revisit my recent posts on Designed to Fail and ask how that might serve a Provincial government wishing for fewer municipalities.

Council knows my mind because I don’t expect them to read my mind, so I invite them to read my thoughts here and via emails. Every post I make on this blog, every comment I make on Facebook is shared with our Mayor and Council immediately so they can be the first to read it. I am willing to publish whatever I say and I won’t publish or say anything behind their backs.

You must also know that Council and I don’t always agree. I’m not perfect and at rare times they’ve angered me and I’ve walked the very edges of disrespectful and will try to do better in the future. In the end, I sure do respect them for the mess they took over, what they’ve done already, what they’re trying to do and the difficult challenges that Hudson has always presented to those who choose to lead us.

Frankly I’m impressed for different reasons with each and every Hudson Councillor and especially their willingness to establish a dialogue and try to solve problems with me. When we differ, they usually reach out and together we try to and usually  close in on or come to common ground.

Naturally, I’m confused and deeply ashamed when Council is heckled at monthly meetings like the last one. If that’s the Hudson we aspire to, I’ll have no part of it. I do understand that it is only a few citizens, less than half of one percent, who are apparently frustrated to self-reduced humanity for various reasons. But there’s just no place for any of that type of disrespectful behavior in our town. I’m disappointed that the vast majority of Hudson did not see that behavior, because I know us to be a polite and respectful place and most Hudsonites would as be angered as I was. We’re all equals on the same side here.

A great problem with planning any progress is that we actually need to agree on a few things, starting with the idea that things must change. In the past few posts I’ve tried to be realistic about some of the risks of failure to manage ourselves, and those risks begin with feeling safe doing nothing and end with Hudson mostly disappearing if we do no better than we have done in the past 20 years. Council better understands the fiscal challenges, the bureaucratic challenges and the hole we started from, but they cannot be expected to have all the answers immediately available, nor can they respond to every great idea they get passed. The key to Hudson’s past success is that a citizen with a great idea gathers some friends to help and the group contributes to the greatness  of our community.

Hudson has been lacking on serious long term planning for decades, so the Prevost Administration’s efforts to establish one have been a confusing new experience for many in Hudson. Especially the part where they actually asked all citizens for our input before taking probably well over a thousand comments and distilling them into Hudson’s Strategic Plan. And yes, they paid some local professionals to help them pull the plan together because it must have been a time consuming and daunting task and they didn’t want to miss anything.

I’m confused by many of the reactions I hear, which range from “great ideas” through “How dare they?” through “What were they thinking (or smoking)?” and span the gamut from quiet support through suspicion, distrust, vocal rejection to some seriously libelous statements about who might benefit that I won’t dignify in digital ink.

In the next couple of posts I want to build on positives and make a case for what our leaders believe we must do to ensure the survival of Hudson and help share the Prevost administration’s look beyond to where we could thrive again.

Today, in preparation for discussion, I’m giving everyone some homework.

Don’t believe what you’ve heard, actually take the time to read the Strategic Plan, or at least the summary version. Extra nerd credit will be given for reading the appendix. Then mark your calendars on May 12, 2016 for the Strategic Plan public meeting, which unfortunately I will be out of town for because of a prior commitment.

The links to your homework are:

Strategic Plan: http://www.hudson.quebec/wpcontent/uploads/_conseilmaire/Plan%20strategique/Our%20Town%20Our%20Futur%20Eng.pdf

Appendix:

http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/_conseil-maire/Plan%20strategique/Hudson%20Appendix%202-%20Financial%20Plan%20Detail%20Eng.pdf

Overview:

http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/BOOKLET-ENGlr.pdf

I keep hearing complaints about Hudson Council’s Transparency, and many of those complaints are on legal issues.

Because issues are before the courts or there are threatened actions, Council is simply not able to share specific information on most of our legal issues. It is unfortunate but apparently quite common to municipalities that we’ve got such expensive legal problems and most of them originate from only a couple of places.

I think Council is supplying what they can fairly well and you can go and look for details of what they have shared but I’ll save you some trouble.

Look at: http://www.hudson.quebec/en/services/general-management/ and you’ll find the links below.

Here’s a link to the current Hudson legal files: http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/2016-03-15-Court-cases.pdf. In terms of number of cases it is apparently quite normal, and a number of the actions are simple disagreements that happen in normal municipal business and issues related to employees which must be kept confidential.

It’s not current, and the legal system grinds slowly and expensively so some of these legal files have been active for a long time but here’s a link to last fiscal year’s contracts between $2,000-25,000: http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/Liste-des-contrats-de-2-000-et-total-plus-de-25-000-du-2014-11-01-to-2015-10-31.pdf and you can find our legal bills under Dunton Rainville.

Since this is basically all the information that can be made public, look at and cross reference these two files and you can perhaps gain a sense of which cases are costing what and in some cases who is driving them. Feel free to inappropriately ask any of those involved for a better perspective, but if they’re well advised they probably won’t be any more forthcoming than Council.

At monthly council meetings there is a list of all accounts payable to be approved and it is specific and detailed. I haven’t found those listings on the web, but I’d like to see them placed on the website. The last two months alone we consumed over $100K of legal expenses that the Town almost entirely simply can’t avoid, so our legal costs are rising rapidly for now.

One significant grouping of our two biggest ongoing legal bills is the collection of files related to the various issues with our former Director General Catherine Haulard. The issues are confidential until resolved; Council simply can’t speak on this matter or be more transparent. I presume that if there were an offer of reasonable settlement that Council would pursue that, so I must presume that our leaders and lawyers believe that we’re spending legal dollars to defend ourselves properly against what our leaders and our lawyers believe to be unreasonable demands. We’ll only be able to judge the effectiveness of that when the end of these actions comes by going to court or settling.

The other big legal cost is preparing facts and a legal defense for a complaint of 15 pages containing 151 specific allegations of ethical and other issues against Mayor Prevost and others that Councillor Robert Spencer filed with MAMOT. I understand that MAMOT took no actions themselves but referred these allegations to the CMQ which I understand is the Quebec Court that deals with such municipal issues.

I will always defend any Councillor’s right to object to or raise such things and especially to seek the judgement of a higher level of the law where he or she feels confident in the allegations. This huge pile of allegations has cost a lot of legal dollars and consumed a huge amount of time and energy from the mayor and others. How we as citizens might wish to judge this action and react can only be determined once the CMQ has rendered some decision. Until then we wait and we spend and must simply accept that the Town Council can’t say anything, but must prepare an answer with our lawyers.

Until such a ruling finally comes, I will also always presume the innocence of those who stood up and were elected to serve us. The points of allegation made have apparently become “public” by virtue of a lifting of the publication ban originally in place. The Montreal Gazette and La Presse had challenged the ban, and it appears that Hudson originally challenged it probably to keep the names of citizens mentioned out of the public eye.

At the March Council meeting Mayor Prevost said basically that he wouldn’t further object if the file became public and that he felt he had nothing to fear and would be vindicated. Apparently the publication ban has since been lifted, so I presume the Montreal Gazette knows what the specific 151 allegations are and so far hasn’t deemed them important enough to publish in any detail.

I’ll leave my original as is, but I need to correct one thing, the Montreal Gazette did in fact publish a summary of the Spencer allegations. Thanks to one of our blog readers:  http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/off-island-gazette/hudson-mayor-ethics-complaint-details-now-public

It is not the Town’s place to publish this full list of allegations. But, the Town must prepare to defend itself properly at great expense. The DG suggested at last council that one maybe could ask the CMQ for a copy, personally I have no interest in discussing details of allegations and will wait for an eventual binding legal judgment to decide which side of this bothers me more. That said, this case and these costs will and must simply grind on slowly at an incredibly high cost in dollars, time and morale and the eventual wrong side will deserve some anger.

Until each of these issues are resolved, we’re committed by the actions launched by others to spending money and energy on them that would be better spent elsewhere improving our Town.

I believe that on these legal issues the Mayor and Council have been as transparent as legally and reasonably possible. What more do you think they should do while we must wait for the legal system?

Always I’m stating my studied opinion and thinking out loud. Some will say I’m being alarmist; others are more than certain that I’m crazy and only time and how we manage ourselves will determine if the future finds me correct or completely wrong. I’ve never wanted more to be wrong than on this subject, but I find we keep following a self-destructive path and something will force change upon us.

Let’s examine some simplistic reasons why Quebec might wish small municipalities like Hudson to fail or stumble enough that merger is our only sensible or available option. Simply put communities of 5000 citizens can become a real pain in the ass to big government.

It’s not just Quebec; the evidence clearly shows that wherever possible Provincial governments are joining towns to simplify management of many issues.  Less points of contact and more homogenized needs to service makes their government of us easier on a day to day basis. The Provinces will argue successfully on the possible efficiency gains and cost savings, but in that spreadsheet process our emotions and attachment to a village heritage don’t get any significant weighting or offsetting value.

Provincial governments get significant pushback and endure legal challenges whenever they force mergers, so it’s my opinion that an unspoken part of the long term strategy to create fewer larger merged towns is to weigh municipalities down with bureaucracy and make it more and more difficult to function correctly at too small a size. Of course they won’t publish such an intention, and perhaps the growth of municipal bureaucracy is just natural government evolution that’s unintentionally crushing small towns.

If we fail to administrate to the required government standards or we eventually need trusteeship, we can’t get grants and maybe even we can’t borrow money from banking channels to finance municipal operations. When we fail to function or govern ourselves, we are no longer qualified to control our own destiny, we can get rolled into a neighbouring community and their life gets simpler.

In my dark and cloudy crystal ball I see Nouveau Hudson becoming an attractive quaint waterfront hamlet within the ever growing municipality of Vaudreuil-Dorion. Hudson would no longer enjoy bilingual status; our failure would surely close that option.

Where Hudson now has six Councillors, Vaudreuil Dorion currently has eight municipal Councillors with about seven times our population. Logically, within V-D, Hudson would have a single municipal Councillor and V-D would have nine Councillors as they’d expand Council to a total of ten because it’s usual to have even numbers with the Mayor breaking ties.

Our administration needs would easily fit within the V-D buildings and systems, immediately saving a few million to build a new Hudson Town Hall. It would be difficult to elect a mayor from Hudson to challenge the longstanding V-D dynasty. V-D is successfully attracting the new hospital, senior’s residences, businesses, schools, and government grants, what’s not to like from an upper government or even citizen’s perspective.

Before you discount my forward scenario, look towards some of the players in V-D politics who are good people successfully building an expanding empire and also look to the incentives that the Provincial government and the MRC would enjoy when Hudson fails.

Honestly, in functional terms we’d be more efficient and have less ability to fight among ourselves, so given enough time and enough new villagers in our Hudson village six story condos, I’m not actually sure that such a merger would be completely terrible as growth would drown out the existing population quickly. Potential developers and builders would surely love the new structure; it seems quite easy to get those things done in V-D.

I’ll ask our blog commentators to tell me what value they’re sure we’d lose and why we maybe should actually stop fighting among ourselves and start fighting to avoid such a future.

I believe that the only way we can save Hudson for Hudson is to find the incentive and ways to actually become a cohesive and very well managed community. Fail to do that and we will fail because our failure has already been pre-planned and we’re executing their plan for our failure almost perfectly.

This is my personal opinion and view of the future of small municipalities in Quebec, especially those attached to an MRC connected to a major metropolitan area. When and if failure comes at some point in Hudson’s future, I will take zero pleasure in having been correct. Hudson’s current collective mentality and mood makes long term survival much more difficult and Quebec would not be disappointed in any way if Hudson failed and had to be merged with a larger neighbour.

The cynical side of me says that the possibility of failure was designed into the Quebec Municipalities system in ways that would eventually benefit and simplify the Provincial and Regional government bureaucracy. Perhaps we’re expected by Quebec to eventually fail, and perhaps we’re just taking too damned long to finish ourselves off.

The technician in me says that to avoid disaster of failure, we must first identify those potential management areas where we would be expected to fail if we were badly managed. Start with the ones where we are most behind the bureaucratic requirements . Once we see the failure points, perhaps we can find ways to work with and around them.

If there’s any interest in discussion I am willing, over several blog posts, to highlight a series of structures in Quebec municipal law that I believe make it nearly impossible for a small town to survive and thrive. Perhaps we’ll together discover other ways we’re designed to fail.

Since the Bouchard days of zero-deficit municipal governments have become more and more complex. The responsibilities of municipalities have grown exponentially, the bureaucracy requirements have been expanded in exchange the right to raise more tax passed down to municipalities. Virtually no small town was prepared for or capable of the newly granted responsibilities and their ensuing bureaucracy and staff requirements.

Thirty years ago, Hudson was far more self sufficient than today, but that doesn’t imply well managed and I won’t try to pass judgement there especially on the known crimes against us. We had our own Police department, a volunteer fire department under our control, an on staff Civil Engineer, and very simple town planning that could generate a building permit for a simple addition or garage replacement in days. When the MRC came to our lives, Hudson’s leaders simply ignored it as not relevant or valuable to us at that time, and I believe that was a huge mistake that we still have not fully corrected. We’re still referred to at MRC levels as the Republic of Hudson, and we do not avail ourselves of all the possible benefits and funding and we can’t escape the responsibilities.

In that bygone era, Hudson could show some world attention grabbing vision, largely driven by a concentration of local passionate people. We were the first community in Canada to ban pesticides, embracing weeds in our lawns as a way of better life. When challenged, tiny little Hudson fought large corporate interests and won at the Supreme Court of Canada. Slowly our anti-pesticide vision started to spread and indirectly we have helped make a large part of Canada a safer place for future generations.

Development always came hard to Hudson, the majority of the local vocal wanted Hudson to never change. It had to be a local who would wrestle White Zoning from Green for his land, and then holy crap they would stand to profit where others might not. Battles driven by Green environment interests and Green Profit Envy were argued and eventually more or less settled locally.

One could argue that Birch Hill was an environmental mistake with borderline land quality and without town sewers and with that generation of septic, but Fairhaven, Quarry Hill, Alstonvale, Hudson Valleys and Whitlock Ouest came together nicely and without significant long term environmental or infrastructure liability. Not all of those developments were approved and managed by a town planning department, but there was lively debate and public consultation. Redevelopment of waterfront was never easy, but most of the major problems came from a few inches or a few feet of extra height due to changes required during construction. When we disagreed, we usually agreed to disagree and allowed grumbling rights forever to whoever lost the argument.

At some point we added an actual Town Planning department, mostly in the beginning because we had to now do so many different things required by the upper bureaucracy, and in the end things that were good for the town. We needed a Conservation Plan and we needed to identify Wetlands and areas to be protected so that we could develop the right areas of town. We needed consistent bylaws and rights to development, so that every White Land owner would be treated fairly under the same rules.

I won’t opine about the quality of our planning department, I believe that any shortcomings we see are the result of bad management practices, lack of direction from leaders, and especially the complex and growing demands of the upper levels of our bureaucracy. I believe we’re well staffed with competent people, yet we continually need to ask for extensions for legally required things demanded by the MRC, so apparently we can’t keep up.

A wise editor always told me that we lose even the brightest reader at 800 words, I’m over that limit, running out of time, I’ve got some real work to do, and I’m already freeloading on this dormant blog, so I’ll try to continue with another post if my rights don’t get yanked.

Today my first conclusion is that Town Planning is one of the overload points designed into our upper municipal bureaucracy that makes it nearly impossible for any small Quebec town to survive, especially one like Hudson that has spent decades mismanaging itself with the help of criminal activity.

Yesterday we received a Federal Budget with significantly larger deficits  for longer than were projected in the election.  We need to clearly understand the reasons for this expansion and exactly how we’ll judge how well our children’s money is being spent.

Below is a column where I first called public debt the crack-cocaine of the political class. It was published in October 2013 when the US Congress was deadlocked about funding and the EU was in debt crisis.

Deficit spending has a place in long term management of our society, but when our governments incur debt on our behalf,  we need to ensure that the debts have a purpose, the results are quantifiable and that everyone understands the goals and duration. 

Published October 9, 2013:

The constitution of the US is brilliant but it never could have seen the present day problems of the political class, including slack morals, self-serving ethics and general lack of responsibility to individual voters. Political parties are huge businesses, labour unions are huge businesses, and lobby groups and PAC’s are huge businesses.

Part of the problem is average voter’s perception versus reality: Many average Americans can’t find enough money to own health insurance, yet ask them and they mostly feel they live in the greatest country on the planet.

The US Congress has approved decades of irresponsible budgets with massive deficits becoming new debt and then the business of politics shuts down their own government while politicians fight over raising the debt ceiling to cover the very costs that they approved. That is just bone headed stupid and irresponsible. For once I agree with Obama, not on programs or content but on the requirement for a government to approve funding of the programs it passes into law.  Some worry the US may collapse the world economy by defaulting, that risk will get bigger with every passing year of excessive deficits.

Sometimes in political discussions I confuse my message by using Conservative vs. Liberal or Republican vs. Democrat. I’m coming to the point that I believe I must simply start using Responsible vs. Irresponsible to properly differentiate political ideology. I believe strongly that today all political parties are corrupted with significant irresponsibility, and that there is not yet a Responsible Party to lead us away from the messes of debt and unsustainable thinking the world is in. I also believe that, without a major financial crash rooted in government overspending, the people of modern democracies don’t really want or can’t handle the truth and changes that a truly Responsible Party would need to bring to the table.

In systems without responsibility balance checks and balances, the responsible always recover first and thrive best long term. The EU model seems to have few solid balance points for fiscal responsibility, therefore Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and others have been able to spend their way into future oblivion while funding social programs beyond their ability to raise tax dollar and the resulting irresponsible levels of debt drag the collective some way downward.

In the same collective political structure, the Germans and Brits are usually better off than most of the rest of the EU, and the Swiss remain small outsiders who seem to always responsibly take care of themselves for the past, present and long term future. I can’t help but say that responsibility that’s not entrenched in law (legislating zero deficits and debt repayment into law is a logical start) depends mostly on the psyche and moral underpinnings of the society. Will we take more than we’ll pay for? Or, are we willing to pay for all that we get and retire that debt in our own lifetimes? Will we ever elect a political party that is truly responsible?

The risk of US financial collapse in the near future seems almost inevitable. No one will escape easily, but a very few countries are more isolated from the effects. Some would call them boring, but Switzerland is probably one of the best isolated from that risk and one of the most potentially self sufficient places on the planet, largely because they’re too responsible to choose to be like the rest. Most of Scandinavia is in that responsible class that will hunker down and survive with simple responsibility accepting the hard work required.

If the US continues at this impasse they’re suffering or worse, defaults and triggers a really dramatic crash, Canada is in a very dangerous position. The Canadian middle class is struggling these days, fueled in part by loss of a significant number of manufacturing jobs and lack of growth in incomes. Many of our prized social programs, including universal healthcare, are available to all citizens but significantly funded by employment related taxes, so as unemployment rises so do those costs.

So how exactly does political irresponsibility creep in? I’ve always felt that the concept of deficit spending is the beginning. Simply put: spending more than we’re willing to tax is irresponsible theft from the future of a society seeking present political gain or illusion of peace. Giving people more government and government programs, social assistance or even wars than they are willing to fund with present generation tax dollars is irresponsible. One of many examples: If my government is using my tax dollars to advertise what they’re doing for me, I think them to be irresponsible because they’re running government like a business with no real cost of money and advertising is propaganda that benefits very few.

Debt is the crack cocaine of the political class and debt beyond reasonable short term limits is just irresponsible. In the recent past we simply counted on inflation to mitigate much of the long term damage of the debt we allowed our politicians to pile up. Prices went up, incomes rose and the past debt seemed less significant. A rise in inflation and the subsequent rise in interest rates might suddenly tip a very fragile recovery to a very bad crash.

In the end, we must look to the fundamental roots of democracy and blames ourselves for voting parties with unsustainable and unaffordable ideas into power. We’re all to blame for the dramatic rises in recent past debt levels of our country, province, or town. It’s time to accept that we’re all responsible for today’s problems and it’s time that we start insisting that all of our governments each start acting responsibly for the quality of our futures.

I first ran this column in April 2011, so some of the numbers have changed a bit and the financing split was eliminated but it makes more sense than ever. We need to address this problem, yet at last council we heard that there are still no clear plans or timelines to install sewers in the Birch Hill area. We’re about to have an infrastructure leaning Federal budget and we really need to get a plan moving forward. 

Original column starts here:

Hudson should quickly install sanitary and storm sewers in the Birch Hill area as well as any other area of equally dismal environmental condition. The cost of the required new debt to service required installations should be averaged into the debt service costs of all areas currently serviced with sewers.

I don’t own or have interest in any property in any of the affected areas, so I stand to gain nothing by proposing this vision of fairness. In fact I’d lose money. Our property’s sewer debt costs would rise by some amount, perhaps even double in the interest of fairness and correcting longstanding mistakes of past councils. But, I’d sleep better knowing that my neighbor citizens were being treated fairly and that their problems were being taken seriously and solved.
The current council mentality is that I’m among six hundred plus lucky homeowners who benefit from the grants. Our sewers were installed at publicly subsidized cost and anyone else who needs connecting will have to pay the whole cost themselves, only if they can all agree to the associated debt for the system they need.This grant and debt averaging idea came to me one day when I pondered the ethics of confining the benefits of government grants to select groups of property owners and then refusing to support owners in equally compromised areas because the government grant well has been pumped dry fixing our part of the problem. What right do I have to this exclusive benefit funded by everyone’s
taxes? What right do I have to insist that others pay the full costs for the same benefits our
collective tax dollars have granted me?
Go way back and one might easily say that the development of the Birch Hill area should probably never have been allowed, but we knew far less of geotechnical issues back then and had far less regulation and oversight from higher levels of government. All past mistakes of town leaders become common property in a community, we own them together and we should fix them together. The councils that finally packaged the sewer project and grants were reluctant to think bigger and confined their thinking to the most visible areas, or areas where sewers would allow new developments like a senior’s assisted care, a new medical center and expansions of schools.
Birch Hill’s dirty smelly problem is tucked conveniently out of sight and out of mind and despite petitions and demands for action over decades they never stood a chance of inclusion in the project. They have been offered various bad deals and half measures, but council mentality has never been to accept these problems as a failing of management of development in an entire community deserving a solution by an entire community.

My total annual cost for sanitary sewers is under $400, a combination of grant subsidized debt and annual operating costs. I don’t know the exact current cost of a proper modern septic system for Birch Hill but I’ve heard cost close to $20K installed, plus regular pumping and servicing. Based on a twenty year life span, average out the capital, personal debt and the operating costs of septic on Birch Hill are well in excess of $1,500 per year. It’s pretty simple why you need to pay four times what I do: I’ve got a grant from our government, you don’t, good for me, bad for you. I think that attitude is completely wrong.
It’s wrong to wait for every Birch Hill owner to replace older septic systems with new more
efficient septic. That will take decades, unless we’re willing to compel owners to replace existing septic systems that our town permitted and approved the installation of with more efficient expensive ones, which would also be wrong. Even that drastic measure wouldn’t fix the problem.
Our town engineer has publicly stated that the only way to solve the entire problem is to install storm sewers too. The only way to actually solve the environmental issues in the Birch Hill area quickly would be to connect every property to sanitary sewers, and to add storm sewers at the same time. The only condition I’d attach is a reasonable deadline to get connected to the newly installed system so the pollution stops quickly.
Hudson needs to aggressively seek government grants for future work expanding on our sewer system.

Hudson should be aggressively planning to expand the sewer system to those areas that so
obviously need sewers because of past development errors. Hudson shouldn’t hold back simply because we think grants aren’t available and we shouldn’t expect present owners to bear the entire cost of fixing those past errors in development. Past administrations have simply set high expensive bars for those areas to jump over and then ignored the real environmental needs of the community.

For the sake of a better community, and to average the costs downward for an area in need, I’m willing to share the grant money I’ve benefited from. We need to fairly reduce the costs of others in similar need of the same solutions our governments helped buy for me. I’d like to see known and acknowledged past errors in development being quickly cleaned up and fixed, not be ignored for yet another decade.

Duff is back but I understand that he’s deep into a “Man-Cold”.  As men are sometimes baffled by estrogen, women can just never understand that there’s something about the presence of testosterone that exponentially multiplies the effects of the common cold in some men.

Today I may ramble a bit, bear with me or click on another link, the joy of the internet is that there’s no required reading if I’m not entertaining or engaging you. I may remain inspired enough to find the time to post from time to time once Duff returns.

I’ve looked at the couple of weeks of moderating and contributing to this blog as an opportunity and a privilege, and I’ve used the experience to try to learn some things about blogging. I have not had as much time as I would have liked to contribute, I have a day job that’s had challenges over the same time period.  If no one feeds a blog with content number of visitors and page views drops rapidly. That’s my first lesson of blogging; you need to feed this blog beast constantly.

My second lesson is that blogs tend to attract mostly like minded people, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. Growth of ideas and development of movements and democracies by intelligent dialogue is important to me, so understanding all sides of an issue helps one find the center that the majority will approve. I came into moderating an existing group and was able to have some great learning experiences and exchanges of ideas. I gained new respect for a number of our readers who comment regularly.

By being a shameless self-promoter and cajoling people on Facebook to read and share, we set some records for both visitors and page views. I learned that the majority of people who visit don’t comment or even mark the post as a “like”. We know someone has been reading but we don’t actually know what you’re thinking.

When writing for the weekly paper formerly known as the Hudson Gazette, I considered our paper the deeper end of discussion, opinion and local government and the other local weekly was the shallow more social end of the spectrum. On Internet discussion, Facebook is mostly a social place where people are “friends”. I purposely have few “friends” on Facebook as my main purpose for using it is to have near real time pictures, video and news of our grandchildren. I find Facebook a nearly impossible place to engage in deeper discussions that might change people’s views, life philosophy or politics or educate yourself to change.

This blog experience has inspired me to learn something of WordPress, the open source platform that this blog is running on. It appears that, in a modern world, being without an ability to communicate your message on the Internet will leave one effectively mute in the near future. I’m a technician and prefer to understand the underlying process and technology and so I’ve stretched myself to learn some things. Visit one of my own first admittedly not well designed website to see some examples of my day job’s products at: http://t-slots2go.com/tslots2go-home-page/rpt-motion-inc-examples/. Not as hard as I expected it would be, but it only took a few hours much of that gathering pictures.

Democracy, especially in the US, has abandoned ideas and policy as selling points and has instead become a high stakes media game. I believe that this trend is a reflection of how the younger generations are becoming engaged and mobilized by political parties. I fear for the isolation of the older and not connected parts of our society, but they’re less and less important to getting elected. Democracy by leveraging media and social media may bring the USA some unexpected challenges that will test the checks and balances designed by the founding fathers.

I started thinking seriously about the failings of modern democracy in about 2009, based on the low voter interest and high levels of apparent dissatisfaction in Hudson. I should clarify that, because I believe the vast and silent majority is quite satisfied. Long before that I had simplistically blamed apathy for every evil of our system, today I see things differently and blame a combination of things with apathy being only one component of why people aren’t getting involved.

Social media represses most people’s willingness to speak up and risk judgement, and so do blogs. Small communities are among the worst places: without a solid vision from leadership they can divide easily into small herds of like minded people with each group often having a fairly narrow vision. These groups can have disproportionately big voices and the silent majority simply won’t engage them.

Probably the most isolated group in any small town is the Mayor and Council, especially if there are any contentious issues or angry people in town. They mostly hear good feedback from their supportive friends and harsh criticism from special interests, past opponents and future mayors in waiting at council each month. At the council meetings I’ve attended, I’d estimate criticism and complaints outweigh compliments by about ten to one.

Because I don’t believe small town or large country democracy is working well these days: I am actively looking for and thinking about ways we might reform the governance of small towns so that the governments that we elect can might have some real time feedback from the silent majority during their term. We need ways to engage people to speak honestly without fear of judgement within a small town, or simply people an anonymous way to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to any given idea that the leaders or citizens might have. Until that day, we all need to treat our local democracy with the respect it deserves and the effort that is each citizen’s responsibility.

Have a great week ahead and give someone words of love, a hug, or just a casual compliment or encouragement. We’re all on this random space rock together, and our journey is finite and of indeterminate duration. My advice: treat the gift of today as a special event not to be missed.