Why Create This Blog? What's its Purpose?



The passage from democracy [rule by the people] to oligarchy [rule by a few] or plutocracy [rule by the wealthy] is as perceptible to citizens as a frog’s perception that he is being boiled alive as he sits in a pot of cold water that is slowly being heated to a boil. This is the fancy way of saying that too many cuts to the municipal democracy in Prince Albert have been administered to the body politic since I started attending city council meetings in 1999. [In 2006 I spoke at council about "the death of democracy by a thousand small cuts."]


Information Gaps

Changes in council procedure don’t make the news. The local paper, radio stations (only the three-license conglomerate actually sends a reporter to council meetings), and our TV sub-station (a video clip supplier to the station in Saskatoon, though it has also been awarded 15 minutes of face time during noon hour, Monday to Friday only) don’t report things like

· the reduction in the public’s speaking time limit from 10 to 5 minutes
· movement of the public forum segment from the start to the tail end of regular council meetings
· the reduction in regular council meetings from 24 per year to 20 since 2005
· the increase in “special” council meetings (held on short notice, so citizens rarely know about them, and media attendance is sporadic) from 2 in 2005 to 26 in 2008.

The print and broadcast media specialize in reporting “controversy” - for the simple reason that it’s more interesting. Violence helps, since every journalist worth her bytes heard the phrase “If it bleeds, it leads” at least fifty times at an industry prep school. Anger is almost as newsworthy. There’s also a print passion here for “feel good” stories, the kind that make us want to cuddle our kids and pets, go to church, donate to a charity, and just generally radiate pleasure at being part of the wonderfully warm and considerate human race. Stories that might offend an advertizer or a prominent public person are rare. Most disturbing to us freedom-of-information types, the concept of investigative journalism is viewed locally as an anachronism from 18th century France (where the press was originally referred to as “the fourth estate”) that, despite lack of use, inept educators have insisted should persist.

Space and time restrictions also prevent the newspaper and radio from covering city council in a way that would give meaningful information to the electorate. Shaw cable usually records the regular meetings of council, but they’ve missed more of them in the past three years than I have, and finding the on-air broadcasts has become difficult. The network TV stations and our public radio network show up for BIG news items (of the ultra-controversial or big money variety).

A citizen interested in knowing exactly what transpired at a council meeting is left with three options:
- watch the Shaw broadcast on channel 10 (if it can be found, and assuming they haven’t changed their cable service to SaskTel Max or satellite TV), a time-consuming enterprise,
- read the meeting minutes, which are limited to recording decisions and one-line descriptions of lengthy presentations (for example, my detailed proposal for a Green Plan for the city, presented over a five-month period, is described in meeting minutes as “Brian Clavier asked City Council to look at a proposed Green Plan for the City”); or
- get off the couch and attend the meeting in person.

When the traditional media do report a story, too much important information is left out (or was excised by editors). Here’s an excellent example, from last week.

A few days before the January 12 council meeting, the local newspaper published a story on councillors’ 2008 attendance, as shown in this scanned extract.

Never mind that the reporter can’t spell the word that begins the description of the table (and doesn’t know how to use a spell checker), look at the numbers hand-written to the right of the table: the total of all meetings was 88, and the Mayor and eight councillors should have been “assessed” on the basis of their attendance in relation this total.

The article should have contained a table that included and commented on this information:
Scarrow (Mayor) - 86/88, or 98%
Gervais (Ward 1) - 58/88, or 66%
Dionne (Ward 2) - 83/88, or 94%
Atkinson (Ward 3) - 76/88, or 86%
Williams (Ward 4) - 66/88, or 75%
Matheson (Ward 5) - 86/88, or 98%
Ring (Ward 6) - 85/88, or 97%
Swystun (Ward 7) - 79/88, or 90%
Zurakowski (Ward 8) - 85/88, or 97%.

The reporter also failed to note that the “official” attendance records for every member of city council fictionalize the truth (because a 1980 council resolution allows three absences, across an indeterminate number of meeting categories, before any deduction is made from the total number of meetings attended). If EVERY member of council benefitted from the 3-absence rule, as is likely, then the actual attendance for all of them should be at least 3.4% lower (3/88, although this depends on how many meetings were held in the allowable three weeks the councillor was absent). Furthermore, “special” meetings are called on short notice (48 hours is common). [These transact “regular” business, normally without the inconvenience of anyone in the public gallery.] So councillors’ attendance at these is bound to be lower if they have jobs where time off is difficult to arrange on short notice.

For the record, my council meeting attendance in 2008 was 17/20 regular meetings, or 85% . I don’t get paid to attend, so I don’t get the benefit of the 3-absence rule. I also attended three committee meetings and one special meeting.

Another example of an information gap that this blog hopes to fill is evident in the following e-mail, sent late at night on January 11 (the day before council reviewed the police budgets), to all members of council and four of the five members of the Police Commission. [I read the council meeting documents in advance, which is where e-mail like this one have their genesis.]


Please explain the following issues with respect to the 2009 police operating and capital budgets.

1. Why do the police operating and capital budgets get city council review and approval before the budgets of any of the other city departments or city-funded entities?

2. Is there an explanation for the error in the percentage increase in the police operating budget from 2008 to 2009 (other than a broken calculator - see page 89 of the January 12, 2009 council meeting documents, where $9,979,210 - $9,328,700 = $650,510; and $650,510 is 6.97% of $9,328,700 - NOT 6.52%)?

3. Does the police service really need a high-tech, remote control Dragonfly [sic] mini-helicopter to enforce laws and "lead parades"? (While the item is a marvelous invention by a Saskatoon-based company, as featured in the Star-Phoenix last week, the $20,000 cost is a lot of money for a sophisticated device whose use is neither explained nor justified - see page 103 of the January 12, 2009 council meeting documents.)

4. When did city council authorize the purchase of the "Pandila building", a 2009 expenditure of $51,000? (This is the law office at 15 - 15th Street West, we presume - see page 104 of the January 12, 2009 council meeting documents.)

Thanks,Brian



No one answered any of these four questions. As it turns out, the mathematical error I note in question 2 was passed on to council, and, at the council meeting, the Mayor changed the mini-copter reference to “video surveillance” - a change which would allow the Draganflyer to be purchased without naming it (in fact, this technology is designed to perform video surveillance). The building purchase referred to in item 4 was apparently approved at a special meeting of council in late 2008, but the meeting minutes on the city web site currently (as of January 13, 2009) show nothing after November 24, and this item would certainly not be “public knowledge” until the police capital budget was included in the January 12 meeting documents (posted January 8 online).

The police budgets were actually the precise reason for the presence of two-thirds of all the people in the public gallery at the January 12 council meeting. [In addition to me, the Police Chief and the newspaper’s crime reporter showed up after the meeting had started.]

To my knowledge, the only independent commentary on city council that is divorced from the media or the official minutes is Councillor Atkinson’s blog, titled “The View from Ward Three.” His blog is a personal assessment of civic issues he deems important and how council has responded to those issues, with large doses of reflection and personal news. Readers of his blog and this one will quickly see the vast differences between the two.

Obviously, the purpose of my blog is to fill an information gap - one that has grown wider in the past three years. This is especially important in 2009, a municipal election year. Even though a clear majority (59%) of the municipal electorate voted for “none of the above” in 2006 (by staying away from the polls), they still might be curious abut what goes on at city council. This blog is for all the city’s residents, who deserve to have access to more information than is currently available to them. It is my hope that it will be particularly valuable to everyone who votes in the municipal election in October 2009. [And no, I haven’t decided if I’m running.]


What Goes on Here?

Within 48 hours after a council meeting, I will post a log for the meeting. I will try to keep my comments simple. I will neither lie to nor mislead my readers; I will sometimes be guilty of excessive candour. I will even try to ensure that these entries are unbiased (although I am not about to sully my reputation as an iconoclast). Unfortunately, I cannot promise brevity.

I will note the mundane - times of events, absences, pages of meeting documents, the public gallery size, and venue modifications. Jokes and other “asides” will usually be included here. Discussions on agenda items will be summarized, except for noteworthy comments. When votes are not unanimous, I will tell you who voted which way.

Occasionally I’ll need to vent on a topic that has little or nothing to do with municipal politics in Prince Albert. These will be titled “Off the Rails” posts.

Comments on blog posts are invited. Unlike many blogs, anyone can comment on this one without registering or identifying themselves. In return for this license, however, I will be monitoring and moderating all comments. I believe in free speech - even if it’s from people who can’t read carefully, write clearly, think logically, or be civil - but illogical attacks on my text that are loaded with obscenities will not see the light of cyberspace.