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- Written by Gordon Prentice
A commendable attempt by Ward 7 councillor, Christina Bisanz, to get a debate going in Council on the “Glenway Lessons Learned” report may fail to do it justice as the discussion comes at the tail end of a packed agenda.
Glenn Pothier’s lessons learned report with a brief accompanying staff commentary has been relegated to agenda item 25 with “Outstanding Matters” bringing up the rear at item 26.
The report captures comments made at the Lessons Learned meeting on 23 June but makes no attempt to synthesise these into a series of recommendations. Pothier says his summary
“reflects all participant input… and makes no judgements about the views shared”.
It follows that the various groups represented at the 23 June meeting will each have learned their own lessons from the Glenway saga. The rapacious developers will know all the weak points in the Town’s defences and its personnel. Senior Newmarket staff, with a lifetime’s skill at kicking difficult issues into the long grass, will be struggling to reconcile opening up the system to more scrutiny without losing their grip on events.
Our ineffectual figurehead of a Mayor, who rashly promised to make reform of the OMB a central plank of his term of office, will be doing his level best to put Glenway behind him and to move on.
Personally, I am interested in the views of our councillors, especially those who were on the Council back in 2008 who voted not to buy the Glenway lands because they swallowed the line that the Town “is not in the golf course business”. That decision was taken in a closed session meeting lasting 35 minutes after councillors had heard a verbal report from the Town’s Chief Administrative Officer, Bob Shelton. The public – and the OMB - didn’t know about this until eight weeks ago when the Town was forced to open the files.
What lessons have Tony Van Bynen, John Taylor and Joe Sponga learned from Glenway and the way it was handled? And what about Tom Vegh and Dave Kerwin who were also Newmarket councillors back in 2008?
Do they agree with former councillor Chris Emanuel that too much is kept secret and this should change?
If so, how do they propose to do this?
Were they shocked when they learned that the Town’s planning staff had decided to boycott the Glenway OMB Hearing? If not, why not?
By calling for a debate on the Information Report on the Glenway lessons learned meeting, Christina Bisanz has done us all a favour. She has given us the opportunity to hear the views of councillors who, up until now, have chosen to remain silent.
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You can see the chronology of my Glenway blogs here.
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- Written by Gordon Prentice
Newmarket’s new revamped and updated website now blocks key information that used to be readily available. There are numerous blind alleys and dead ends.
There are also weird circular links which take the reader back to where he or she started from, without providing substantive information.
Detailed on-line information on major planning applications on Newmarket’s official website has simply disappeared.
Now anyone who wants to read the background documentation on a current application has to contact the Town’s Planning Department, cap in hand.
Again, information on the evolution of the Secondary Plan has vanished. Background reports and studies are, though, still available from the Planning Department. But they used to be on-line.
In this day and age we do not need a discredited Planning Department acting as gatekeeper, allowing people, on application, access to paper records (or, perhaps, electronic records) that used to be available instantaneously on-line.
Burying Information
Navigating the Town’s clunky old website was always a bit of a challenge. Important information was often hidden away in odd corners, sometimes buried many levels deep. But the streamlined revamped website blocks useful information that should remain accessible and in the public domain. Many links from this blog and others to the Town’s website are now redundant.
Of course the Town has every right to update its own website and make it more user friendly. But blocking or concealing key information that informs debate on the Town’s performance – positive and negative – is taking a huge backward step.
Open Data
There is a delicious irony in having the Mayor, Tony Van Bynen – a self proclaimed champion of super fast broadband – support the stripping out of key data from the Town’s website. Van Bynen should be leading the open data revolution instead of air brushing the record and covering things up.
Van Bynen’s other top priority for this term is reforming the OMB
“to ensure our residents have a say in shaping their community”.
Anyone who wants information on Glenway – surely one of the most controversial planning issues in the Town’s history – must now contact the Town’s Planning Department via the Glenway Application page. Information on the facilitated Glenway Lessons Learned meeting and the highly revealing Glenway "Questions and Answers" can now be accessed courtesy of the Planning Department.
The useful “information reports” which used to appear sequentially by date in the section dealing with agendas and meetings have disappeared as a discrete part of the website. These were required under Procedural By Law 2013 – 46 to be posted on line. Where are they now? Using the advanced search function using the exact phrase “information report” throws up six results. And not all of these are “information reports”.
Back to where I started
Now I type in the search box “Heritage Conservation District”.
I click on the highlighted link to District Plan and it takes me to “Planning Documents and Application Forms”. I scroll to Heritage Conservation District Plan and click to open the highlighted text and it takes me straight back to where I started – not to the plan itself.
With a developer salivating at the prospect of building a condo in the heart of the heritage conservation district, it shouldn’t be this difficult for the public to check out the Town’s official policy for the area.
There is simply no reason to hoard information. It distorts public policy and leads to terrible planning blunders like Glenway. And even if secrecy is in Tony Van Bynen’s DNA, it shouldn’t be allowed to infect the whole body politic.
There is no indication the Town’s new website is still under construction. I’d like to think it is work in progress but I fear not.
As it stands it is not fit for purpose.
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Update 13 August 2015: My spies tell me there is no conspiracy. Just another cock-up. Someone, somewhere gave the go-ahead to switch on the new site before all the necessary documentation had been converted to comply with Provincial accessibility legislation and uploaded. I am told that "eventually" all documents will be available on line. I think we need a deadline for this work to be completed - and a note on the Home Page indicating the website is still under construction.
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- Written by Gordon Prentice
A recent post by the anonymous blogger Nwkt Town Hall Watch on the future of our library service in Newmarket catches my attention. I use the library and I am interested in its future development.
The blogger, who delights in setting hares running, fancifully suggests that the Town has been conspiring behind the backs of the Newmarket Public Library Board and its Chief Executive, Todd Kyle, to reconfigure library services, working in partnership with Aurora and Whitchurch Stouffville. The blogger writes:
“Two years ago, I wrote about the need for the public library to amalgamate within York Region in order to save money and provide better services to the community… So it comes as no surprise that the Towns of Whitchurch Stouffville, Aurora and Newmarket are considering just that. Stouffville council members learned that talks were already underway for the three communities to work together on providing library service at their council meeting last night.”
He or she continues:
“It appears that the Town of Newmarket is working behind the backs of the Newmarket Library Board and its CEO.”
The strapline asks the question:
“Is Van Bynen keeping us in the dark about our library?”
Newmarket’s Mayor, Tony Van Bynen, has many virtues but, as I have said before, leading from the front is not one of them. Van Bynen is a man of process, procedure and rules and the idea that he is manoeuvering behind the backs of the Newmarket Public Library Board and its CEO would be absurdly out of character.
The blogger has a view of Van Bynen which few who know him would recognize. He is regularly portrayed as an evil schemer and manipulator, the senior partner in the so-called “gruesome twosome”. In reality the Mayor leans on his senior staff like a crutch, for the most part faithfully going along with their recommendations. His key initiatives germinate from seeds planted by others.
Library Fiction
The blogger asserts that talks are already underway for the three communities to work together on providing a library service. This is more fiction than fact.
At Whitchurch Stouffville’s Council meeting on 21 July 2015 a report from Rob Raycroft, the Director of Leisure and Community Services, was before the seven person Council, setting out the case for expanding the Whitchurch Stouffville public library on its existing site, more than doubling its footprint.
There is no suggestion in any of the written reports or the minutes of the meeting that Whitchurch Stouffville has been co-operating with its next door neighbours, Newmarket and Aurora, to increase library provision. It is left to a couple of WS councillors to fly that particular kite.
A Window of Ten Years
First up is Cllr Ken Ferdinands who (starting at 58 minutes) tells his colleagues:
“We have lots of land and we don’t have the population that is needed to support a library satellite or a second library. However, with the population that exists in Aurora and Newmarket and Whitchurch Stouffville we can build a centralized library… Perhaps a centralized library of 45,000 to 50,000 sq ft that serves the three communities should be given some consideration.”
“What the staff are recommending I think is appropriate in that we will be able to accommodate the growing (WS) population for the next eight, nine or ten years or so and that would give us a window of ten years to talk to Aurora and Newmarket and say, listen, is this of any interest to you because I think the future demands that we co-operate with one another.”
Food for thought
Ferdinands supports the staff recommendation to expand the WS public library on the existing site and describes the future overtures to Aurora and Newmarket as “just food for thought”.
His colleague, Hugo Kroon, is the only other councillor to pick up on this theme. He says a second library on the western edge of Whitchurch Stouffville serving 8,000 – 10,000 WS residents and 20,000 – 25,000 residents from Aurora and Newmarket would make sense especially when “someone else is going to be paying two thirds of it or more”.
He concludes:
“I think this is a discussion we need to have with the Councils and the Mayors of those two municipalities”.
Fair enough. But this seems a million light years away from the anonymous blogger’s conspiratorial assertion that Tony Van Bynen has been pulling the wool over the eyes of NPL Chief Executive Todd Kyle and the library board.
Where is the evidence that talks are “already underway for the three communities to work together on providing a library service?”
I see none.
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- Written by Gordon Prentice
The Glenway lessons learned report is to be considered by councillors at the Town’s Committee of the Whole meeting at 395 Mulock Drive on Monday 31 August 2015 at 1.30pm.
The Glenway Preservation Association says Ward 7 councillor, Christina Bisanz, has asked the Town Clerk to put the report on the agenda.
The GPA should be congratulated for following this through with such tenacity. Here is an opportunity for our councillors to speak openly and candidly about Glenway and how the residents ended up being hung out to dry by their own municipality.
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- Written by Gordon Prentice
I receive an email from a familiar name in the Newmarket Twitterverse telling me that Di Muccio v Taylor is being heard in the Small Claims Court so it is “no big deal”.
On the contrary, it is a very big deal indeed. Don’t let the radio silence fool you into believing it is something of very little consequence. Although the amount claimed in damages by Di Muccio ($5,000) is relatively small beer, the cost to her reputation as a “champion of taxpayers” will be very high indeed. She has been threatening to take all sorts of people to Court for years, including me, and now it is actually happening.
It is clear the settlement conference held on 28 July 2015 didn’t resolve anything and the matter now goes to trial as soon as Di Muccio asks the Court to fix a trial date and pays the appropriate fee which is, I think, $100. As I understand the rules, Di Muccio has 30 days from the date of the settlement conference to do this. So the deadline by my calculation is 27 August 2015.
Meanwhile I see that Di Muccio is taking steps to prevent the occasional casual observer like me from reading her acidic tweets. To read them from now on you must become a “follower”. But when I decide to follow the President I discover I am blocked.
How strange.
That's no way to change the world.
Maddie Di MuccioProtected Tweets
@MaddieDiMuccio
President @SQESocQualEd; President @YorkTaxpayer; political media commentator
Joined February 2009
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