When Joe Fontana decided to resign from his position as MP for
London North Centre in order to take a run at the mayoralty race in
London in 2006, he announced that he would “put London on the map.”
London Civic Watch
Keeping residents of London Ontario updated on what is going on at City Council and its committees.
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Welcome to London Civic Watch
"Ever wonder if City Council is as contentious and chaotic as it is sometimes portrayed? Here you can get a progressive perspective on some of the issues from someone who spent four years in the trenches. Totally unbiased, though! Feel free to comment but keep it respectful, just like they do at council."
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
The judge didn't buy it
It was ironic: first, the Corporate
Services Committee at the urging of the mayor voting unanimously to
support retaining an integrity commissioner to enforce a new and
improved code of conduct and then, an hour or so later, a ruling by
a federal court judge that that same mayor's charity should not
receive a stay of execution in losing its charitable status.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
The children will go hungry
On Thursday, the mayor's charity,
Trinity Global Support Foundation, had its day in court to explain to
a federal judge why it should not suffer the same fate as its
predecessors that aligned themselves with tax shelters, i.e. to lose
the ability to issue tax receipts. After all, there appears to be a
demand for those receipts. In fact, Trinity had issued $152M worth of
them in 2011, a significant increase over the $72K issued when
Fontana joined the board of directors only three years earlier.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Charges, courts and claims
Although
there were no committee meetings this week for which to prepare or to
attend, the mayor gave his court date a miss.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Are you getting what you paid for? Part 3
This concludes the three-part series on councillors' expenses.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Are you getting what you paid for? Part 2
Now to return to the councillor profiles on the basis of their expense reports.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Shooting the messenger
Although I had planned to continue with
a ward by ward analysis of the spending profile of our councillors,
the statement on Wednesday by Councillor Stephen Orser that he has
prepared a motion to present to council to fire Andre Marin, the
Ontario Ombudsman has to take precedence.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Are you getting what you paid for?
As I said a few days ago, you can learn
some interesting things when perusing people's expense accounts. How
councillors spend the money entrusted to them by the taxpayers says a
lot about how they approach their responsibilities. What follows is
the profiles than can be drawn from the spending of our current
council.
Councillors' expenses 2012 continued
As I noted in the previous post, it is
not always easy to compare the use of expense accounts by the various
councillors since the descriptions of the items or services purchased
tend not to be standardized and the categories may overlap. In this
analysis, I've done my best to cover all the basis and not to double
count, but slip ups do occur.
Such is the case with a couple of
entries I failed to describe yesterday. I had indicated that
Branscombe had made no donations out of her expense account but in
fact upon closer examination I noted that she had made one for $35.
Likewise I has stated that VanMeerbergen purchased no advertising,
but he in fact did pay for a $60 ad in a student play programme. In
my defence, I must point out that there are 28 pages of spreadsheets
to contend with, none of them electronic.
But let me move on.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Councillors' expenses 2012
You can learn some interesting things
when examining our city councillors' use of their expense accounts
funded by you, the taxpayer.
At first glance it may not be all that
obvious. There are a lot of numbers to deal with. After all, there
are 14 councillors, and they don't all use exactly the same approach
to their use of the money that we have given them to represent us.
And since the current council has taken office, despite its
preoccupation with keeping other parts of the city departments at a
zero increase, it has been very successful garnering more dollars for
itself. But since they have nearly tripled their allotment over the
last few years, we may well ask what are they doing with the money?
Are we getting a reasonable deal?
I will leave the issue of the mayor's
expenses for another day. But what about councillors? How are they
using the money that we give them?
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