It's déjà vu all over again

I have been just a little preoccupied lately with this and that, deadlines to meet, presentations to prepare, and a number of meetings and conferences. I’ve tried to attend as many meeting of council and its committees as possible but often find myself having to leave early and missing the items I especially wanted to witness.

Not that it seems to have made much difference. Meetings at city hall have taken on the pace of the once popular soap operas. Viewers could miss one episode or many, sometimes even several years, and found they could just pick up where they left off.

Putting London on the map

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.” 

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.

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.

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.

Are you getting what you paid for? Part 3

This concludes the three-part series on councillors' expenses.

Are you getting what you paid for? Part 2

Now to return to the councillor profiles on the basis of their expense reports.

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.

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.