An unprescedented act in Strathroy-Caradoc Municipal Politics that has never been seen before, one of the Municipality’s newest councilors sent an open letter to fellow council members on January 19th. Ward 2 Councilor Greg Willsie sent the letter to express his concerns over a “divide growing” between the new and incumbent council members.
During the 2022 Municipal Election campaign, plenty of feedback from voters was that Council meetings seemed to happen without debate or discussion, and the previous Council approved the majority of staff recommendations and opinions on a regular basis without questions and discussions. Willsie says a lot of the issues boil down to the past level of comfort with staff resulting in not asking questions that maybe should have been asked. Something he would like to see changed.
Willsie says he has recieved almost exclusive positive feedback from members of council, although there was one member who’s feedback indicated that Councillor Willsie sent it too early in his term. He says he wanted to bring his experience to the table and help prevent any further divides among council members. He tells myFM he believes that more questions need to be asked and there needs to be more transparency with the public. Below is the complete interview with the Councillor and a copy of his Open Letter.
myFM did reach out to Mayor Colin Grantham for comment. The Mayor did respond respectfully declining to comment at this time.
written by: C. Soares
Councillor Willsie’s Facebook Introduction to the Open Letter:
The letter sent to council…
Dear Fellow Councillors of Strathroy-Caradoc,
I wanted to share my thoughts and attempt to shed some light on my process of reconciling my previous experience with the workings of Council. I would ask that you take the time to read and consider the content below.
During my last Ivey retreat, we had a session where we role played as the Ground Control office during the NASA Columbia shuttle disaster. Incidents, where foam had broken off from the booster and hit the shuttle, had happened numerous times before. In previous incidents, the damage had always been minor and resulted in no issues at all. In this last case, it caused damage that went undiagnosed and ultimately led to the explosion that caused this disaster.
At first, the smallest bit of foam coming loose from a shuttle put a halt to all planned launches, but after half a dozen instances with no adverse effects, the engineering risks were downplayed and eventually ignored. This had a very tragic ending, but there are some commonalities to how most organizations develop policy and eventually, through some new insight or unfortunate business downturn, realize they aren’t on the best path.
I have learned more about how the Municipality is operating and its policies over the past few months. One of the points I continue to hear is we’ve always done it this way, and our Municipal staff are the experts and we need to fully trust them. I am having a hard time reconciling that with the number of precontracted sole source engineering contracts we have, followed by statements from the Engineering department during the Capital budget report saying that we need a 9 Million dollar upgrade to the sewage plant in Strathroy not only to increase capacity but because there is maintenance that hasn’t been done in almost 20 years that is beginning to become a problem.
I appreciate the exercise of a multi-year budget, and think that it is a great step forward, however, without looking at the foundation of the current system and just adding another layer, we are moving forward while cementing in some of the issues with the existing process. Without examining the whole system, we are missing some of the value that could be found in this process.
I won’t go into every example, as my point here is not to criticize where we have been. The ideal way to move forward is to listen to new and minority opinions and carefully consider which ones add value. We now have 5 new members of Council and I believe we need the increased level of discussion and questioning we are currently experiencing. Our goal is to move forward and consistently improve. I don’t pretend to have all the solutions, but our job as Councillors is to speak up, ask questions and make the best informed decision we can. At the heart of it, we need continuous improvement to be part of our culture, not something we just use as a talking point.
Sincerely,
Greg Willsie
Councillor, Strathroy-Caradoc