Time To Bring the Hammer Down and Get Our House in Order!

Since our last meeting, our Annual General Meeting, LSARA executive and administration has been very busy. We filled some directors positions at the meeting and are now actively working on our membership drive. We have folks that are perusing documents for us to ensure that we aren’t missing anything. We have help for communication efforts.
All support that we are very grateful for. To ensure that we keep up on the latest and inform everyone is a full time job in itself.

LSARA has penned a letter to the Minister of Municipal Affairs. We had the letter pretty much written when we did the Annual General Meeting, just needed a few tweaks. That is until we found out from our Reporters that were in attendance that the Ministry was claiming that the process we utilized “Internal Procedure for Petition Verification” to conduct the audit was improper.

The Communications Director for the Municipal Government indicated that the process was only put in place in May of 2016. The very documents that through our FOIP access were provided and referenced. No one informed us until we began to ask questions after this very important information had already been shared with the Mayerthrope Freelancer and the Barrhead Leader reporters.

Then the response was that there was no process in place when the review of our petition was performed in November of 2015. With the comments that were provided by Municipal affairs, we dug deeper. Not only did his comments have almost verbatim what had come from the previous Minister, they were once again referencing our frustration with certain decisions. He indicated that they “reviewed the work done in October and November of 2015 and we stand by the results.” 

How sir, can you stand by the results when you have not met the criteria as set out in the Municipal Government Act? Within the framework of our Petition documents that were finally returned to us for our own audit, was an Attachment number AR3518. “Legislated Requirements for Petitions” Section 224, wherein it outlines the requirement for a petition. 

It most certainly covers all the areas that we utilized to initiate and formulate our petition. In addition, Section 224 also states in part, “printed given name or initials” “each signature must be witnessed by an adult person opposite the signature, and each witness must sign an affidavit indicating that to their knowledge the petitioner is an elector, and a statement designating a person or persons as the representative of the petitioners.” 

We have no issue meeting this process within our petition. In fact, this automatically puts back 77 signatures that the Appointed CAO Eliminated due to No Affidavit. 

The Appointed CAO wrote right on the Petition Red Line Document that it was disallowed as the witness had used initials. This is not a procedure in the in the MGA but right out of the new process that they speak of  "Internal Process for Petition Verification" included in our FOIP Request. We now are told it was implemented May of 2016. 

Why then, would a process that was not in place be utilized to scrutinize and remove 77 signatures? Initials are acceptable within the MGA framework.

In addition to our updated information to the Minister of Municipal Affairs, we have also penned a letter to County Council asking that they support the inquiry. If indeed there is nothing to hide, then why would they oppose it? 

We have an email indicating that the letter will be brought forward at the April 13th meeting at council chambers at 9:30 am. Important, very important that anyone who has the ability to attend do so. SUREAL, a Ratepayers Association in Sturgeon county recently forced their council to take a few steps backwards with some “like” issues when over 200 people showed up to a council meeting! WE can do this!

LSARA also penned a letter to Dan Ashton, MLA. We were recently provided an article by one of our members. This article was in “The Taxpayer” in the winter of 2013. What was most interesting about this article is how deep in debt Penticton was when he took over as Mayor. They had debt they did not know how they were going to pay. Their spending was out of control and so were their taxes. His approach was one of fiscal responsibility first and foremost. They brought in an outside firm and they went through everything. Budgets, wages, positions. They even had their department heads sit together to come up with their annual budgets and by doing so found many areas that they could share that were overlapping. They found positions that were being out of line with pay scales to the private and public sectors. Some areas they had too many staff for what was required. The bottom line was in 2 years, not only did they balance, they actually brought down the taxes!!!! We wrote to him to ask him what kind of recommendations he may have that he could share. This man went from Mayor to MLA because he truly believed that they had a responsibility to the Ratepayers.

Follow us on FB Lac Ste Anne Ratepayers Association. Like, Share, Follow, see first! Hope to have all that can attend at the April 13th meeting at 9:30 in the OLD council chambers as it appears that the new building is still not ready for occupancy.