Dear Editor:
RE: Brennan: Erin doesn’t deserve secrecy award, March 5.
Mayor Allan Alls and councillor John Brennan’s ridiculous whining is beyond belief. Don’t they know that an apology would serve them better? They certainly owe me one.
I put in an FOI request on the severances before the Advertiser did in 2017. I was refused. Then I requested a letter of correspondence be included in a council agenda.
I was told it was “not appropriate” when I wanted council to discuss whether the town’s accounting system was able to efficiently handle legitimate requests made by the public, since I was told it would take 22 hours to find and package severance info. I then put in a complaint to the CAO and got an obfuscating reply from Alls. It turns out that Erin has now updated its information retrieval system and released the severances after wasting 24,000 tax dollars fighting the Advertiser before the Privacy Commissioner.
A reasonable person would think the Town of Erin owes me an apology and a thank you for pointing out how poor their record retrieval system was.
When the Advertiser received the severance info from all the municipalities in Wellington and the county, why did Erin not clue in that it was legal for them to release the info too? Thanks to the Advertiser a precedent has now been set and no other municipality will try what Erin did.
All this shows that Alls and Brennan are more into face saving than caring about what they do with our tax dollars. Nearly $1 million has been spent on severances to get the town a professional level of staff for coming development, so says Brennan. That is a lot of money for a less-than-12,000-population town. Will future development recoup that million dollars? Fat chance.
And after all that money was paid out where is the development, and the professionalism to get it without causing the town residents misery? Daniel Street in Erin Village is to be the route of the big pipe to the wastewater plant. It is not being maintained because the town doesn’t want to have to dig it up twice. As a result it is so deteriorated that driving on it is like driving on a pioneer log road over a swamp..
So, Erin taxpayers are sick of all the whining at town hall. Alls should apologize for town sins and give us professional weekly reports going forward on all the doings there.
Jane Vandervliet,
Erin