What would I do to make my office as Ward 5 city councillor more transparent? In this item I will discuss two areas, the first being the Councillors Office budget and the second, the Councillors Voting record. You might think this information should and would be readily available, but, interestingly enough, it isn’t.
Each councillor received a $227,172 office budget in 2009. Even without any increase, that is over $1 million that can be spent solely at the councillors discretion. In March, the expenditures for the Mayor and the Councillors offices were released. The amount spent varied from a low of $161,422 to a high of $227,055 and the runner up came in at $227,025. Only 4 came in at under $200,000. The issue seems to be contentious even between councillors according to a report in the Sun.
Certainly, there are expenses for the Ward Office and staff, City of Ottawa pins and other handouts which support ward activities. What is important to note is that these items ultimately are provided by the City, ie your tax dollars and your councillor is the conduit that provides those items. What would appear to be a common practice is to have the council member provide these items, cash support for events and they may not succinctly point out that the resources are provided by the city and not the councillor. Other Cities such as Toronto post councillor expenditures, so why don’t we?
What I will do once elected is to use the City of Toronto Councillor Expense Policy as a baseline, amend it with my staff to reflect the differences between Ottawa and Toronto [in Toronto, office staff are funded differently], post the revised policy on the ward web site, and lastly, post my expenditures on that website in accordance with that policy. If, as an example, I were to buy a Radar Gun as one councillor did, you could ask why, if being a Council Member is a full time job, would I have time to do the job of the OPS?
You would think that if your primary job is to represent your constituents, and one of the main ways as a council member that you do that is to Vote on issues, that the city would publish councils voting history. To my surprise, and that of others, this isn’t the case. To help clear the historical waters, OurOttawa has compiled, and let me say, I suspect it was not an easy task, voting history for the current council for the last 4 years “on many key votes”. I have spent some time with the data and suffice it to say, some interesting patterns can be discerned, I would encourage anyone with experience with spreadsheets and who is interested to spend an hour and do some comparative analyses of various row/column subset combinations.
In order to make OurOttawa’s job easier, and the Ward 5 residents visibility into what is going on I commit to post my voting history on every vote I participate in on the website. Ideally, this will be done within 24 hours, but certainly within a week. If I don’t I expect the residents of Ward 5 to be on my case. Not only that, if I DO drop the ball, I will be up front and post it as a comment along side the entry when it does get posted.
