Dear Editor:
When Maxwell Smart wanted to keep a secret, he insisted on lowering a “Cone of Silence” that made productive conversation impossible. And when Hinton Council wants to keep information out they lower their own “Cone of Silence” that made discussing emails on an important topic impossible. A very unusual approach and vote, especially as all Councillors have espoused values of openness and transparency at some point in their term.
The substance of this Hinton cone was that Councillor Haas made a ruling, as the Chair of the meeting, to exclude emails containing pertinent information on a discussion on the Wanyandi and Lupin Development Project – one of which is a large 120 housing development project. Councillor Taylor, a.k.a. me, immediately challenged the ruling, which meant a council vote was needed. And all five of my colleagues voted to exclude the emails, and I’m now retired, so all of the current council owns the Cone of Silence.
The point of contention was that the developer had indicated that the town’s proposed costs for a road and offsite costs were far too high at about $12 million dollars. The discussion ultimately was about who should pay for the off-site costs so costs were important. If costs were too high, then potentially they could stop the development and freeze the land in an unused condition.
When it became obvious that a difference of opinion over the costs was occurring there seemed to be a few possible courses of action: 1) keep talking to further understand the differences; 2) refer the topic to another meeting to give time for proper reflection and discussion on such an important subject as disagreement over millions of dollars; or 3) ignore that any such disagreement had arisen and disregard the emails.
No Councillors made any “Motions” to refer the topic to get more information. Instead Option 3 was the path chosen by Councillor Haas and council. By going that way they choose to disregard important information on one of the town’s most important developments and they offered a variety of reasons for voting for this unusual exclusion:
- Permission to share the information from the developer wasn’t given. Yet the developer gave the information to all Councillors before the meeting without any caveats.
- The information was not in the agenda packages so all councillors could not speak to it. But all Councillors received a copy of this information before the meeting and it is common practice for Councillors bring information to council meetings that isn’t in the agenda packages because they’d subsequently talked to or received emails from members of the public about matters the latter wanted addressed.
- On related grounds, that it was more transparent to exclude the emails because the public couldn’t see them. But if that was a major concern, the topic could have been referred to another meeting and the emails included in the agenda.
In my view, Councillors should be saying with Maxwell Smart, “Sorry about that, chief.” The Chief would also want to know why information was withheld and why only information from Administration was trusted? Perhaps your information will be ignored next?
Stuart Taylor,
Retired Member of Hinton Council
P.S. If you’re too young to know Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, I strongly urge you to find some episodes of the 1960s comedy classic series “Get Smart”.
