After watching the Special Meeting of Council on October 13th. 2hrs 40 minutes of  the, as one Councillor described it, “Your dog and pony show” referencing the man in the chair. Mr. Cleveland the candidate being Mayor or was it Mayor Cleveland just being a supercilious, smarmy, trying to be clever Chair of the Council. As people who have watched seven Mayors of the Town in action, this one performed like none of those dignified and mature people. His main objective failed and that was to prove that he, and only he, can get the information about the Town’s ‘secrets’ out in the public.

These secrets are the facts about the state of the Finances of the Town and the Cobourg Police Services. Trying to prove that the previous term of Council were incompetent and not following Staff recommendations to correct discovered “institutional challenges”. But the whole line of questioning fell apart when the CAO, who was put on the spot by the Mayor’s interrogation of her in the later stages of the meeting. 

The CAO told the Council what they knew, having received regular updates, but may have been news to the Citizens. Speaking very professionally and guardedly and within instructed legal bounds she told of her onboarding and subsequent discovery of problems. as she perceived, in the Finance Department. Joining the Town in 2020 she had presented many reorganisation reports to the then Council which culminated in a report from KPMG basically they discovered that the Finance Department was understaffed and not familiar with the new ways of doing things. When the former Treasurer decided to retire in 2023 the Town then hired a new one. He came from the Private Sector and soon discovered that Municipal Finance procedures and the problems of the previous systems needed a serious upgrade. A consultant was hired to guide the reorganised department into the modern world. In November of 2024, two years into the term of Mayor Cleveland’s tenure, the CAO and the Finance Department gave Council the Financial Report. This report outlined the problems that the Finance Department had overcome, and described that in order to reorganise they had to overcome problems that dated back to 2012. Various action plans were adopted by Council and the Finance Department was overcoming decades of shortcomings and was being dragged out of the ‘dark ages’.

Fast forward two years and now it’s election time in Cobourg. Driven by his most rabid supporters – the Cobourg Taxpayers Association, he then threw another plank on his one-trick election platform (the law and order, clean the streets issue) and it was simple; Taxpayers deserved to know what he knew about the problems of the Town’s finances and the Police Services. The Citizens may not have known about the state of affairs but he had known since 2024 – two years earlier!

But how could he do it? He decided to use Council Meetings as the medium, after all as Marshall McLuhan said “The medium is the message”. So introducing motions designed to cast shade on previous Councils and on the previous Finance Department was the way. The first attempt failed – he could not find a seconder. The ploy succeeded now the people who voted NO were cast as villains having something to hide. But not content to take the win he slogged on and the result was last night’s epic meeting. The Lucas Cleveland show. Mayor Cleveland was surprised when a motion was made by Cllr. Bureau, who told the Chair that he had circulated the motion to all members of Council except him, he did not explain why but the Mayor was POd. The amendment passed and the discussion was on it. The motion called for a written synopsis and a report back to Council instead of the planned interrogation of the Police Chief. The motion passed and the Police Chief told Council that when he assumed the post he had discovered what the Board had been telling him – that the previous administrations had been using dubious financial policies and not producing financial reports. An internal review was conducted and he immediately referred the situation to the Inspectorate of Policing and a called for a peer review by a third party – the OPP. Emphasising that no criminal matters had been implied by this process just a normal policy of third party review. For detailed timeline of these events check here

It should be noted that this part of the meeting was particularly rancorous involving Nicole Beatty and the Mayor as well as Cllr. Bureau. At one point the Chair made an illegal motion whilst being in the Chair calling for the immediate resignation of DM Beatty and Cllr. Bureau from the PSB. The Mayor continued in his usual style of couching questions in innuendo and when questioned by Council about the badgering of the Chief, Bureau and Beatty about who knew what, when did they know about and what they did about what they found he justified it by stating in his political mode “Hey I’m not here to conduct a witch hunt, (nudge nudge) but the public needs to know!” The amended motion calling for a documented chronology of the problems passed with one No – Mr./Mayor Cleveland’s vote.

On to the next “witch-hunt” motion – the CAO’s questions and answers. Starting off by saying she could not give the Chair the answers he wanted, which was to uncover a scapegoat for the financial mess, because of privacy and liability reasons, but she did lay out systemic and historical problems going back decades.  Not one to give up the Chair then asked the CAO to disclose the contents of the closed meetings held by the previous Council in 2022-23. She could not, for privacy and liability reasons, but did admit that that Council did not adopt all of her recommendations for change. When the Chair attempted, in this discussion, to blame the four incumbents who had sat on the previous Council for not wanting to divulge that information he became quite animated – more than usual until Cllr. Darling, a Cllr. not noted for being very vocal during discussions asked for the vote to be taken and chastised the Chair for electioneering and said he was tired of the dog and pony show. This was in the final two minutes of the meeting where he became the victim again and berated Council for not wanting the public to know what was going on.

The meeting ended!

The post mortem:

Checking with the Mayor’s adulation page – the Cobourg news and the comments on the latest post here their conclusion was that Cleveland won and Bureau and Beatty were childish – surprise surprise. However one of the supporters made such a surprising comment it deserved to be posted and it is used as the headline image to this post. Checking in on the local FB pages Cleveland was described in not very flattering terms such a contrast.