Since Cobourg has rejigged the Council/ Standing Committee meetings schedules Councillors and the Mayor only have to attend two Statutory meetings in September. It appears that may be too much for them. An announcement appeared today:

“A Council committee meeting was cancelled today at the last minute due to a lack of quorum. Both Mayor Cleveland and Councillor Randy Barber had personal matters to attend to.”

This highlights a couple of problems:

• The ability to do Town business
• The wisdom of only having three people on each committee
• The Effectiveness of the “Governance Reforms”

We cannot guess what personal matters the missing people endured but it must have been pretty serious but not unexpected when you want to cut the governing hours to the minimum by establishing scanty and few Standing Committees. As a critic of the reorganisation I can easily point out that Councillors of previous years sat in many more meetings for far less pay, and we want to pay these people more than minimum wage.

The image above is the Council meeting map, all of the Council/ Committee meetings are on it. Each Councillor sits on one Standing Committee and attends the Regular Council Meeting – a total of two a month; hardly an onerous job. Surely if this meeting had to cancelled because of lack of quorum why was it not postponed to a time in the next week after all the Regular Meeting isn’t being held until a week after that?

As we said in the headline “You only had one job to do” – go to a meeting, and you can’t even manage that!