A recent brouhaha in Town Politics has raised a serious question – is the Mayor being a Mayor or is he campaigning as an angry Candidate?

If the Mayor was being Mayoral we at the BR would expect the top guy on Council to respect procedure and convention (that is if he knew it) and this latest way of setting out an opinion is not Mayoral but that of an angry candidate.

The backstory is simple a Parks and Recreation Master Plan was initiated a couple of years ago and having moved through the process is out for public comment on the final draft. The Mayor and Council have not seen the draft, officially, as it is still in the public comment stage of the process. Mayor Cleveland does not sit on the Committee that oversees the process, but as an ex-officio member of all committees he could if he wanted to.

The Consulting Company that is working on the Plan wrote the full document after consulting with the Community and taking some direction from the committee. In their effort to set the stage for policy that would cover the administration of the Parks for the next ten years they acknowledged that in some Parks drug users were in the Parks and leaving paraphernalia behind. In acknowledging reality and that drug use and some camping could be ocurring in the future, even though those uses are illegal by the Town’s bylaws for parks uses, the Plan on page 61 outlined how this problem might be ameliorated. By noting that “Housing is a Human Right” and that encampments have not been ruled illegal it was noted that this might happen and Cobourg should be prepared for it.

Well the “brown stuff” hit the proverbial fan and the hard-liners and Mayor Cleveland’s enablers went ballistic. Obviously those whose emails the Mayor deigned to read and the phone calls he accepts from those enablers/sycophants had a reaction. See the previous post here to read his first reaction.

Now his second action is what is creating the confusion about the Mayor using process to handle this situation as opposed to a candidate in an election campaign pressing voters’ buttons. The Mayor and Council have not received the final report yet nor have they been asked to comment on it as a Council body. When they do have it handed to them for comment then all comments from all Council are needed. If the Mayor is hot to trot to have the report rewritten to stike out the offending parts of the Plan on page 61 forward then that is the time to do it if he followed procedure.

Doing it the way he is doing it now – publicising a notice of motion Mayoral letterhead, as well as issuing public statements on Mayoral letterhead is both unnecessary dictatorial and non-procedural. This is the way an angry Candidate behaves, but since Mr. Cleveland has not filed to be a candidate for anything yet, even this position doesn’t work for him. It should be noted this split personality move is apparent on Mr. Cleveland’s FaceBook page where the logo is an election sign.

So we at the BR implore Mayor Cleveland to be Mayoral or file to be a Candidate, for whatever it is you want to be, and become the angry candidate that you appear to be.