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On Jan. 10, our newly elected mayor, Don McIsaac, councillors Tim Lauer and Janet Durnford, accompanied by city staff Gayle Jackson, Ian Sugden and Wes Cyr, as well as John Bravakis from JB Enterprises, attended a meeting at the Elgin Bay Club condominium to entertain questions from the condo residents regarding the construction of the sewage pumping station on Cedar Island Road.
The city was provided with the questions in advance and staff and Mr. Bravakis provided answers. The project is now scheduled to be completed by October and costing $1.645 million over estimate. We residents at Elgin Bay will be now subject to another year of not being able to use our balconies and keeping our windows closed.
I contend the city did a totally incompetent, lousy job for the planning of this facility. The logical place for it is where the existing pumping station is located on Elgin Street beside the vacant Rona property. The city did approach Rona but was told they would have to purchase the entire property. That was it; no further negotiations. The city then decided to build this pumping station beside the highest-density residence in Orillia. (Intelligent civic leadership should have identified this and pursued it with Rona.)
For the past two-plus years whilst construction of this facility has been going on beside our condo, numerous diesel generators have been running 24/7, pumping out water from the site. We have been subject not only to the noise but also the smell and pollutants of the exhaust fumes (all this when the city is championing its green credentials). We were told that the local utility, Hydro One, could not provide electricity for the pumps because of insufficient lead time. (All they had to do was install one or two transformers and string secondary cable. Again, intelligent civic leadership should have identified this and pursued it.)
A number of questions were asked if management staff responsible for this debacle were disciplined or rewarded during the past few years. Answers were not provided, citing privacy concerns. My taxes are paying for this farce and I therefore share the wage increases from the provincial Sunshine List for two of the major actors:
- The chief administrative officer received an 18 per cent pay increase for the year 2020, and
- The general manager of development services and engineering received a 20 per cent pay increase for the year 2020.
My question is: Why did these city employees, our municipal public servants, receive these large, pre-inflation increases in salary with so much incompetence? We have to ask ourselves: Are we getting good value for our tax dollars?
Tom Griffiths
Orillia
