School division, city kerfuffle highlights lack of transparency

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/06/2022 (1565 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the course of investigating Brandon City Council’s off-the-record informal meetings, it came as a bit of a surprise to discover there had been a conflict between council and the Brandon School Division that had never been mentioned publicly.

In a batch of emails sent and received by Mayor Rick Chrest on the subject of council’s formal, informal and special meetings between January and April of this year, there was one from Linda Ross, chair of the BSD’s board of trustees.

Since 2015, the city and the division have had a joint use of schools agreement where in recognition of the community’s use of school fields, the city would contribute an annual minimum of $20,000 toward their maintenance and upkeep.

So when the city’s 2022 budget removed that funding — which had been raised to $30,000 in the intervening years — without consulting the division, it became a bone of contention.

“It has come to the attention of the Brandon School Division Board of Trustees that in your budget deliberations you removed the $30,000.00 for field maintenance from the city budget,” Ross wrote in an email to Chrest on Feb. 16, 2022.

“We have been very proud of cooperative arrangements between the City and the School Division, which are the source of much admiration from other jurisdictions. Needless to say the Brandon School Division is very disappointed that this agreement has been broken with this year’s budget for the City of Brandon. This disappointment has been further compounded by the absence of any prior consultation with the Brandon School Division.

“We pride ourselves on our collaborative relationship with the City of Brandon, and sincerely hope that this funding will be re-established in future budgets.”

In his response, Chrest said the relationship with the school division is important and “it was hoped that we could find other ways to continue to assist in the grooming of the school fields and that is being investigated as we speak.”

On April 7, the city and the board of trustees held a joint meeting — which was held behind closed doors like the rest of council’s informal meetings — and the issue of the fields was the first item on the agenda.

No resolution to the issue was documented in the emails this newspaper received, but both Chrest and Ross informed Sun reporters this week the funding had been restored and the relationship repaired.

Chrest also told a reporter that the absence of the funding was a simple oversight and one that has been fixed in the spirit of the close relationship between the school board and the city.

We don’t have an issue with either of those things. The fields are a community asset worth keeping in good condition. A close relationship between the city and the school board is worth maintaining in the spirit of community growth.

What we take issue with is that this whole affair and its resolution would never have been known had the Sun not stumbled into it.

Director of parks and recreation services Perry Roque wrote in an email that the funding is being restored out of the parks operating budget and will show up in the department’s April budget review.

Just like that, this whole affair would never have been known about by the public, save for a single change to a ledger item in a document few people will likely ever read.

It might only be $30,000, a drop in the bucket compared to the millions being moved around in Brandon’s annual budget, but if small items like this are being dealt with in complete secrecy, it leaves open the possibility that bigger ticket items are as well.

Despite what Minister of Municipal Relations Eileen Clarke told us earlier this week — that informal meetings like these are a regular part of doing business — this is another example of a lack of transparency.

Her reaction, which included an extremely narrow reading of the part of the Municipal Act that outlines what meetings of a municipal council actually need to be held in public, leads us to believe there is a severe deficiency of transparency among this province’s municipalities.

Or, as University of Winnipeg professor Aaron Moore — who specializes in municipal politics — put it in an email to one of our reporters: “I suspect the issue you uncovered in Brandon isn’t that uncommon in many smaller municipalities in Manitoba, and it may be that the provincial government doesn’t want to get dragged into anything at the municipal level.”

This was the milquetoast answer sent to us by the NDP’s municipal affairs critic Matt Wiebe this week when asked for comment on the situation: “The decisions that city councillors make impact Brandon families. We value the work of local leadership and support transparent access to information.”

Given that response, we have to believe the opposition has no intention of ruffling feathers at the municipal level either with a chance to assume power next year.

We have to give credit to the Manitoba Liberals for being the only party that seemed to care when reached for comment.

“The Municipal Act says that by default, meetings should be open, and that private meetings should be the exception,” leader Dougald Lamont wrote in a statement.

“Process does matter, and meetings that educate councillors presumably would benefit the public too. Public engagement takes work and can slow things down, but it’s about a better result in the end. The public can’t hold elected officials accountable if they don’t know what’s going on.”

Public participation in a democracy like ours is a feature, not a bug.

When it comes time to elect new municipal councils, we hope the process reminds incumbents of their duty to the people who elect them and encourages constituents to vote for people who embrace that duty.

Otherwise, we’ll continue living in the dark.