It’s about time that Westlock County councillors began making some good decisions and their call for a review by Alberta Municipal Affairs is as good a place to start as any.
The provincial department will be asked to step in and conduct a top-to-bottom inquiry of the municipality and for ratepayers it will hopefully provide some answers. Of course former reeve Ken Mead is probably having a bit of a chuckle today as you may remember that his petition to get a Municipal Affairs review fell flat in March 2015.
The only possible downside to this review is that it’s happening too late. There’s roughly 16 months left until the 2017 municipal election and it’s hard to imagine a review will have much, if any, impact on the current council and how it conducts business.
But, fingers crossed, it should set the county on the right course going forward.
Council has seen its fair share of controversy since 2013 — a shoddy lease deal that cost ratepayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, a council-chamber fracas, and problem after problem with the Tawatinaw chalet.
And that’s only been in the last year.
There’s been a revolving door of CAOs, severance packages offered to all employees and one councillor who resigned because he didn’t want to be apart of the decisions they were making.
Of course controversy and Westlock County, or the old MD of Westlock as some still to refer to it as, go hand in hand. We did a lot of digging through past archives of the News in the run up to the town’s 100th and there’s no shortage of headlines on past problems at the county.
That said, it’s been on the current council’s watch that it has hit new lows. It’s hard not to draw parallels to what we saw happen in Thorhild County last year.
The Thorhild review detailed divisions between councillors, bullying, improper conduct and general dysfunction.
It resulted in Municipal Affairs stepping in and issuing 14 ministerial directives, firing the CAO and suspending one councillor.
For all that has gone wrong over the last three years, if this review finally gets Westlock County doing its business properly, then the pain will have been worth it.
