Below is my essay against the Vince Hall (Thank the lord he decided not to run) and the Tea Party Councillors, with whom Lee is a member.
=====================================
The Great Disease
It has now come to public light, the seemingly simple way councilors in the CBRM can control processes with little to no accountability or limitations.
Vince Hall has been taking courses for a master's degree and charging them to the fine citizens of the CBRM. While I do not oppose Mr. Hall's education pursuits, I do oppose his spending tax payers' money and trying to justify it as an improvement to his job. There are many questions behind this process. People may not realize that it was Mr. Hall who proposed that the public workers education fund be open to councilors.[ http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/civic/council-minutes/2005/CouncilMinutesMarch21_2005.mht, Employee Training and Development] Upon doing so, he promptly exploited the program to the tone of 8,028 dollars for courses and related fees toward a Masters in Public Administration. This was approved by the CAO Jerry Ryan. What are the standards for this? Are there rules behind approving the funds? There are councilors who lack a high school education while Mr. Hall has two university degrees. The standard for the student loan program in Nova Scotia only provides for two bachelor degrees and no masters or above. If we were to apply the same standards of the student loan program to Mr. Hall, he would be disqualified. Mr. Ryan has an orientation for councilors when they first go into office explaining their role under the so called ?CAO-Council? system. In this orientation it is explicitly stated that councilors have no involvement with the public administration of the CBRM but are policy and decision makers. The system is designed to explicitly remove the burden of administration so that councilors can focus on the people. If this is the system of the CBRM, it would seem that by definition a Masters in Public Administration would not be beneficial to Mr. Hall's position as a councilor of the CBRM; yet Mr. Hall uses over 60% [8028/(5257+8028) = 60.43%] of the total dollars in this program. Should there be a limit as to how many dollars can be used for educational purposes and should there be standards on who should be able to apply and what courses should count? Apparently this program is just a vast caldron of gold coins, ripe for the picking of anyone who wants to pursue any education whatsoever. What if Mr. Hall decides to pursue a civil engineering degree because it would be beneficial for him in understanding how roads are made, should we pay for his tuition and daily flights to and from Halifax so he can attend classes? Given Mr. Ryan's previous assessments, I do not trust him to decide if this is or is not a valid request. This program should have standards, rules, and limits.
Mr. Hall wrote an article called ?Rethinking Regional Development in Nova Scotia: Cape Breton as a Case Study.? [Which can be viewed on the website: http://www.ndpcaucus.ns.ca/Caucus/Reports/paper_cape_breton_aug04.pdf] In it, he claims the average House Hold income in the CBRM as around 40,000 a year. Given that he makes that amount a year alone, his wife works, he gets a rather generous travel compensation that he motioned for [http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/civic/council-minutes/2005/CouncilMinutesMarch11_2005.mht, Council Expense Policy] of 140 per week; enough to pay for a car and the gas completely, he makes around double the average salary of the people he represents [$20,340 * 2 = 40680 http://www.cbc.ca/nsvotes2006/riding/023/, Issues: Jobs and car insurance top the list; http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/civic/committee-minutes/boundary_review/2005/documents/ComparativeData.pdf , lists 31,835 with expenses and 7280 for travel included ranks close to or over 40680], and contrary to Mr. Hall remarks that ?I'm very confident the people who elected me are supportive of my endeavours? I have yet to find a resident who feels that they should be paying for Mr. Hall's Masters degree and I live and work in and near Mr. Hall's district so I have access to many of the people he represents; I believe that if Mr. Hall wishes to pursue a Masters he should pay for it, the travel and the hotel rooms. He can afford it; even before he was charging both the CBRM and the UNSM for the same travelling expenses.
Anyone who has any dealings with the council will realize this to be a symptom of a greater disease; these councilors work toward goals that benefit them solely. Mr. Hall is the chairperson on the Boundary Review committee charged with deciding the amount and size of the districts in the CBRM for the next election in 2008. The council decided to have a committee set up solely of councilors, the one group of people who have a financial interest in the outcome of the meeting and would be considered far from unbiased. The person in charge of analyzing and compiling the data would be a municipal government clerk with highly questionable credentials, and not an impartial expert with a PhD in Mathematics or some research subject. Finally, there would be public meetings, but no representation from anyone of the community at large in the committee leaving an open but opaque process whereby one can speak but yet have no say nor attend the closed committee meetings where the decisions would be made.
At the first public meeting of this committee, I attended with an analysis in hand of the councilors in relation to people and land area for the municipalities of Nova Scotia. My information was well received but universally dismissed. I then continued to email every councilor to be sure they understood that the analysis that had been done for them was very inaccurate, unscientific and contained many logical errors. I stressed the need to have an independent expert review the information and to have to a public member on the committee. I received one reply from one councilor telling me that my voice will fall on deaf ears with the majority of councilors. I sent another and another trying to reason with the councilors explaining that by and large I agree with them in regards that I do not want to see a sharp reduction but I do not agree with fudging numbers or out right misrepresentation of statistics in order to prove your point. I felt that maybe the councilors, some of whom do not have a high school education, failed to understand that part time and full time councilors should not be compared one to one as they do incomparable jobs and received drastically different pay. Then I found the report done by Mr. Hall. In the report, Mr. Hall not only uses the same kind of analysis techniques I used [http://www.ndpcaucus.ns.ca/Caucus/Reports/paper_cape_breton_aug04.pdf , Table 1: Pg 12] he goes on further to dissect the information and denounces some of it as not used fairly or shows it is prone to not being truly reflective of actual costs. This proves that Vince Hall, councilor for district 4, understood my argument but still dismissed it saying he ?didn't buy that logic? when he himself employed the same logic of adjusted comparison when reviewing a similar situation.
Furthermore, one of the conclusions of the Boundary Review Committee and his article is that the CBRM is decreasing in population at a rate of 1,000 people or more per year [Pg 21, Paragraph 2 in article; http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/civic/committee-minutes/boundary_review/documents/NSURBsubmission.pdf difference between Figure 2 and Figure 1 voter numbers, pg 3-4; http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/civic/council/studies_reports/PDF/PopulationForcastPresentation_PNS.pdf, slide 7]. Instead of the logical step of reducing councilors to maintain the ?status quo? of councilor to person ratio [which would be roughly 2 councilors at around 8000 people over the years 1998-2006] the committee decided to re-organize districts[Existing Districts: http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/services/mapping/images/existing16_000.jpg; Proposed Districts: http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/services/mapping/images/proposed16.jpg] as if the major issue was population resettlement instead of population reduction. This approach was opposed by at least a few councilors themselves [http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/civic/committee-minutes/boundary_review/documents/NSURBsubmission.pdf, Pg 11]. For further evidence as to why the status quo should be maintained, the Boundary Review Committee used ?statistics? from the people who attended the meetings. [http://www.cbrm.ns.ca/portal/civic/committee-minutes/boundary_review/documents/NSURBsubmission.pdf, Pg 80] In this argument, it is suggested that 44.74%[17/38] of the 38 citizens believe that council size should remain or increased, 36.84%[14/38] were undecided and the minority 18.42%[7/38] wanted a reduction. Besides the fact that this survey is unscientific in that it only includes those who offered an opinion and therefore cannot be considered impartial, Mr. Hall is on record condemning the method used my Mayor Morgan to get a feel for the public opinion on the subject matter. Over 7000 replies to Mayor Morgan's survey which was sent to the residence who receive a water bill, in which a vast majority of citizens suggested a reduction is what they wanted. Mr. Hall rejected this large and relatively scientific survey having issues with the pool of people it polled. The suggestion is that those who rent homes maybe more likely to want status quo and or an increased council then those who own them, which defies any logic I can use. Given that these numbers were published far in advance of the meetings and the majority of those who are opposed to reduction were in rural communities who would likely be effected by a councilor reduction, one would likely assume that people who had read the survey results were motivated to attend the meetings in hopes of countering the widespread opinion of citizens. These important facts surrounding the circumstances of attendees are not accounted for and are actually excluded from the NSURB submission council released.
From this example and the previous examples of use of tax dollars for personal goals and refusing to discuss (or even receive) expert opinions and/or public involvement on the committee makes a clear picture to me; appears the majority of the councilors of the CBRM are looking out solely for their own interest and are trying all they can do to keep their jobs as it is no big secret that any reduction in council would mean someone loses their job. They seem to be more interested in keeping their job than in doing what the people elected them to do, represent them. That is the greater disease we need to cure.