There seems to be a lot of talk about transparency by Hamilton’s elected officials these past few days.
Last Friday, the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) released documents showing the board paid Toronto lawyer Christine Thomlinson $39,294.32 to investigate alleged ethics violations by Mountain trustee Laura Peddle.
In doing so, newly elected public school board chair Tim Simmons said the costs were released to demonstrate “openness and accountability to the community.”
On Dec. 14, thanks to a motion introduced by Ward 4 Councillor Sam Merulla, city council revealed it had spent more than $1.3 million in outside legal advice in its long-running Red Hill Valley Parkway legal action against the federal government.
And this week the Hamilton police and the police services board were waxing eloquently about opening the doors to their budget deliberations for the first time.
In addition, the police budget is being posted online — for all to see — and is being discussed during an open police services board meeting. The meeting was also to be live streamed on the Internet.
This represents a change of heart from past police budget talks, which were previously shrouded in secrecy.
While we applaud all three municipal bodies for being more open about how they spend taxpayers’ dollars, our enthusiasm for this turn of events would be greater if they hadn’t all been prodded against their wills to open the doors and the books.
For instance, it took a freedom of information (FOI) from Hamilton Community News to force the board to come clean over its $42,720.52 legal bill to determine whether it was within its rights to exclude two buildings from the Mountain high school closure review.
For those keeping track, that’s the issue that prompted the ethics violations review ($39,294.32) after Peddle spilled the beans about that behind-closed-door decision.
Add on another $11,000 legal bill for advice from another Toronto law firm on the ethics probe and the total bill is more than $90,000.
No wonder board members would have preferred to have kept this information a secret.
However, once Hamilton Community News pieced together the legal bill on the Mountain high school review using the heavily redacted report released for the FOI request, we suppose the board felt it was only a matter of time before they were forced to release the rest of the information.
As for the Red Hill Valley Parkway legal costs, Hamilton Community News filed a FOI request last July, which was denied by the city. We subsequently filed an appeal of that decision, which was at the mediation stage, before city councillors finally chose to release the information. HCN is still pursuing the outside legal costs.
Lastly, the sudden about-face by the Hamilton police over its budget deliberations follows an order last month by the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office to release minutes from in-camera budget meetings in 2009 and 2010. That order came 20 months after Hamilton Community News filed an FOI request for those documents.
So while the elected officials and bureaucrats congratulate themselves for being more open and accountable to the public, let’s not forget they are simply adhering to rules they should have been following all along.
Hopefully, this change of heart will continue and usher in a new era of transparency among the decision makers of Hamilton.
