- By Jake Bates

For incumbents, elections are their performance review: It’s the time we, their employers, evaluate the job they’ve been doing, then decide whether to keep them on, or replace them with someone we feel will be (hopefully) more competent. To help us in this important task, we need good information. Here is a data bank with all the motions put forth for the last three and a half years.

Unfortunately, it’s what it doesn’t tell us that is frustrating. Two key pieces of information are routinely missing: the details on what was passed when a report is accepted, its recommendations implemented; and a recorded vote on who did or did not support a motion. One can find out the former with a lot of digging (the links to the report are in the data base); the latter is lost to time.

Regardless of whom we, the citizens of Owen Sound, decide to hire to run our City for the next four years, I hope the next council will pledge to make the dealings of Council more available to us, their employers.

All votes should be recorded; any recommendations from accepted reports should be recorded in the minutes (cut-and-paste — best feature ever!); and the dollar amount associated with any decision should be there for all to see. Because in four years, we are going to want to see just what sort of a job our employees have done.

The voting record is available here.

Jake Bates lives in Owen Sound