Mayor Ian Boddy on the CFOS Open Line, February 18, with Claire McCormack, on the decision to delay the hiring of a Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Coordinator. (For clarification, the Coordinator position was recommended by Owen Sound's City Manager, not any citizens' group.)

"There are different theories of being a municipal councillor. One is that you are a trustee for the people. And the other one is that you are the voice of the people. And at various times we are one or the other, or somewhere in between and we have to be. Because of the volume of reading we do, the reports that we're doing, we're often more trustees because we know what's going on to a lot more depth than the public does.

That was one where, boy, you know, we heard loud and clear that the community wasn't ready for it after we started to move ahead.

And in sober second thought we looked at it and went “well, what else is going on,?” and partly what twigged it is that there are so many people in that group that were from West Grey, that were from Chatsworth, that were from outside of Owen Sound coming in and demanding that Owen Sound must do something and you know, they're not necessarily taxpayers so should we be listening to people outside the community?

But the bigger message was that this is a regional issue; it's an issue for everybody and that started to really hit home. Should we be going alone or should we be trying to figure out what everyone else is going on?

So the County back in April got a report from students from Guelph University that had done a review of what everyone else had done across – not everyone else- but a lot of comparitors are doing across the country and came up with a report for a climate change action plan. It came back to County council I think August 8 if I remember correctly. I should have known this and I should have brought it forward a little bit sooner but I wasn't at that meeting actually, Richard Thomas was sitting in for me that day that they passed it up there to go ahead with a report.

There's funding through the FCM which is Federation of Canadian Municipalities – Government of Canada funding to give you all the information. So you sign up to get the information, you use it, so all the research is done, it's being done for municipalities. Grey County is grabbing that information, they're putting together a report as we speak and it will include lower tiers such as Owen Sound so they're really well ahead of us.

So let's wait and see what data they give us and we can put it in our strategic plan and then we can decide from there what to that benefits all of us within Owen Sound and without....

....If we only do what everyone tells us to do, that's not leadership, that's followship. Leadership is responsible decision-making, looking at everything that we've done; everything that we're going to do.The staff have looked at electric loaders and how that would work. The market's not there yet. Buses with our hills and the winters – not quite there yet. But we're monitoring it.”