Resident has concerns with administration after watching budget deliberations

I want to address only two items from the Dec. 9 budget meeting, which clearly shows the state town administration is in.

There was a discussion about a new drive-thru for a business.

By now, the administration would have sufficient experience with what a drive-thru should look like and the relevant bylaws.

We certainly have enough of them in town. But no, they want to spend $44,000 for a consultant for an assessment.

Both Councillors Pouget and Courtney raised questions on why we can’t use guidelines from other towns and why administration staff cannot handle this.

Here is the answer from the administration: we don’t have experts on staff that can do these things, and if we did, it would result in overtime and overworked staff.

We get to hear this all the time, and it is a clear admission from the administration that they need consultants to do the work. But Amherstburg has one of the highest number of people on the Sunshine list.

There is a simple solution. Replace staff members with the consultants. Now you have a people who can handle the job, and you save consulting fees.

The second item that proves my point is the infrastructure services.

There is lot of money for in the budget for bridges etc.

When Councillor Pouget asked which bridges is the money for administration responded that there weren’t specific bridges yet, that we put aside this money for repairs and maintenance.

Again, the Sunshine managers had a whole year to prepare details for the budget, but we just get guesstimates. What are the CAO, Deputy CAO (why do we have one) and the VP of finance etc. doing about this? Nothing.

But they are experts in one thing, let’s raise taxes.

When are the council members are going to start representing the interest of the taxpayers and stop this nonsense? No company or professional organization would put up with this.

A clear shake up is needed to get this town back on the right track.

—Holger Kretchmann

Amherstburg