Leaked audio reveals that at the meeting in Blyth on 13Sept a long time resident of East Wawanosh confronted council on the condition of our infrastructure and stated “ we are bankrupt, insolvent, how can you keep giving money away if we are insolvent?”
Council gave away $500,000 of your money to the hospital and decided to skip tar-and-chipping roads in East Wawanosh. The reality is they could get their photo in the newspaper holding a giant novelty check if they gave the money to the hospital, or they could tar-and-chip a road they likely will never drive on. The photo opportunity obviously won.
North Huron has no infrastructure reserves, and has a $2.5 Million/year infrastructure deficit. Simply put, if we don’t put $2.5 million a year away in a special account to maintain our infrastructure there is zero hope of bringing our infrastructure up to standards for several generations.
This council should have put away $5,000,000 so far into infrastructure reserves. By the end of this term it should be $10,000,000.
So, how much do you think they have put away so far? You guessed it, zero.
What could be worse? How about if council still has no idea how to address this issue, and has taken zero steps to address it. In fact the CAO said “I’m being frank, we don’t have currently a plan in place to put money away for each one of those facilities to decide how sustain them into the future, we need to do better, we need to figure out what our plan is, or we are going to be in trouble someday.”
Council has clearly failed to uphold 224 of the Municipal Act and ensure transparency and maintain the financial integrity of North Huron.