The Municipality of Chatham-Kent did the right thing and brought a report to council on the full costing of foreign investment travel – the same information requested in a Freedom of Information filing back in the spring.
What doesn’t make sense is why they were charging a private citizen an exorbitant fee, quoting $1,322 and hours of employee time to research, for a report done by one staff member that outlined all expenses for the mayor and economic development staff from 2011 to the present.
According to Michael Burton’s report to council Monday night, he prepared the report himself, with no consultation with other departments. That implies he had the information all along. Why not just give the information to the citizen who asked for it?
Why wait until an FOI request goes to mediation to make the information public? And why the ridiculous price tag?
We’ve said it before and it bears repeating until the powers that be get it – the public should not have to go through the FOI dog-and-pony show to get information. The report from Burton is well done – very comprehensive and answers many questions – and now the public can actually see if for themselves on the municipal web site.
The report was brought to council after Coun. Doug Sulman requested it, but that was long after the FOI process to get the overseas costs was started.
The municipality gets hundreds of FOI requests a year, and it would be so simple to cut that number down by just giving the public access to information via its website or in communications to the public. We aren’t talking about frivolous information requests but legitimate inquiries into how our money is spent on very public programs.
Mayor Randy Hope talked about how much the overseas trips cost and named a $121,000 figure. Rightly so, people questioned how only that amount was spent on the whole program. The total costs for the mayor and staff came closer to $600,000 before the federal grant is deducted, which gives us a better picture of how much is being spent.
We don’t think that’s too much to ask to share information and save the municipality hours of time in figuring how not to share the information.
