Come out and support the 50th Anniversary Tour di Via Italia Road race on August 31st, 2008. You can find all the details on the Road Race website or through the Facebook group.
It's bad enough that Windsor continues to pour money into the Detroit Grand Prix, but now it looks like we're giving away City Services for free in order to further support a Detroit event. I say "looks like" because we never get an accounting of what we get for our investment in the Grand Prix. The City of Windsor News release highlights discounted packages that include free parking in municipal lots and free tunnel bus transportation. This year, the City will once again hawk tickets at the Transit Windsor terminal and all customer care centres. What a great way for taxpayer paid municipal employees to spend their time.
Another question I have regarding this event is how many free tickets do we get and who gets them?
Speaking of the News Release, in typical cart before the horse fashion, it mentions visiting the News Notes section on the front page of the City of Windsor website or the visitwindsor.ca website for links and more information. Ooops - guess they forgot to check and make sure the information was actually there before issuing the news release. Hmmm... I suppose if we spend a quarter million on a new communications department, it will fix problems like this.
Meanwhile, the Via Italia Road Race, celebrating it's 50th anniversary, must compete with the City's subsidized offerings in order to put on their event.
I'd sooner see the $50,000 per year (or more?) that the City spends on the Grand Prix be dedicated to replacing the "temporary" stage in the Riverfront Festival Plaza. I actually heard a great idea on John Fairley's Face to Face show the other night regarding the stage. He proposed a partnership between the City, Festivals that use the Riverfront and various corporate sponsors to work together on building a new permanent stage. The festivals could contribute through a 50 cent or 1 dollar surcharge on ticket sales, dedicated towards the building of a new stage. An excellent idea that should begin as soon as possible. (In Windsor time, that means about two to two and a half years. )
Accounting firm KPMG will be hired to examine an audit -- kept under wraps for more than a year -- of the construction of the 400 building in City Hall Square.
The decision made Tuesday by the city's audit committee, following an hour-long closed-door discussion, means the long-awaited audit won't be released to the public for at least several more months.
Meanwhile, the creation of the Auditor-General's position so sorely needed in Windsor continues to crawl along in typical Windsor time.
Now you can stay connected to Mississauga.ca with our convenient E-Mail "Alerts" feature. You can sign up to be notified directly via e-mail whenever we post or revise News, Events, Bids, Agendas and Minutes.
For your convenience, we combine all the day's Alerts into one user friendly daily e-mail summary. You won't be flooded with multiple e-mail alerts during the day. It's fast, it's FREE, sign-up today. View Sample E-Mail Alert.
You can pick and choose which ones to sign up for, or take all 5 to be really in the know!
* City of Mississauga News Releases
* Events
* Bid Opportunities / RFPs
* Agendas
* Minutes
What a nice simple and cost effective idea. It's not original, offering email alerts, but it's the fact that they've also added Events, Bid Opportunities, Agendas and Minutes to the typical News Release offering.
Instead of trying to figure out how to get the public to accept a quarter million dollar communications department, Council should be focusing on cost-effective ways of communicating with the public.
While the City is revamping their website, these are exactly the types of tools that should be considered, along with simple social bookmarking tools standard on many websites today. While email represents "push" technology in distributing content, RSS feeds accomplish the same through "pull" methods. By offering RSS feeds for the above items, and many more, the City affords the public the opportunity to pick and choose what content they want, when they want it. Personally, my RSS reader checks for new content every 15 minutes. Even though I have over 300 feeds, RSS enables me to monitor a wide variety of site in the same amount of time it takes me to check my email.
Better communication with it's citizens shouldn't require buckets of cash and an increased bureaucracy, in fact, it should be the complete opposite.
Here's yet another Auditor General's report from a City other than Windsor. Ottawa's Auditor General was established in 2003 and since the recent Municipal Act changes, has assumed the statutory powers granted under that act.
From reading the Ottawa A-G's report, it would seem that Windsor is on the right track so far in terms of funding (currently $550,000.00).
The budget of the OAG is set at 0.08% of the total operating budget of the City. For 2007, this resulted in an office budget of $1.7 million, including $200,000 devoted to the Fraud and Waste Hotline. The budget remains one of the lowest in Canada for municipalities with a similar audit function. All of the audits presented in this report were conducted within the 2007 budget.
Ottawa is roughly three times the size of Windsor. For the $1.7 million budget, the Auditor General conducted 23 audits comprised of planned audits, follow-up audits from previous years to ensure compliance and additional audits initiated as a result of tips to the city's Fraud and Waste line.
For those interested in seeing what Windsor might be able to look forward to in the near far distant future, you can view the complete Auditor General's report here.
Had a great time Friday night sampling food and culture at the riverfront Carrousel festivities, but that's not what this post is about.
Considering the debate that has opened in Windsor regarding recycling and garbage I couldn't help but notice the number of garbage cans placed throughout the plaza. I counted 32 bins Friday night, with another collection off to the side ready to be called into action. The number of recycling bins spotted? Two.
Water was available to all who wished, although it was of the plastic bottle variety. For all we hear about how Windsor water is cheap, clean and available, the one place it's lacking is within the City's own parks. I looked throughout the riverfront plaza but could not find one single water fountain.
Just a couple things noticed in passing.
I've just tracked down a bug that was causing my site to abort whenever it's viewed in Internet Explorer. It's related to embedded YouTube videos. Although I haven't found a solution as yet, I've taken off the YouTube videos that I had posted on the site and won't be posting any more videos until I have the situation resolved.
1. I don't know how many people caught Ward 2 Councillor Jones' performance at City Council last night, but it was somewhat over the top and rather disturbing. A resident, Kevin Pinsonneault, was objecting to the extension of the noise by-law for the Caribbean Village. He gave a reasonable presentation to Council and backed it up with a petition from neighbours with 64 signatures. Councillor Jones moved a motion to allow the Multicultural Council to have a blanket extension to 1 am for all villages. In his comments on the motion, he all but accused Mr. Pinsonneault of racism. His motion was subsequently defeated by a majority of Council. Councillor Dilkens then moved a motion to allow an extension for all Villages, applied for and held individually. In his comments on Councillor Dilkens motion, Councillor Jones all but accused Council itself of being racist for defeating his motion. Councillor Dilkens certainly didn't care for his approach as he raised a Point of Personal Privilige to clarify that his motion in no way singled out any village, rather it treated each Village exactly the same. Each individual Village can now apply and receive a noise by-law exemption. If there are any infractions, the individual Village will have their license revoked and be penalized and not the Multicultural Council as a whole.
2. Article in Saturday's Star about the Audit Committee approving the Auditor General's position for Windsor, funded to the tune of $5550,000 per year. What remains to be seen is how long it will take this to come back before Council for final approval and what the terms of reference will be for the office. The way the process is moving now, I still hold to my original estimate that by the time this Auditor General is finally hired little will be accomplished before the next Municipal Election. A cynical person might think that was the goal all along. Funniest line of the week goes to the Windsor Star, "Empowered by new provincial legislation that enhances an auditor general's financial policing powers within municipalities, the audit committee and council have pushed since January to take the next step."If that's what's defined as "pushing" in Windsor, I'd hate to see what taking things slow would be defined as.
3. Speaking of Auditors, how often is it that you get the answer to an audit before you even see the audit? Whatever happened to that glowing report about 400 City Hall square that assured us that everything was fine? Only in Windsor.
My laptop screen has died. Running late this morning so I didn't have time to check the net before I hopped the train to Toronto. I popped into a FedEx office near Queen's Park in Toronto to check on WE Speak and boy did I get a surprise.
The site was hacked sometime between when I left Windsor yesterday morning and this morning. Of all times for this to happen, it had to be when I was both away from home and without access to the net. On top of that, today was the Blog Burst day for Windsor area bloggers.
I've got a great blog for the Blog Burst that hopefully I'll find time to post later this evening. Right now I have to finish fixing WE Speak and try to find the security hole that was used to hack the site.
At the last Windsor Bloggers meet we decided to try out a Blog Burst each month on specific topics. By focusing everyone's effort into one day's worth of blogging, it's hoped that we can encourage other people to join in, write their own blogs, learn a little about each other and just generally spark thought and discussion.
The first topic chosen was Gardening and the date for the Blog Burst is tomorrow. You can discuss any aspect of gardening that you wish - vegetable gardens, flower gardens, organic gardening, local gardens, guerrilla gardening, herb gardens, local food and just about anything else that you can think of and somehow relate to gardening. Photblog - how about some nice gardening pictures?
If you have a blog, please consider joining in. If you don't, feel free to join in on the discussion at the various local blogs participating in the Blog Burst.
Although I'm out of town for the day Wednesday, I'll be updating WE Speak whenever I can with a special section at the top highlighting all the participating bloggers. I've already begun a draft of my own blog, titled "No Labels Here Please".
