More than an hour of debate at the Nov. 1 marathon council meeting saw decisions from four weeks ago to vote down a pair of equipment purchases reversed and council approve buying a new loader and a grader, all by 5-4 margins.
The four councillors on the losing end of this meeting’s votes – Duncan Wong, Jeff Fountain, Les Ellsworth and Earl Colborune – were the ones who voted against buying the grader and loader at the Oct. 10 meeting, defeating the resolutions 4-2 with councillors Andre Proulx, Braden McMurdo and Brian Lundmark absent from the meeting right after Thanksgiving.
The day after Halloween, however, with all council members present, the four councillors opposed to the purchases couldn’t do anything except argue passionately for their position.
Lundmark, who submitted motions to reverse the previous decisions at the last council meeting, said the purchases were approved during the budget process and that the equipment was needed. Under Manitoba’s Municipal Act, decisions of council can be revisited and reversed if a councillor submits written notice of a proposal to reconsider the decision.
“We have a loader that’s unusable half the time,” he said, referring to a 1988 Champion loader that has needed $71,000 in replacement part over the past four years.
The new loader costs about $245,000 while the new grader costs $388,000 plus taxes and should be delivered in about six to eight weeks.
Wong lambasted councillors who voted in favour of the purchases this time for not showing up for the previous vote.
“If you guys are so passionate about the bill, show up and defend the bill,” he said.
Ellsworth said something being in the budget isn’t a guarantee it will pass and criticized public works director Neil MacLaine for not ordering parts to repair the oldest of the city’s three graders when it broke down in August. The parts were ordered following the last council meeting, MacLaine said, at a cost of $14,000 and are weeks away from arriving.
“That grader should have been fixed and ready to go,” Ellsworth said. “We must never, ever allow any department to make those decisions based on the fact that they think that a resolution may pass. I got a problem with that and so should the rest of this council.”
MacLaine was grilled repeatedly by Wong, Ellsworth and Colbourne during the Nov. 1 meeting, until ultimately he balked at Wong’s suggestion that the need for the new grader wasn’t based on data and walked out of council chambers.
Colbourne tried to table the resolution to approve the grader purchase until Wong received answers to the questions he’d asked MacLaine but the motion was defeated. He also suggested the purchase was to thank the public works department after Lundmark noted that some residents said the city did a better job of snow clearing than usual last year, despite the heavy snowfall.
“You’re saying that because they did such a good job last year, we’ll reward them with a grader,” Colbourne suggested.
“That is not what I said,” replied Lundmark.
