MAYNOOTH – During a council meeting on February 7, it was asked by Councillor Tracy Hagar, and Councillor Hald Robinson that CAO Pat Pilgrim to bring back the total cost of an Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) hearing named Dalgleish vs. Hastings Highlands, which took place in the final months of 2017.
During the February 21 meeting, a report was brought back to council with this information.
This document was addressed from Joan Nieman, financial analyst-payables, and in that report, the total costs were broken down.
The legal expenses for the municipality came to a total of $31,689.66. The total expenses spent on consultants came to $11,200.35 and other expenses, which includes postage, advertising and mileage came to a total of $2,300.63
All of this comes to a grand total for expenses of $45,190.63.
Nieman also included that this took 150 working hours to complete which is the equivalent to 20 full working days.
After those numbers were read, members of council gave their feedback and thoughts.
The first person to speak on the issue was the councillor who made this request, Tracy Hagar.
“I would like to say thank you very much for this report, I feel this is very informative for the ratepayers to understand where their tax dollars are going and the amount of staff time in particular is important. A lot of people don’t realize that those are dedicated hours that staff could be working on other things that they need to be working on daily. It lets people know that if they had issues at that time that possibly weren’t addressed in what they feel would be a timely matter, it was because staff was fairly busy with this,” said Hagar. “So thank you.”
For more pick up a copy of the February 28, paper.