In an unusual move, council has streamlined its job by formally handing the administration of the whole town over to the CAO.
The surprise move happened when new councillor Nick Thorp had an aha! moment during a recent council meeting. “You know,” he said, “I just realized that, whatever comes before us here at council, we always end up asking the CAO what he thinks, and that’s what we end up doing. Every single time. Why don’t we just save ourselves some time and hand it over to Geoff formally?”
Councillor Corlazzoli also recommended facing facts. The CAO finds recycling a pain in the ass, so recycling goes nowhere. The CAO is fed up with riding herd on developers and their bulldozers and dynamite, so developers get carte blanche on their projects. “Why play this ‘elected council’ game? It just gets everybody’s hopes up.”
The mayor disagreed strongly, saying it was important that Ucluelet be run by strong, elected officials who are accountable to the public. Then she asked CAO Lyons what he thought.
Mr. Lyons waved his arms about, as though unspeakably irritated by the bother of administering a small town, and said, “Essentially, council is a group of volunteer amateurs with no expertise whatsoever.” There were nods of agreement around the council table. “In every municipal venture,” Lyons continued, “I generally recommend that the district avoid incompetence and cost overruns by leaving it up to professionals, such as myself. In this case, however, the decision is entirely up to council.”
“Oh, I see,” the mayor said. “Okay then, let’s make it official. We can save everybody a lot of boring meeting time here.”
Thorp then made a motion to move the CAO’s recommendations. Council passed the motion unanimously, then made a date for next Tuesday at the ANAF Hall for darts.
Henceforth council meetings will be cancelled, the mayor announced, and COW meetings will be renamed CAO meetings and will be closed to the public. The small audience in attendance broke into spontaneous applause and also began making plans for future Tuesdays.
