Don't pave over this question

Asking why spending nearly one million dollars of taxpayers’ money wasn’t brought to the attention of Charlottetown city council isn’t an unfair question.

And, Coun. Bob Doiron isn’t “out to lunch” for asking.

At Monday’s city council meeting, Doiron renewed his accusations that CAO Peter Kelly spent $940,000 on asphalt paving a dozen city streets without council’s approval.

In the 2018-19 budget, $3 million was set aside for paving and council approved two tenders for around $2 million.

Doiron wanted that spending brought before council, and he believes the Municipal Government Act supports his case that spending anything over $25,000 needs council approval.

Despite Coun. Mike Duffy’s out of line remark that Doiron is “out to lunch,” Doiron is nonetheless interested in having a chat with Premier Dennis King and Communities Minister Jamie Fox about the spending.

Residents regularly accuse the City of Charlottetown with lacking transparency. But this is a new low with an elected city councillor appears to have the same concerns and has to go to the province for help.

Doiron admits that he may be wrong, and maybe Kelly was authorized to spend the money without council approval. But there is an important difference between Doiron and Kelly. Of the two, only Doiron was elected by taxpayers. And as an elected public official, he has every right to find out why nearly one million dollars in spending wasn’t formally brought to council.

Whether the spending needed council approval is another matter, but Doiron believes it does.

Of course, council did approve the $3-million paving budget, which includes the disputed $940,000. So, the city’s argument is this isn’t new spending.

At the very least, city administration should have been transparent and put this $940,000 in spending on a council agenda for information purposes and a discussion.

We can agree that paving as many streets as possible is a good thing, and the more the merrier.

But the public and Doiron are within their right to ask what the basis and criteria was for choosing the 12 streets and whether the same companies awarded tenders were also hired to do this work as well.

This is what happens when a government tries to side step full transparency – it invites suspicion and questions, whether warranted or not. This lack of transparency and suspicions can lead to conspiracy theories on social media, such as who lives on these 12 streets – the implication being that some residents may be getting preferential treatment.

Who knows, maybe we’re all “out to lunch”? But when we’re dealing with this amount of money, city administration should have known better and been fully transparent, whether it was required to do so or not.