{"id":1292,"date":"2013-04-09T12:01:14","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T16:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=1292"},"modified":"2013-04-16T11:46:01","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T15:46:01","slug":"public-could-be-able-to-keep-tabs-on-council-expenses-more-often","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/public-could-be-able-to-keep-tabs-on-council-expenses-more-often\/","title":{"rendered":"Public could be able to keep tabs on Council expenses more often"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aurora residents could be able to keep more up-to-date track of which Councillors are spending what through the course of the year.<\/p>\n

Council is set to approve a committee recommendation this Tuesday which could see more detailed reporting on what Councillors are expensing to the town on a more regular basis. As things stand now, these details are reported annually by the Town Treasurer \u2013 2012\u2019s were presented last month \u2013 but if last week\u2019s recommendation goes through, they will now be reported twice yearly.<\/p>\n

The move was a bit of a compromise following a lengthy and, at times, heated debate over expense reporting. Some Councillors wanted reporting to stay the same on an annual basis, but others called on quarterly year-to-date figures being released to the public.<\/p>\n

The ball got rolling on looking at potential ways to change the status quo in January with a special Council meeting to go over the options.<\/p>\n

Out of the nine municipalities, Aurora, King, Whitchurch-Stouffville, East Gwillimbury, and Georgina report their expenses in their Council agendas on an annual basis. Markham and Vaughan, on the other hand, provide monthly year-to-date reports, and Newmarket follows on a quarterly basis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was hoping we would move things forward rather than stay with the status quo, or a slightly expanded format,\u201d said Councillor Ballard on Town Treasurer Dan Elliott\u2019s latest report on expenses which were broken down into more detail than in years past. \u201cI think the policy needs to include provisions that would have expenses budgeted and tracked per Councillor, that expenses by Council members be reported quarterly and year-to-date, including details\u2026on each transaction, by description categorization, much like the municipalities around us. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is my firm belief, and certainly from the people I talk to, they want to be able to see how we\u2019re spending this money and many of them see it as a way of tracking how we are spending the larger budget.\u201d<\/p>\n

Councillors Wendy Gaertner and John Gallo agreed with him, with the former stating it would be a welcome move \u201cinto the area of more transparency and accessibility\u201d and the latter stating quarterly would be \u201ca bit more reasonable\u201d than monthly reporting. <\/p>\n

Mr. Elliott\u2019s 2012 numbers came this year in a fresh format with a detailed breakdown on how Councillors spent their money, including which Councillors attended what conferences, mileage claimed, and other categorizations. This, he said, was in response to some of the concerns raised throughout the course of the last six months by Council.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did have a category for alcohol, for example, because I know that was a bit of a topic with this Council, with some members of the community, and the media (see below),\u201d he said. \u201cI wanted to show that was very clear that was separated out and considered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frequency of reporting, nevertheless, was still the primary issue at hand. While Mayor Geoffrey Dawe, for instance, said that nobody had an issue with being open and transparent, it was important to look at things in the wider context of Councils past. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2019re reporting out a whole lot more than previous Councils,\u201d he said, making a motion that Mr. Elliott gather up previous expense reports for the last several years, \u201cso we can get a sense as to where we sit in the overall scheme of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was something Councillor Michael Thompson said he had already done and he said he agreed there was \u201ceven less information provided in those reports from prior Councils\u201d than what was approved last month<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have taken a step forward,\u201d said Councillor Thompson.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is concern that we seem to be going wild with our spending and I think that would be appropriate to compare that to what is reasonable over the last two terms,\u201d added Mayor Dawe, calling on the previous reports to be broken down as they now are by category.<\/p>\n

This, however, didn\u2019t fly, and Council opted to go the simper route of just having a summary of the previous Councils compiled into a memo.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really see the purpose of that,\u201d said Councillor John Gallo of the suggestion for retroactive reports. \u201cI have no problem if the director sends us the annual reports for the past five years, I don\u2019t care, and we can analyse them ourselves, but to have staff spend time on that makes absolutely no sense to me and is a complete waste of their time. If we want to know what those are, pull a report and take a look. They are all on the website. There is nothing untoward about that and it is a complete waste of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the recommendation are passed as-is this week, Council expenses will be reported semi-annually, with the last two years of expenses re-formatted with greater detail. <\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir Aurora residents could be able to keep more up-to-date track of which Councillors are spending what through the course of the year. Council is set to approve a committee recommendation this Tuesday which could see more detailed reporting on what Councillors are expensing to the town on a more regular basis. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-kQ","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-22 12:27:15","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}