Undevelopment Commission Update

There is something very strange going on at the Undevelopment Commission. A panic mode has set in. Someone has decided that there is now a need to try and bury their short-comings for some reason, to get their story off the Front Page.

We now have 1-800-Call-Eddie and Nelson instead of Sam to the rescue.

The odd thing is that we have heard nothing from other Board members. Have they been silenced? Have they agreed to be silenced? I cannot believe that if this was a Board of a listed company on the Stock Exchange with shareholders that they could seemingly be so invisible. What gives?

Doesn't this sound so similar to what happened with WUC?

Except for a few negative comments from some spoilsports from the County, I thought the joint City/County Councils pretty much agreed that the Undevelopment Commission was doing a great job.

No one seemed to be too concerned about the 10 month CEO search and that it was starting all over again. No one even questioned the Chair if he was getting any payment as interim CEO. If they did, I certainly don’t remember him telling them that he was getting $1,200 per day through his consulting company.

I am not sure what changed but all of a sudden Windsor’s Mayor and the County Warden want to be put on the Board of the Undevelopment Commission. Obviously, it is an exercise in damage control since these two people for some reason still want to preserve the Undevelopment Commission in the form that it is in. Presumably as well the Chair remains the same as do the Board Members.

Here is the first page of a letter sent out to Council members. The way I read it the reasons that they want to go on to the Board are twofold:

• 1) the problems around the CEO search
  
• 2) no significant number of jobs have been created and no significant new investments have been made after all this time and after so much money has been spent although they did not say this as bluntly as I have.

I trust that two new positions will not be added to the Board but rather the CAOs of the City and County will be removed. In this case, I wonder if Eddie and Nelson will agree that they will not be the recipients of Board money from the Commission. I would hate for people to think that they are profiting because of the problems of the Commission.

There is a problem as well that no one seems to want to deal with or even to acknowledge. What have the two CAOs been doing while they were acting as Members of the Board?

•  Were they at all troubled by the two issues that the Mayor and Warden seem to be concerned about now? If they were troubled, what did they do about it? If not, in my opinion their judgment needs to be questioned
  
•  Our two senior leaders now want to involve themselves in order to engage, review and report back to their respective Councils. Wasn’t that the job of the CAOs? Did they do that or didn’t they?
  
•  I assume that the CAOs had enough sense to report but to whom? If they only reported to the Warden and Mayor, these two Officials certainly let the Undevelopment Commission slide and I hardly think that they ought to be made members of the Board now.
  
•  Were the Councils ever made aware of what was going on either by the Mayor and Warden or by the CAOs? If so, then both Councils are well aware of what has been going on so why is there the need now for them to panic? They did not seem to any panic at the Joint Councils meeting. If not, why not?

It is another mess again. At a time when we should be focusing on economic diversification and creating new opportunities to help people find jobs, we are instead worrying about a 10 month search of a CEO of an organization that has achieved little after spending millions of dollars.

Instead, we heard that after 24 months:

• “the new WEDC is still taking shape, growing and changing”

It is not fair to take out all of the abuse on the Chair since it appears, according to him, that many of the Members of the Board have been fully involved in what has been going on. What excuse do they have for their action or inaction? Is this how they would run their businesses?

To be direct about it, this organization does need to be wound up and started all over again with the correct focus. Putting two political officials on the Board achieves nothing. They have already failed us in not having proper oversight of the Commission!

The Undevelopment Commission was going to fail right from its outset. May I remind you again what was written and why they have not achieved:

• “Because of the nature of the region’s strategy, traditional performance measures such as the number of new plants attracted, or the number of jobs retained, albeit significant, should not be the primary indicators of success. These could actually be counterproductive by driving the wrong behaviour.”