Quick-kill for Patterson Street fix

Posted August 31, 2010

Just as Ward 4 councillor Richard Norcross was preparing to defend the need to repatch a 200 meter stretch of Patterson Street in Beeton, outside the approved capital projects list for 2010, Ward 3 councillor Barb Huson moved a motion to defer the matter to the 2011 budget deliberations.

The Town's procedural bylaw for council meetings is that a motion to defer cannot be debated.

A recommendation approved last week in committee that split council down the middle, would have directed staff to tender the section between Cedar and Stewart Street. An inhouse estimate put the job at about $32,000. An amended motion on council's agenda last night, went further and would have delegated authority to the CAO or a designate to award the tender because council will lapse into lame duck status on Sept. 10 and would be prohibited from awarding it should it come in over $50,000.

So, in the preamble to her deferral motion, Ms. Huson explained that "a staff report was supposed to come back on this item. We've received no staff report and council has moved ahead and requested that the road be done. The road was under the line item in this past year's budget, and the estimate at that time was $67,100. So I'm asking this be moved forward and it be discussed in the 2011 budget deliberations."

With that, mayor Mike MacEachern called for the vote to defer. It was tied at four - Ms. Huson, Ward 1 councillor Jamie Smith, Ward 2 councillor Dennis Egan, Ward 5 councillor Jim Stone in favour, - then he cast the tie-breaking vote pushing Patterson Street back into the queue for the next council and budget deliberations.

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