General Food, Dining and Nightlife News

[Rainrider22]

What would be self serving in respecting the wishes of the community they serve ?  To get votes ?  

We elect people to make decisions on our behalf.. I don't necessarily always agree with with OMB because they often over rule local leaders who have their finger on the pulse of the community more so than the OMB. However, in this situation, the use of the OMB as a conciliator seems to have been effective and more efficient.

What is self serving is that the council knew that the OMB would rule for the restaurant developer, because there is no good reason not too (IIRC, even staff recommended accepting the development).  However, council voted against doing so, because that's what the residents wanted.

The result is, the city had to spend money defending an OMB appeal which they believed they would lose (using our tax dollars) the result of which is the restaurant gets built anyway, but the council gets to appear as if they were doing the thing that a few residents wanted.  So our tax dollars were spent on one thing only, and that's making council look good.  That to me is frustrating.

Moreover, the residents and council were short sighted.  IIRC the developer had offered a number of concessions (bigger fence, maybe some other things) in order to make the restaurant more palatable (ha) for the residents, as they now had to spend money on the OMB appeal, I'm not sure they'd be willing to do these things anymore.  In the act of spending our tax dollars to make themselves look good, council may have even made things "worse" for the people they want to look good too.

Whether you agree with the OMB or not, it was a foreseeable result.

It's the worst type of governing, where you make choices you know are bad, but which look good.  We elect a government to make good choices for us, and hopefully, they can demonstrate that they are good as well.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I am not privy to all the details here, this is only what I've gleaned from reading the news, council reports and shall we say "between the lines", and this is of course all my opinion.

/rant over

 I understand your thoughts however, if I was a resident, I would want my concerns addressed.  It is Council's job to make decisions.  You are of the opinion that Council ought to have known the outcome and therefore, should have just made the decision.  That becomes a slippery slope.  It is always easy to make comments and judgement after the fact. Additionally, most of these comments are based solely on our opinion and no known facts..

I think we have become so jaded that we always seem to think the decisions made are now some how "self-serving"  and that is not fair.

Many times on this forum people have tried to make conclusions or guesses as to what the outcome will be on various issues without being privy to all the information, and then when it is a different outcome, they don't acknowledge how wrong they were.  

We all like to predict and make guesses, it is kind of fun, however, to label people as self serving is a bit strong.

That's all I will say....