Monday Morning Musings on the Medicine Hat Municipal Mutiny
By Kelly Allard
Last week was eventful with a marathon session of council, council members running out the clock before they could discuss the Mayor’s Motion and topped off with former mayor Ted Clugston giving interviews to the other two news agencies in town.
Clugston said to CHAT News
“To everybody looking from the outside, yeah, it totally looks like she got caught shoplifting and they sentenced her to 25 years-to-life. But you have to be a fool to believe that’s the only reason that they sanctioned her.”
“Clugston says he doesn’t have behind-the-scenes insight, but city hall experience leads him to believe that strain between council and the mayor had been growing for some time.”
I say you’d have to be a fool to think that the former mayor does NOT have behind the scenes insight.
Clugston has worked closely with at least 3 of the current council members (Hirsch, Dumanowski and McGrogan from when he was police chief) and is likely still in contact with a number of people inside City Hall.
I do agree with Clugston that there must be more to the story.
Therein lies the problem.
The Kingsgate Report states that the ONLY action considered was the exchange at the August 21 2023 Shitshow Showdown.
“The scope of this investigation is limited to assessing whether the Respondent’s decision to obtain a personal legal opinion on the corporate reorganization and/or the Respondent’s exchange with the City Manager during the August 21, 2023 Council meeting breached the Code. Additional concerns regarding the Respondent’s conduct were determined to be without merit or beyond the scope of this investigation.” (source pgs 4-5 of the Kingsgate Report)
The report found that Clark did not violate the Code by getting a legal opinion so the only issue was the interaction at the August 21 2023 Shitshow Showdown. Even IF Mayor Clark was wrong for trying to hold Council’s sole employee to account, there is NO WAY it merited the most severe penalty from TMSOC (The Mutinous Seven Of Council). That would seem to indicate that
• TMSOC is being misleading about what precipitated the penalties.
• TMSOC is incapable of considering only the facts of the case, it seems they were considering extra evidence.
TMSOC could easily vote to make it public but instead they have chosen to cite privacy rules (sorry Ted, they are not "gagged").
Why are they not doing that?
What are they hiding?
If Mayor Clark’s behaviour outside of the Shitshow Showdown was so egregious that it merited the most severe penalties then there should have been a formal complaint filed by a council member.
Why did that not happen?
When TMSOC clams up and refuses to elaborate, then it leaves the public to come up with their own explanations.
Here is what I am imagining.
That in addition to the Kingsgate Report, TMSOC considered other behaviours not in evidence. (That is very concerning).
That TMSOC is not capable of separating their emotions from the presentation of the facts. (Again, very concerning.)
That TMSOC will not explain their decisions to us commoners. (This is infuriating.)
Community TV /The Trash Panda will do our best to discover the information but we do not have the City Hall contacts the former mayor does as apparently does the Sun City Sentinel (SCS) who said on March 24 2024 -
“As stated when the Sentinel published the outcome of the special council meeting to decide Mayor Clark's fate, sources that wished to remain anonymous for a number of reasons, said there has been an ongoing pattern of behaviour by Mayor Clark inside city hall that needed to be addressed.”
Did I mention that all of the commentary on the SCS is anonymous?
(I find that cowardly. It is very fitting that they use so much yellow on their site.)
Community TV /The Trash Panda lets you know exactly who is writing the opinion pieces (it’s usually me.) Come on, SCS, reveal the author! Either cite your sources or actually do the investigation to prove their allegations.
Community TV/ The Trash Panda do get tips from people who are too scared to say anything publicly. All we can do is investigate to see if what they are saying is true.
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