This week's Market Squared talks about the bad policy results from sloppy staff work and performative outrage by the mayor. If nothing else, at least this week’s city council meeting included birthday cake. It was a chocolatey sweet chaser to a meeting that was largely characterized by sloppy staff work, and performative outrage by the mayor. I knew there was going to be trouble before the Easter weekend when I noticed on the amended agenda that Mayor Cam Guthrie had added an item about approving a request from Red Top Taxi to secure $39,500 from an account that’s been collecting fees from vehicle-for-hire businesses since 2018. This account, it seems, is meant to be accessed by those businesses to modify vehicles like taxis and limos in order to make them accessible. So far so good. According to Red Top, one of their six mobility taxis is at the end of its working life, and they need a new one. Making the mods to create an accessible taxi vehicle have apparently become prohibitively expensive, which is why this account exists. Here’s the rub: The Accessibility Advisory Committee has discretion for allocating those funds, and at their April meeting, two days before the updated agenda was published, the AAC said that they would not make a decision on Red Top’s application until they got a report from staff about the TaxiSCRIP program, which offers mobility customers discounted rides in taxis. The AAC believes that program is underfunded, and the application to take part is far too onerous to reach a wider number of people in need. About 20 minutes after the AAC rendered this decision, there was no more AAC. Four members, including the chair and vice-chair, resigned in apparent frustration that City of Guelph staff and council don’t value their feedback or give them the autonomy they want. It was in this aftermath, less than 48 hours later, that Guthrie decided to orchestrate what he called a “win-win”. If the now-former members of the AAC felt like their contributions weren’t valued by the mayor, he certainly proved the point by big footing the AAC and their concerns by putting something on the agenda before a holiday weekend with only a brief four-page report that was taken directly from the AAC agenda and without any of the requisite background or the direct feedback from the AAC on the matter. Much of the discussion around the topic featured councillors trying to catch up on the file and catch up on the politics. All the while, Mayor Guthrie, with the urgency of a drill instructor trying to get his trainees through a live fire exercise, kept asking council to stay on task: Does Red Top get the money? On the matter of the question, the answer is yes. Red Top Taxi should have been duly awarded the funding, and their request was in keeping with the intent of the bylaw. So what’s the problem? Well, there are many. For the second time in two months, the mayor has used the council meeting to score cheap political points. Last month it was a pretty major amendment to the Public Space Use Bylaw without any supporting documentation, and this month it was sudden interest in mobility. It’s clear that the mayor believed both moves were a proverbial lay-up, or at least seemed that way so that when council pushed back then they looked like the obstinate ones. There’s also the mayor’s selective enforcement of the procedural bylaw. When it serves his interest, he’ll sand off the edges, but when it doesn’t he cracks the whip. It’s the difference between Cam The Dad with his dad jokes, dad rock and affinity for garage sales, and Cam The Father, whose authority you’ll respect or you’ll get the belt. But this isn’t the mayor’s fault alone. The report from the AAC agenda about Red Top Taxi’s request is startlingly haphazard. It reads like it was written in shorthand and is a formatting mess. I read a lot of city reports, and I can’t say I’ve seen anything like it; they can be sometimes hard to read, but it’s never this hard to gleam the nature of the request or it’s justification. Then there’s the AAC’s request to use the funds in this account to expand the TaxiSCRIP program, where did they get this idea? Why did staff never correct that assumption if it was wrong? Why were the members of the AAC apparently led to believe that this fund for vehicle upgrades was potentially meant for something else? For that matter, why has this account been allowed to sit there since 2018 and accumulate over $300,000 in funds with apparently no plan to disperse them? Why has there been no call for proposals? Why no public outreach to cab companies, or businesses like Red Car to promote these funds as an option to expand mobility? Of course, there’s the original sin in all of this: Guelph is not an easy place to get around if you’re not the owner and user of a private automobile. And on top of that, and it’s part of the issue, the application to get access to mobility transit, and through that the TaxiSCRIP program, is 18 pages long. Not only do you have to answer questions like “Identify and explain the impact of the applicant’s disability” and rate it as mild, moderate or severe, but you also need a doctor to sign off on your application. Just flipping through this – I say again – 18-page document, you can feel the dehumanization. This meeting was a mess. The report, the way it was handled at the AAC, the way staff has handled the AAC, the mayor’s decision to leapfrog this to the council level two days after the AAC quit, and the slapdash enforcement of what was and wasn’t in keeping with the procedural bylaw, there had to be a better way to handle this. For whoever ends up on the next iteration of the Accessibility Advisory Committee, I recommend not making any decisions until you’ve thoroughly discussed the extent of your power, what you’re responsible for and how seriously staff and council should take your recommendations. At this point, I fear that events of the last week have made it impossible for anyone in Guelph with a disability to believe that city hall is accessible in any way except the literal.