HOLDING MUNICIPAL POLITICIANS ACCOUNTABLE

   Chatham, Ontario:  John Cryderman has found so much government waste at the municipal level, he’s making local politicians and bureaucracy nervous. He figures he could save taxpayers across the province billions of dollars. “Municipalities are the worst offenders of wasting taxpayer dollars,” he insists.
   In his own municipality of Chatham-Kent, Cryderman found that expenses are routinely not explained and sometimes approved behind closed doors. He said that the Police Services Act requires its meetings to be public but in Chatham-Kent an in-camera meeting approved the police chief ramping up his car allowance to pay for a $73,000 SUV, an increase from $37,000. In another case, the municipality almost approved a plan to “save” taxpayers money until Cryderman figured it was actually going to waste millions of dollars and persuaded some councillors to vote against it.
   Ineffective municipal politics are a province-wide problem, Cryderman said. Idealistic individuals run for office to change the world and when they are elected, it seems they learn about how much personal gain they can achieve by staying in office and too many firebrands become compromised.