Eight months after Council rubber-stamped the 2026–2030 Strategic Plan with barely 12 minutes of actual discussion, the Municipality has produced its first “update.” It is the mysterious Appendix B — the 100-plus action items nobody could trace back to the original consultation - dressed up as a colourful infographic and handed to Council for review.
Having sat through the consultation, catalogued the broken promises in the Warden's own words, and watched the plan get adopted in near-silence, I went through this update line by line. Here's what it actually shows.
The Promised Report — and the Report Residents Got
Back in September 2025, when I asked how the public would know the process was on track, the answer that I got was that the Municipality would measure success by making sure every idea was captured, and by giving residents quick feedback opportunities to say whether sessions felt worthwhile. Also promised was an accessible financial briefing package explaining budget assumptions, and a system for tracking public input transparently.
None of that shows up here. Instead, five strategic pillars are broken into roughly 100 individual line items, each with a department name, a fiscal-year checkbox, and a one- or two-line status comment. There is no reference anywhere in this document to the original 43 in-person participants, the 20–26 online survey entries, the “shared themes” supposedly extracted from them, or how any specific action item traces back to a specific piece of community input. The thread connecting “what residents said” to “what the Municipality is now doing” - the entire justification for calling this a community-informed plan - simply is not there.
“Ongoing” Is Not a Status Update
Scan the status column and one word dominates: Ongoing. Dozens of items - union negotiations, workflow streamlining, the multi-year maintenance plan, the equity and anti-racism plan, food security partnerships - are marked "Ongoing" with no date, no percentage complete, no milestone, no measurable outcome attached. Others are vaguer still: "Research is being completed," "Options being researched and ordered," "Discussions are ongoing."
Compare this to what this update was supposed to deliver: a way to measure success, fiscal indicators linked to decisions, and a financial briefing package that explains assumptions and scenarios in plain language. What residents got instead is a document that would fail a basic project-management audit - it tells you an item exists, not whether it's succeeding, slipping, or stalled.
A handful of items are refreshingly specific - the Jordan River Bridge rehabilitation has a signed contract and start date, the polishing wetland construction is described as complete pending commissioning - which only underlines how thin the rest of the reporting is by comparison. If the Municipality can report a construction milestone precisely, it can report the rest precisely too. It's choosing not to.
The Items That Quietly Admit Trouble
Buried in the status column are several items that deserve much clearer public explanation:
The SCADA system for the sewer treatment plant is delayed and may be pushed to a future fiscal year entirely.
The Water Supply Repair at the Public Works building - flagged in this same document as an OH&S compliance issue - is also delayed.
The By-Law Enforcement/Public Works Supervisor succession planning item has been pushed to 2027/28, with funding reallocated elsewhere due to extended staff leave - a staffing gap disclosed in passing, in a spreadsheet cell, with no further explanation.
The amalgamation feasibility review - the single biggest structural decision facing the Municipality - is reported as "awaiting a response" from the provincial regulator, with no timeline for when residents might see the findings.
None of these is necessarily damning on its own. What's damning is the format: a resident has to comb through a 7-page infographic PDF line by line to learn that core services - water supply, sewer monitoring, staffing succession - are behind schedule. There's no summary, no dashboard, no plain-language "here's what's off track and why," despite that being exactly what governance pillar 5.2 promises: publicly reporting on progress to build accountability and trust.
Still No Ranked Priorities
The Strategic Plan explicitly refuses to rank its five pillars, making it impossible for residents to name the Municipality’s top priorities for the next four years. This update does nothing to fix that. If anything, it compounds the problem. With 100-plus action items spread flat across five pillars and no weighting, there is no way to tell whether the Municipality considers the Fire Services needs assessment more urgent than IT tablet procurement. Everything is “ongoing,” “on target,” and equally important - which functionally means nothing is prioritized at all.
The Pattern Holds
This update is not an isolated problem. It fits a pattern:
The consultation drew 43 in-person participants and roughly 20–26 online responses - under 1% participation - with no way to verify respondents were even residents.
The adoption happened after 45 minutes of consultants reading the document aloud and just over 12 minutes of actual Council debate, with public comment blocked.
This update - the first real test of whether that flawed process nonetheless produced accountable follow-through - instead delivers a report where "ongoing" substitutes for evidence, where delays to core infrastructure are disclosed in passing, and where the thread back to what residents actually asked for has vanished entirely.
We were promised a plan reflecting community priorities and a governance pillar built on public reporting that builds “accountability and trust.” Eight months in, residents have a marketing-tagged spreadsheet that tells them very little about whether their Municipality is delivering - and nothing about whether their input mattered in the first place.