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THE CONVERSATION: Accursi looks to lead

The third and last contender to enter Pelham's mayoral race has the most municipal experience O n July 17, Councillor Gary Accursi jumped into Pelham’s mayoral race, joining retired federal civil servant Carla Baxter, and retired dairy farmer and for
Councillor Gary Accursi, at Lookout Point Country Club, during his 2018 campaign for Pelham mayor. DAVE BURKET

The third and last contender to enter Pelham's mayoral race has the most municipal experience

On July 17, Councillor Gary Accursi jumped into Pelham’s mayoral race, joining retired federal civil servant Carla Baxter, and retired dairy farmer and former Ward 1 Councillor Marvin Junkin. A retired dentist and occasional property developer, Accursi, who is 69, has served two terms on council representing Ward 2. He has strongly championed the civic and commercial development of Town-owned lands in what has become commonly referred to during the last council term as East Fonthill.

According to the news release announcing his candidacy, Accursi intends to spearhead “a transparent and experienced leadership style” for the next term of council. Two additional priorities are ensuring the success of the new Meridian Community Centre, as well as to “work with seniors to find ways to assist in their ability to continue to live in Pelham.”

Born in Welland, Accursi and his wife, Mall, have lived in Pelham for 45 years. His volunteer experience over the years includes Chair of his Church Board, Chair of Big Brothers of Welland County, Member of Pelham Minor Baseball Board, Coaching positions in hockey and lacrosse, and being one of the founding members of Pelham Business Association.

We met in an empty dining room before opening hours last Thursday morning at Lookout Point Country Club, the peaks of Toronto’s downtown skyline just visible through picture windows.

The following has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

BURKET: Given what a lot of people see as a large turnover of staff at Town Hall, and have raised questions as to why there is a sort of churning effect, people coming and going, would you as mayor support rescinding the nondisclosure agreements that ex-employees have signed, and allow them to speak to their experience working for the Town of Pelham?

ACCURSI: I would have to say no to that. Those are contractual obligations that the community has made with the individuals that have left for whatever reason. And it's a contract between them and the community. And I think to take a rescinding position would jeopardize the Town and the corporation. I don't think that's appropriate.

Maybe a slight rephrasing then. A contract is only as good as its enforcement. You could allow ex-employees to speak freely by not enforcing the nondisclosure element. We're not talking about a financial transaction here. We're not talking about them giving money back or anything like that. We're just talking about allowing them to speak freely about their experiences.

I'm going to say that a contract is only as good as the people that sign that contract. And so when you enter into a contract, you enter into it with good faith and with the expectation that both parties would abide by the contract. That to me is what makes a contract more so than what you stated.

Contracts can also be modified by subsequent contracts. An agreement can be modified by a subsequent agreement. So basically what we're asking is would you be in favor of an agreement that says, "The previous agreement is null and void"?

I guess we would have to look at that. If we were approached by an individual that was involved with that, we'd have to sit down with our legal counsels, seek legal advice. Again, all of this goes around protecting the individual and the corporation. And when you enter into an agreement of nondisclosure, I would say ten times out of ten, that's really what the initiative is about.

“Initiative” meaning?

Initiative of entering into that contract either because the individual involved wants to have a nondisclosure or the corporation wants to have a nondisclosure because either party may feel there's liability and a jeopardy there. So those are requested when we go through these sort of things by one or both parties because there's a feeling that there's jeopardy there.

I guess that's exactly the point. Do you understand how people are asking themselves why there is such a turnover at Town Hall, and why would the Town be so concerned about liability and jeopardy?

Well, I do understand it to a degree, and it's unfortunate that these are one of the circumstances where we are bound— that we cannot disclose that for personal privacy or because it's an HR issue that we're bound to by the municipal act. So I understand the frustration. People want to know, but you have to understand that we live within walking distance of 11 other municipalities. So a great deal of cannibalism goes on within the municipal world. A community down the street may offer an employee $1,000 more a month, and better benefits, and an opportunity to move from being deputy whatever to director of. It's a move up and they make more money. They move on. Sometimes relationships between the municipality and the employee break down for whatever reason and they move on. That happens in the business world all the time. And we wouldn't be having this conversation if it was in the business world because both parties would say, "I have a contractual obligation not to disclose. We're moving on and end of story." But because it's a municipal world, people kind of think there's something coarse going on behind the scenes.

Well, because it's a municipal world, people's taxes are paying for it. I think that's the key difference.

That's true but I think people's taxes pay for legal issues too. And if you jeopardize the cooperation, would you like to see us having to spend hundreds of thousand dollars defending the fact that we incorrectly released information? If you left a job for whatever reason and you had a contract that says, "You're not going to disclose," you wouldn't want us going out here and disclosing. It's the same. We wouldn't discuss HR issues in an open forum. Because if you were the person that we were discussing, you wouldn't feel very happy about that. I wouldn't. And so people have to personalize the thing a little bit more than just say, "Oh, this is this great, big, bad corporation trying to keep information away from us." That's not the case. It really, sincerely is not the case.

Speaking of personnel issues, I've had a good handful of people come up so far, and this is unsolicited, saying that whoever pledges to fire [Town CAO] Darren Ottaway on Day One gets their vote. That's an HR issue, isn't it?

It is.

Can you respond in any way to that?

I cannot.

What level of confidence do you have in your CAO?

Darren has done a good job here in terms of being a visionary and helping us plan, I think, some outstanding projects. Moving forward, we'll have to see where it goes.

Do you see him staying on after October?

I don't think I can answer that question. I don't know. I don't know what his will is. I don't know what the new council's will is. We'll have to see how that plays out. It's not a mayoral decision. It's a council decision.

Sure. But the mayor is the leader of council.

The mayor is leader of council but we don't live in a strong mayor municipality. Most municipalities, we don't have a strong mayor system. The mayor is a member of council, has one vote on council, has the same say as every single council member. So I think what the mayor can do is try to bring unity and cohesiveness on and provide as much information to council, and ensure that the flow of information to council is thorough and comprehensive, and then whatever the decision of council is, to make sure that this message gets out to the public.

That might come as a bit of a surprise to Mayor Augustyn. If you read his blog, certainly it's easy to infer from the way he writes that his vision for East Fonthill and for Pelham over the last 12 years is what's been the primary driver of growth and the changes that we've seen. That would sound like a pretty strong mayor.

I don't read his blog so I really don't know what he puts out there. I can tell you that what you see going on in East Fonthill is the result of work by all members of council, by votes of all members of council, with input and assistance from our professional staff and our consultants that have been brought forward. The mayor is one vote—how he portrays it in public, I don't know. I don't read the blog. I know at least when we sit down and work together as a council, he is part of council and he very much involves himself in the discussion and the voting, and what moves forward is what all of council supports in a majority.

So you would characterize his involvement or influence over the last 12 years as no more than one-sixth or one-seventh of a group effort?

I would say that's fair. I'd say that's fair.

Given the questions that came up over East Fonthill, particularly the transaction with Fonthill Gardens—the three acre, million dollars an acre, more or less, purchase price—various audits were conducted and a public meeting was held at E. L. Crossley last November. A promise was made by council that a follow-up meeting would occur where residents could come in and ask whatever remaining questions there were to be asked. And council reneged on that a few weeks later. Did you support that decision?

Well, more than that. I'll wear this because I want to be accurate. I brought the motion forward to move on. I felt that this council had done everything possible to bring forward as much information as they could. And if the public had taken the time to read the report, understand the report, that— how many times can you ask the same question in different ways and expect a different answer? And, at that point, I felt that we needed to move on. We had done our best to get information out there. We had the Evening of the Experts, where we let people ask the questions of our experts, not us. None of us sat on that panel. We had undertaken the review. We had agreed to release part of the review that was done by KPMG. We opened the forum for emails directly to KPMG. None of us saw those questions. And they were answered by KPMG verbally, but more importantly, in a written form. I felt we needed to move on. We had spent almost a year and a half battling over this. There was work that needed to be done. And I know this is going to be portrayed in the wrong way—it's like a child continually asking you the same question or badgering you to the point where you finally throw up your hands and say, "Okay. You're right. Go do what you want to do." And I just felt we were at that point. We needed to just move on. So I brought forward the motion. We had a good debate about it. And we amended the motion to allow a citizen group to meet with staff to ask the questions that they felt still were lingering around that report. And that meeting was held. I did not sit on that meeting. It was strictly a staff and public meeting. I don't know where that went other than that.

As I recall, and I don't have the details at hand here, I think the group that sat down and met with staff was not particularly satisfied. And their requests for a follow-up meeting were never answered or fulfilled.

Right.

In retrospect, do you think that was a good decision? I mean, given the fury that it provoked among residents that council was seeming to retreat behind closed doors and refusing to answer questions. What would the harm have been in one last meeting? You could have billed it as, "This is it, folks. The Last Meeting."

This is it, folks. Yeah. I still stand by my position. I think we had reached that point where, "This is it, folks." I think we had done our best to answer it. We've had two of the top accounting firms in Canada look at our books. They basically answered the questions.

Critics would say, however, that these auditing firms were hired by the Town and given a very specific and narrow remit.

Well, let's take the folks that audit our books on an annualized basis. Yeah, of course they're in the contract. But they're independent from the Town. They come in and do what they have to do, right? So you could point— you could use that same argument against the beloved Region, you could use that against any municipal government in Ontario because that's the way the system works.

We now have a gorgeous, new community center. I think the reviews were pretty much uniformly positive. There were some remarks about the walking track being a bit too narrow, people were going to bump into each other, but generally speaking, pretty positive reviews. We did get a letter to the editor that's going to run this week wondering whether the parking is sufficient, and whether there was initially going to be parking on the side of the building that's facing Highway 20. Is there enough parking, do you think, for the capacity crowds that are expected?

The advice that we've had from staff is that that parking meets the requirements of the building. Of course, the proof is always going to be in the pudding. As more Town-owned land surrounding the community center gets sold off and developed, the parking— because of our approach to how we want that land laid out and developed, where we have street-facing properties so the building's pushed up as close to the street as possible—the plan is to isolate parking in the back. The approach is that we would get a shared parking agreement between them and us so when the businesses are open and it's quiet in the community center, they could use the community center lot, but when the businesses are closed, we'd be able to use their parking lot for overflow parking and what have you. So that's a very efficient way to use the land without taking great swaths of land that are very valuable, paving them over, and most of the time they sit there doing nothing. It ties in with new urbanism where you do shared access, you do shared parking, and you isolate the parking away from the street. Of course, it hasn't unfolded completely yet, but part of our agreement with the medical center incorporated that as a matter of fact.

You're the largest individual donor, as far as I'm aware, to the community center. $300,000 for the multi-purpose room. For the most part, that's perceived as being very generous. On the other hand, there are some critics who have said, "Well, this is a Fonthill or Pelham developer.” Meaning, you and your wife owning property in downtown, elsewhere in the area, kind of greasing the bureaucracy a little bit to move things forward when you need permits or inspections or whatever. How do you respond to that?

Well, people can see evil in whatever they want to see evil in. I think my wife and I were very clear on why we gave our money. First, we very much supported the project, so we put our money where our mouth is. Second, we raised five children in this community. We appreciated the volunteers that raised the money for the old arena and had the foresight to put that up and allowed our children to play there. At that time I was just starting my career and my wife was a stay-at-home mom. We didn't have much. I think we gave like a hundred bucks.

This would have been 1974, '75, in there.

Yeah. When they came knocking on our door and we said, "Man, we just had our first child," so we did what we could. And so we've always felt that the volunteers that help out in the hockey, and do the coaching, and run all of our community programs give of their time freely and generously. And we felt like we're in a financial position where we could contribute to the project, and so we gave our money. We put our money where our mouth is. We felt we were paying back and paying forward. If we could do something to provide for our community of the future and our kids of the future, we wanted to do that. I have nine grandchildren that are coming up. They'll use it intermittently because they live all around the area, but for anyone to imply that I was trying to grease the wheels of the bureaucracy, they really don't understand how it works because at the time we did it, there were some things in the Voice that sort of pointed out that my wife's corporation owns a piece of property on Port Robinson Road and that we were going through the process. Nobody ever pointed out the fact that anytime that issue came before council, Accursi left the room. Accursi never interfaced with staff. [Editor’s note: In fact, in the newspaper’s April 18 2018 issue, in a story headlined “Pelham Town Council discusses development of arena site,” the immediately following subheadline read, “Accursi recuses himself as wife’s project debated.”] Accursi hired Upper Canada Consultants to act as their agents and deal with staff on any of the issues. Was I kept informed of what was going on in the process? Of course I was. Did I ever go to staff and say, "Move this sucker along. What the heck's going on?" Absolutely not. I would never risk my credibility, my honesty that I've worked so hard to protect all my years of my professional career. So people can throw stones. They can say whatever they want. They don't know who they're talking about.

In your news release, you mentioned stability. It seems to be a pretty strong theme of your platform. Does that imply that the current council has somehow been unstable or that the situation right now is unstable?

No. What I'm trying to express there, and I'll roll it out further as time goes on, is that we have invested heavily in our community, particularly East Fonthill, in infrastructure, and we did it for a purpose. We did it to stimulate the growth there, to attract investment in our community. I think it has— the results have shown that it was a good investment. Let's take a business in the private sector. They look at what's out there, and they see an opportunity to enter into a marketplace and take advantage of an opportunity. But it means that they have to invest in their infrastructure, in their plants, in their people, in order to tool up and get to the point where they can take advantage of that opportunity. So they take the cash that they have. They go out and they borrow dollars and they invest into their business. All of those things that will allow them to take advantage of that opportunity. That's what the Town has done. At some point in time, the business says, "Okay. We've done all of that heavy duty investment. All the heavy lifting. It's time now for us to start going out and taking advantage, putting our product into the stratosphere and taking advantage of the opportunity we thought existed out there and reap the benefits so that we can replenish and pay down debt and get stronger so that the next time that opportunity appears, we can be in a position to take advantage of it. So my view for the next four years is that— and again, I'm one voice on council, but I will be presenting this position if I'm elected to whatever council is elected— that we need to move forward and take advantage of the investment that we've made. We know our tax base is going to grow very significantly over the next number of years. Let's use that growth to replenish the reserves. Let's use that growth to pay down our debt. And as we do so the community will move to a stronger, more sustainable place. And that will involve council bringing forward policies. That will involve staff implementing those policies in an organized fashion. So that's what I mean by that. I will be flushing out. I have some ideas around that and I'll be trying to flush that out as I move forward in my campaign.

Is it fair to characterize the Town as essentially being cash-poor right now?

I would say that you could characterize the Town as being cash-poor and asset-rich. And we really knew that we would go through a phase of that in our projections. We knew that there would be a period of time where we had to be very cognizant of that. And quite frankly, it's rolling out the way we thought it was going to roll out. And when we did our projections— in fact, we really did not take into consideration our growth and our tax base because that was sort of unpredictable.

But doesn't this remain unpredictable? I mean, the real-estate market now, it's not exactly tanked, but it's certainly plateaued.

But we have a buffer in our plan, because of the fact that all of the development you see already currently in the ground, we did not include that. We had an idea of where that was going to go, but we didn't include it in our projections. So we already have that buffer in. And even if the market does slow down, we're still going to experience— I think the last projection I saw is, what's in the ground now will receive a minimum of about $1 million a year in tax revenue increase.

By what point?

I think by the end of 2018, '19, in there. I mean, it'll all depend on how [the provincial tax assessment authority] goes in and assesses, and all of that sort of stuff. But—

This is an extra million dollars a year derived just from property taxes?

Correct.

How many years do you see it taking for the Town to get back to roughly the same financial stability or footing that it had before East Fonthill's construction projects began?

I think we can go a long way within the next four-year mandate. Will we be exactly there? Difficult to say. We will have some longer-term debt, for sure. There's no question about it. And again, it will depend on how rapidly the build-out takes place, and how rapidly East Fenwick comes on board. Once those two developments come on board, really, what we're left with is redevelopment and infill, because those are the last really major sites, I think the projections were that we wouldn’t really get the build-out for 15 to 20 years. I think it's probably happening faster than that, from what we see. But it's cyclical. Real estate goes in bursts. It goes crazy for a period of time and then it slows down, and a lot will be dependent upon the interest rates and all that. Fortunately, our debt's all locked in at— it was a very unique period of time for the Town to invest. We had probably the lowest interest rates we've seen in a century. It was a factor that allowed us to undertake the projects that we've undertaken.

Given that there was no upper-tier financial support?

Correct. Absolutely correct.

And why was that? What caused the delay in getting the project going when there were grants available?

I really don't know because I wasn't on council at that time. I can say when we went back and we reviewed all of the documentation and read through all the reports, they never, ever got to the stage where they created a business plan. Never. They looked at all the demographics. They made up the wish list. They had consultants look at this, that, and the other. They looked at different sites. No one ever sat down and said, "You know what? Before we move this forward, we have to put together a business case, right?" They never got to the point where they even had a draft design. And as you probably know, when you're dealing with upper-tier governments, you have to be shovel-ready in order to even be considered for grant money. They never got to that point. Not even close. So when this council undertook this project we said, "You know what? This thing has been spinning in the air for 20 years. Let's look how can we finance this thing. Let's engage a consultant.” There were rumors around that there might be some money coming. Then when it became apparent that it wasn't going to happen, we were already well along the way in developing the business plan, and it became obvious that we had a way to do this without having a heavy-duty impact on the tax base.

Jumping ahead a little bit. Spring 2016, the final vote was taken to authorize the building the community centre. Councilors Junkin and Papp voted against the second ice pad.

Yes, they did. Yep.

Looking back, and considering public comments that have come up since, do you think that the second pad was necessary? Would you have rather seen, say, an Olympic-sized swimming pool in there?

No. You know what? We looked at that, and the second iteration of the report that was done by Leisure Plan International indicated that by 2018, we would have reached that falling-off point to 70 or 75 percent uptake. So my decision was based on the fact that if we had gotten into the ground, 2016, '17, building completion by 2018, and now all of a sudden we've hit the threshold where we should have had the second pad anyway, now we've got to re-marshal, we're going to pay more. Whereas if you get all of the trades on-site, you're doing it all at once. Much more efficient build, much less costly. And in fact, the numbers have shaken out exactly that. In fact, exceeded that. Our second pad is currently, for prime-time hours, booked 90% of the time. We have a significant interest in summer utilization of the pad. The thoughts are that we'll keep ice in that second pad for the summer. So that now we can run lacrosse, we can run hockey, we can run figure skating, all sorts of things. So in retrospect, it was a good decision. I understand the trepidation of the two councilors that voted against it, but I think if you look back at the Leisure Plan study and you considered it from an efficiency standpoint in terms of build and cost, we did the right thing. Because they projected that by 2018 we'd be hitting the 70% uptake threshold, so that's in fact why I voted for a second pad.

Would you favor the addition of a swimming pool at some point?

Well, that's another interesting thing. if you look at the Leisure Plan study again, where they pulled the community facts that they brought back to us, where it would've cost a very significant amount of money to build a pool. It would've cost somewhere in the order of a million dollars. Enclosed pools are a hole in the ground into which you perpetually throw money, because of the chemicals, the humidity, etc. Extremely hard on construction materials, okay? The other factor was that the Town had, a number of years ago, invested, I think it was a half a million dollars, in the current pool that the Y operates in Welland. Leisure Plan, when they brought that information back to us, said that if we put a pool in the community centre, we could, in fact, bankrupt the Y pool, and that the $500,000 that the community had invested there would have been lost. So all of those factors taken into consideration led to the decision that we wouldn't undertake a pool at that point.

Generally speaking, where are you politically? Left, right, center?

I am not a member of a political party. In terms of where would I fall, I would say I'm fiscally conservative, but I'm socially responsible. I think it's important for us to be cognizant of the least fortunate in our community and do what we can to help them. But I think it's also important that we as financial managers or asset managers for our community need to do the best we can do to operate as efficiently as we can with that money and use that money as carefully as we can.

We've heard that you and Marvin Junkin got along pretty well on council. That you often saw eye-to-eye. I think Catherine King is reported to have said something along the lines of your not being twins exactly, but very simpatico. Does that match your recollection of his time on council?

Absolutely. Marvin and I got along very well. In fact, there were several Sundays that Marvin spent the afternoon in my dining room with me helping him understand how the computer programs operate, some of the background reports and all of that sort of thing. So yep, that's absolutely true. I did my best to try and bring Marvin up to speed with what was going on in council and to become part of council.

What was your reaction when he resigned?

Frankly? Devastated. Devastated. I felt that he and I had a good relationship. I felt that, as a council, we worked together. If we found ourselves with problems, the way to deal with them was to sit down, put your heads together, and deal with the problems. Marvin made his decision. It is what it is.

I think we reported that when he resigned, he told us he was frustrated in not being able to convince council to take action related to, first, the depleted reserves, and secondly, a particular personnel issue which I know you can't discuss. Does that at all modify your opinion about his reasons for leaving, or the rationale for his leaving? He got so frustrated that he didn't see any use in remaining on council?

You know what? We all get frustrated on council, dealing with issues. We all go in there with the hope that we can move the bar forward, quicker, faster, more efficiently, in specific directions, and from time to time there is not a single councilor that sits around that horseshoe that does not get frustrated. But having said that, when you take on the roll of councilor and you sign on to a code of ethics, you are duty bound to stay to it, and stick to it, and solve the problem. You don't solve problems by walking away from them and—this is going to come across as if I'm being critical of Marvin. Marvin did what Marvin wanted to do, and what he felt was best for him. And I'm not going to judge that. My approach was entirely different. My approach was to stay in the trenches, and try and work through the issues, and move the community forward.

When you present yourself to the voters, what is the largest advantage you think you bring compared to Carla Baxter or Marvin Junkin as a candidate? What do you have that they don't?

Well, I could tell you what I have. I think I have 45 years of business experience in multiple businesses so I understand finance. I have some background in construction. I ran a construction company for many years. I have some background in planning. I understand planning documents. I think that that's a strength that I have. I've sat on council for eight years. I've been there through thick and thin. I've served the community in many capacities in a volunteer basis. I've lived in the community for 45 years. I've seen it go from a one-stop-sign town through to what it is today. And that's how I will portray myself. I'm not going to run a campaign that's going to slander or attack my competitors. I think that will be up to the public to make a decision who they see as being most qualified and who's going to move the community forward for the next four years. That's democracy.

You mentioned the one-stop-sign town. Was Pelham a better place to live back then?

Different. It was different. It was smaller town. When I first moved into this community, it had just amalgamated, they had just joined all the five little communities. There was a great deal of angst around that. I mean, we used to have two minor baseball leagues—Fenwick minor baseball and Fonthill minor baseball. It's a different community and communities need to move forward. But they need to move forward being cognizant of their past and try and preserve as much of their past as possible. When I moved here, Pelham was very much an agricultural-based community. Fruit farms abounded, we had, I think three canning factories in our community at that point in time. As you well know, all of that has fallen off. Not through nothing that council had any control of, it was the vagaries of the economies, the marketplace. So we had the councils of the past and the councils of the future are going to have to be cognizant of that and move the community forward and make changes that still try to preserve that small town— we hear this, "What is a small town feel?" Neighbors knowing neighbors, and engaging with their neighbors, and feeling safe, and all of those sort of things are important and we need to be aware of them, we need to work very hard to preserve.

One thing council does have control over, if it wishes to exercise that control, is the way things look. By that I mean signs, architecture, lighting. Do you think that the new Food Basics plaza reflects a small town flavour or character? Could that have been designed better?

In my personal opinion, yes. The developer moved, I feel, a long way away from their initial designs and where they wanted to be because of the insistence of council, and our desire to move in a direction towards—again, you'll hear me use the phrase “new urbanism.” Think back to the communities of the past, look at the downtown core, where the buildings are right at the sidewalk, where there's interplay between what's going on in the building and what's happening on the street. And if you look at that plaza you'll see that some of that plaza has been brought close to the street and has tried to have interplay with the street. That was the insistence of the Town. We tried to isolate as much of the parking lot as we could away from the street view. Did we accomplish everything that we had hoped, and is it the best that we can do? No. Have we learned from it? Yes. One of the reasons that our sales there have not moved forward as quickly as we had hoped was because of our insistence on what we want there. We have a vision for that community and we are insisting on our urban design guidelines.

You're speaking of the remaining Town parcels in East Fonthill.

That's correct. We are insisting on how that's going to roll out and what it's going to look like. And with respect to lighting, with respect to structure, all of those things, incorporating, engaging with, or hooking up with our trail system, green space, etc., etc., etc.

How did we end up with two or maybe even three different types of streetlight designs around the community center?

I have noticed. It's an interesting question. I don't have an answer for you.

You speak of shops near sidewalks and interplay between pedestrians and shopkeepers. A lot of shopkeepers on Pelham Street are not particularly pleased that Summerfest disrupts their business for a couple of days each summer, and there was some talk — I don't think official talk but maybe some hopeful talk — about moving Summerfest to the community center grounds at some point. Would you support that?

At this point in time, I would say no. It's a street festival and it would change—

Well, in fairness, it's called “Summerfest,” it's not called “Summerfest Street,” or something.

Right. And I would say that the majority of people like where it's located. There are a few businesses that are unhappy, but the Summerfest committee did its best to try and address that. I think we've had the highest engagement of Pelham businesses in this past year ever. The statistics are being compiled, but I believe that's what was said at the last meeting when we met on Tuesday. We made changes on where we placed the gates, and where we closed the road, and tried to engage with the businesses that had expressed some concerns. We offered free marketing advice to those businesses. Not one took it up. So at some point in time, it's a two-way street. If you try to solve a problem and people don't want to engage and try to solve the problem or work with you to try and solve the problem, we can do what we can do.

What sort of marketing advice, though, would help a business that is shut down and inaccessible to its customers for two and a half days?

For example, we heard that customers couldn't get into their businesses, so we changed the time when we closed the road. We advised them that tell your customers they come up to the gate, that they have an appointment. They'll be allowed through the gate and access. Full access. No problem. One business said, "Well, you're taking away all my parking." It just happens to be a business that always perpetually parks his own truck and takes one of his own spaces directly in front of his own business. We said, "Okay. Fine." The Summerfest committee had plans to isolate a piece of road on College Street that would be designated specifically for those businesses. It was all set up. They were advised of it. They chose to close their businesses on those days. We did everything we could. We offered to engage a professional marketer to come in and sit with all the businesses on the street to show them how you can take advantage of the significant number of people that walk by your business during the course of Summerfest. How could you engage with them? How could you draw them back to your business at times when Summerfest was not operating? That was the second time Summerfest undertook that. Not a single business took that up. Not one.

The Premier showed up this year at Summerfest. Did you have a chance to chat with him at all?

I did not. My view is Summerfest is not a political event. It's an event where the community gets together and celebrates the diversity and has fun. He was invited, I understand, by [MPP] Sam Oosterhoff, and chose to come down. It's awesome that he did. Was there something political there? I don't know. I was busy with doing what I was doing with Summerfest, so I didn't have a chance to even speak with him.

I should ask about the Town’s “How Might We” problem-solving process. We've been pretty reliably told that a lot of staff are not particularly happy about it, especially staff who don’t work in Town Hall. Is that something you would consider changing? What's your feeling about the merits and the expense, I guess, of maintaining the program and its philosophy?

To be very honest with you, I haven't really given that much thought. It's a process that's sort of entrenched right now in terms of how problems are approached. As a matter of fact, I was at a meeting last night with Lookout Ridge community members, with respect to Airbnb. And after a couple of pre-meetings with that community, it was decided to try a How Might We session to see if we could crystallize some of the problems. I will say, in some circumstances, it works extremely well. In other circumstances, I haven't been overly impressed with the results. So I guess I'll have to give that some consideration. But, at this point in time, money's been spent on bringing it into the fold. A lot of our documentation is now built around the whole How Might We plan. So it would be expensive, I think, to get out of it.

Anything you would like to leave readers with? Anything we haven't covered?

I think the best thing that I could say to readers is, it's your town. Democracy works best when people go out and vote. I’d like nothing better than to have a record turnout on election day, and we'll let the chips fall where they may. I think really that's the best message that I could give. Vote for the candidate of your choice, but at least vote. Don't take a position to say I don't care, because you get the government you vote for. If you don't vote, you really have no say.