PLEASE UPGRADE YOUR BROWSER NOW. INTERNET EXPLORER 6 IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED. 
Councillor ordered to pay up!
Posted 1 year ago
Thu, Apr 26th, '12 - 8:49 am
Personal use of a municipal cell phone was the big issue at a meeting of Centre Hastings council last night.
It was a short, but tense, meeting last night in Madoc.
The Centre Hastings Ratepayers Association had detailed breakdowns of council’s municipal cell phone bills from last year.
The records showed councillor Shelby Kramp-Neumann’s monthly bills getting as high as over 400 dollars a month.
Many of the calls were personal.
The Ratepayers wanted her to repay those costs.
Councillor Kramp-Neumann said she didn’t mean to take advantage of a weak cell phone policy, and that council approved the expenditures last year.
She added that she believed the Ratepayers were out to destroy her reputation.
In the end, council voted 4 to 1 to order Kramp-Neumann to pay the money back for those calls that were personal.
For her part, Kramp-Neumann said she’d be checking others’ expenses closely, and that these kinds of discussions weren’t over.
Perhaps Council could set a proper policy. Perhaps the ratepayers assoc. should ask for all council members to make their cell-phone usage public. Picking on one councillor, in my opinion, seems to be a conspiracy against this particular member.What about all other spending that is being done without motions from committees, or council. A lot of these are being ratified by accepting the account vouchers monthly, as were this particular councillor’s cell bills. Where are the monthly reports from the ratepayer’s assoc. council liason. Why ,if this is not a potential conspiracy against one member of council, the concerns of the ratepayer’s assoc. being brought forward by this council appointee?