Aurora’s Mayor Marakas sends out his annual cookie-cutter Happy New Year message overflowing with self congratulations and back patting that we have come to expect from him.
It is no surprise that Mrakas cherry picks the positives while completely failing to address the equal amount of turds. No town, its politicians nor its bureaucrats can learn from their mistakes until they acknowledges and take ownership for them publicly.
This is something the town of Aurora is exceptionally adverse to doing under the leadership of the past 3 mayors. There is this perpetual mindset that everything that “gets done” must be seen as perfect and to say otherwise dispels the laughable Pleasantville image that politicians try to construct of our town.
This very inaction actually contravenes the town’s Accountability and Transparency Policy laid out in By-law Number 5690-15. Check out Page – 3, subsection 4 : Accountability and Transparency Principles and Practices.
There were too many actions or inactions in 2020 to try to sweep under the rug like Marakas is attempting to do. So in an attempt to preserve the public trust, in compliance with the town’s policy I’ve awarded the best of the worst in this 2020 Town of Aurora Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Mediocrity
Information Technology
1st Place : Sharepoint
2nd Place: Unable or unwilling to leverage GIS data to their website
3rd Place: Mismanagement of the town’s “where’s my plow” app
Transparency & Openness
1st Place : purged agendas
2nd Place : Meeting minutes and Video curiously absent from the town’s website without any explanation
Infrastructure
1st Place : Unable to operate a simple led sign board
2nd Place : Clueless as to how to divert pet waste
3rd Place : Sole Sourced $1000 a piece bland and uninspiring lamp post snowflakes, with no BIA involvement or investment
Communications & Community Engagement
1st Place : Unable to roll out the town’s website without issues, the second time in 5 years
2nd Place : Placespeak platform inevitable failure and collapse
3rd Place : Anti-social media posts encouraging residents to contravene the Ontario Trails Council trail etiquette during a pandemicand using resources to dispense links to crosswords and Disney land
Business Improvement
1st Place: A BIA that failed to act during the pandemic, and pretty much at everything since its formation
2nd Place: The ineptitude of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce which fails to represent more than 26% of local businesses yet pretends they speak for all of them
3rd Place : Amateur roll-out of a microsite for business
Public Planning
1st Place : Can’t “work together” with developers to meet expectations for parking in development applications
Traffic Safety
1st -Place : Yonge & Wellington got a rainbow flag makeover but nothing to address traffic safety
Selective Enforcement
1st Place : no consistency in enforcement of noise bylaws
2nd Place : Unwilling to police it’s corporate identity
You did all of these in 2020 Town of Aurora.
Own them as your bylaw requires.
And while you scramble to spin and deflect the rest of us have to ask ourselves if the town of Aurora is providing an “exceptional quality of life for all” or just for the select few on its payroll.
Watts Trending 