To the Editor,
Re: City expanding communications department, May 17.
With 23 years experience on Nanaimo council, 15 as mayor, it is safe to assume I am one of the two or three people most knowledgeable of the true need for a City of Nanaimo communications officer, let alone a whole department.
There is absolutely zero need for such a disgusting waste of taxpayers’ money. Taxpayers are fed up with wasting money on useless bureaucratic positions. PR flacks are the worst. People want answers from the people in charge (elected or appointed), not some PR person. Any publicly funded body that has a PR or communications officer is wasting our money. Any elected person or body needing a communications officer is either incompetent, lazy, hiding something, or worse.
Any council member voting for this nonsense has no sensitivity to poor economics and the taxpayers’ anguish over waste in government.
Gary KorpanNanaimo
To the Editor,
Re: City expanding communications department, May 17.
Coun. Brennan is the spin-doctor of spinning. The somehow-veteran councillor has kicked up this latest firestorm in the media; muttering she did not ask for a new communications consultant to be hired for the city. OK, fine, but it is well within the city manager’s duties and budget to hire such a person, period.
The bigger hypocrisy here; Brennan fails to mention she was the politician, who at the council table four years ago, dropped the motion to set up the city communications department, which is currently costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It is far cheaper to hire a professional ex-media type on a part-time, hourly, case-by-case basis to provide communications skills and guidance on dealing with the media rather than paying for a full-blown, full-time public relations department.
Maybe this whole fuss is about one person not liking another and wanting to control the messengers for their own political purposes?
K.T. ShawNanaimo