Three things, done properly
Not a wish list. Three fundamentals a councillor can actually affect, and how I’d work on each.
Stabilize the basics
A town runs on its people. Over the past few years Cochrane has lost a lot of experienced staff, and every departure costs us more than a line on a budget. It costs us the knowledge that took years to build, the momentum on projects already under way, and the money it takes to recruit and retrain. That knowledge takes years to replace, if it gets replaced at all.
This isn’t about any one person, and it isn’t about pointing fingers. It’s about the conditions that make good people want to stay. Municipal work is demanding and rarely thanked. What keeps skilled staff in place is stable leadership, clear direction, and the sense that council has their back rather than second-guessing every file.
The clearest measure of that is the chair at the top of the administration. Council appointed a CAO in August 2022. By July 2023 the CAO was absent, and council passed a resolution handing the Mayor day-to-day administrative direction of the town and naming the Director of Protective Services as Interim Operational Lead. Council’s own words in that resolution describe an operation “currently without structure or leadership.” In November 2024 the town contracted senior management out to a consulting firm. A General Manager and Deputy CAO started that December, became Interim CAO in April 2025, and that interim appointment was repealed in January 2026 when the current CAO took over.
Since 2022 the top job has changed hands or changed shape four times. Every one of those transitions costs the same things. Files already in motion stall while someone new comes up to speed. Relationships with the province, with funding partners, and with staff restart from zero. And each new arrival spends months learning a town they did not grow up in. Turnover at the top sets the tone for turnover everywhere below it.
- By-Law 1512-2022, appointment of a CAO
- Resolution 379-2023, Interim Operational Lead
- July 11, 2023 council minutes
- By-Law 1613-2024, PMC Consulting for GM/Deputy CAO services
- By-Law 1621-2024, appointment of a GM/Deputy CAO
- By-Law 2025-53, appointment of an Interim CAO
- Jan 13, 2026 agenda, By-Law 2026-04 on p.143
Before Cochrane takes on anything ambitious, it has to be a place where good people want to work and stay. That means a council that sets direction and then lets professional staff do their jobs; respectful working relationships as the default, not the exception; and turnover treated as the warning sign it is, not shrugged off as normal. If we don’t get this part right, I don’t think the rest of it holds together.
The clearest early test is retention itself. I’ll be pushing for turnover and staffing to be reported to council and the public in plain terms, under the publishing standard set out in Pillar 02.
Show the work
Almost everything a resident might want to know about this town already exists in writing. The condition of the roads is assessed and reported, because Ontario requires it. The tax rate is set by by-law every year. The debt is tracked, totalled, and filed with the province. Somebody at the town could tell you all of it tomorrow.
So the gap isn’t information. It’s publication. Nothing anywhere requires this material to be put in front of the people who paid for it, which means it gets decided one file at a time, usually by default, usually as an appendix to something else. That isn’t secrecy. It’s just nobody having made the decision.
This pillar is that decision, made once and applied across the board. Here is where the main pieces stand today, and what I’ve written down about each.
| Information the town holds | Where you can read it today | What I’ve written |
|---|---|---|
| Road and infrastructure condition | A summary chart in a budget appendix. Nothing street by street. | A road condition and capital work registry |
| The residential tax rate, year by year | In each year’s by-law, one year at a time. | A public tax history and a bill calculator |
| Debt outstanding, and the plan to repay it | Filed with the province. Pieces of it inside agenda packages. | Publish the repayment plans |
| The Growth CIP annual review | The plan says a report should be written. It doesn’t say where you’d read it. | Publish the annual review |
| Staffing levels and turnover | Not published. | Workforce reporting. In progress. |
None of that needs a new study, a consultant, or a line in the budget. Every row is information the town already produces. The only thing missing is a rule saying it gets published.
That rule is the thing I would actually be voting for, and it is short enough to write out here.
The publishing standard
Anything the town already produces about how it spends money or looks after what it owns should meet four tests:
- It goes out on a fixed date every year, and it says when it was last updated.
- It is written so a resident without technical training can read it.
- It links to the source document, so anyone can check the town’s work, or mine.
- Nobody has to file a freedom-of-information request to get it.
Applied once, that is four documents. Applied as a standard, it also covers the files nobody has thought of yet, which is the reason to write it as a standard instead of four separate motions. It protects the town as much as the resident: when the record is public and current, a decision is easier to defend and harder to second-guess later.
And this is the part where I could use help. The list above is what I built from reading council agendas, which means it reflects whatever I happened to go looking for. If you have ever tried to find something out about this town and given up, tell me what it was. That would be a better list than mine.
Four of the five are written and posted, and all of them are open for comment: the road registry, the tax history and bill calculator, the debt repayment plans, and the Growth CIP review. Tell me what you’d change at dan4cochrane@gmail.com.
Restore financial stewardship
Good financial stewardship isn’t complicated, but it takes discipline. It means budgets passed on time, so the town isn’t spending months of the year operating without a plan. It means debt taken on only with a clear, written plan to pay it back. And it means special levies that end when we said they would end, not quietly rolled forward once the original reason has been forgotten.
That first one is not abstract. Here is when Cochrane actually adopted its operating and capital budgets:
- 2023 Adopted March 28 By-Law 1539-2023
- 2024 Approved May 29 By-Law 1583-2024
- 2025 Adopted June 10 By-Law 2025-74
- 2026 Adopted April 14 By-Law 2026-35, agenda p. 61
The 2026 budget came in earlier than the two before it, which is progress, though still later in the year than 2023. And the pattern is still a town spending the first third of the year, sometimes the first half, operating on last year’s plan.
The bill for that arrives in the construction season. The 2025 road paving program, a contract worth about $4.87 million, was not awarded until August 12, 2025, and the agreement required the asphalt work to be finished by October 15. Staff had already told council that summer that gravel roads were being selected while waiting for budget approval. By January, several segments of that paving program had been pushed into 2026. In Northern Ontario you do not get those weeks back.
The right time to price next summer’s paving is the fall or winter before, when contractors are building their season and we are one of the first calls, not in July when the crews are already committed and the quotes reflect it. On-time budgets are not a bookkeeping preference. They are the difference between a road getting paved this year and the same road getting paved next year, for more money.
This isn’t only my reading of the record. In his August 2026 video address, the outgoing Mayor described the same pattern in his own words: council approving critical road work in multiple budgets, taxing residents for that work, the work not getting done, and the same projects coming back in the next budget, year after year with no adjustment to correct it. In the same address he described $1.2 million in revenue from an evacuation initiative going unclaimed for more than a year because the claim was never issued, and supplier bills going unpaid for over a year. I have no reason to doubt any of it, and I am not going to pretend it is a small thing. When the outgoing Mayor and I agree that residents were taxed for work that did not get done, the question is no longer whether the problem is real.
His position is that the hardest part is behind us and that it is now a matter of time and patience. That may well turn out to be true. But time and patience are not something a resident can check. The reason any of this is reaching the public through a video in the final months of a term, rather than in the year it happened, is that nothing required it to be written down anywhere a resident would look. That is the gap, and it is the same gap in every row of the table in Pillar 02. A road registry that lists what was budgeted, what was awarded, and what actually got built would have shown each of those road years as it happened. Not as an accusation, just as a record.
It also means reporting that a regular person can follow. You shouldn’t need to be an accountant, or file a freedom-of-information request, to find out where your tax dollars went.
None of this is glamorous, and none of it makes for a flashy announcement. I’d rather be judged on whether the budget passed in February than on anything I announced. Careful stewardship is the difference between a town that can absorb a bad year and one that can’t. It’s the kind of work I’ve spent twenty years doing, and I’m comfortable being held to it.
The first of these is written and posted: publish the debt repayment plans. Before the town borrows, show the plan to pay it back; once a year, show what we owe and when it ends. Sunset dates on special levies will follow on the Proposals page.