Opinion: Time for Grimsby 4 to resign

Grimsby residents know who they are.

Mayor Jeff Jordan

Coun. Dorothy Bothwell

Coun. Reg Freake

Coun. Lianne Vardy

These elected officials’ services are clearly redundant and obviously no longer required, so they may as well just pack it in now and save the municipality a few bucks by getting the heck out of Dodge.

Why not?

It is clear their polar opposites – the Grimsby 5 – have everything well in hand.

Between The 5’s control of every key vote town council has taken along with a plethora of painfully minor votes – which still manage to take up a ton of time and energy – there really is no need for serious debate and bitter discord is all too common, so why not do the honourable thing and just step aside and let the inmates run the asylum?

Anyone who has followed any municipal council, nay, anybody of elected officials anywhere, has seen more crazy antics in the just over two years this council has been in place.

With the best of intentions, Grimsby residents opted for near wholesale change with its council, and that needed to happen, but there was no way to know three of those successful candidates would come up lemons and one would evolve from a beacon of light to, well…words are indescribable to sufficiently explain the level of disappointment evident in the community.

This hubbub over a phone call by the mayor after his email, seemingly, was hacked to allow for personal emails to magically appear on the doorstep of Coun. Kevin Ritchie is beyond the pale.

Most would think calling the person at the other end of the emails to see if they had forwarded them on was acting in the best interests of the community. Not The 5.

No, not only did they decide to overstep the findings of the Integrity Commissioner, but they decided – as part of a 9.5 hour council meeting – to rope in every decision they could find from incidents where closed session information had been divulged province – wide and apply sanctions in Grimsby’s case. This, of course after the IC dubbed the matter “trivial”, many times over.

Nope, The 5 know better, so time for The 4 to pack their bags and continue with what they have been doing –running the Town into the ground. M.W.