Collingwood Needs a Communications Director and Plan

Yesterday, the Town of Collingwood sent out an email trying to rationalize the town’s budget and tax increase. That release underscores in so many ways why townhall desperately needs both a person and a plan to oversee and guide its communications. And this is coming from someone who also believes the town should freeze all new hiring and stop building personal empires through staff acquisitions in our municipal bureaucracy.*

As a former editor and writer, and someone who still collects and reads style guides and books on grammar, I was appalled at this release. You can read it here on the town’s user-hostile website, and please do so before you read my critique below.

First, the headline is written in capital letters in bold letters. All-caps is akin to screaming at your reader:

COUNCIL APPROVES SERVICE BASED 2024 MUNICIPAL BUDGET – BALANCING A MODEST TAX RATE INCREASE WHILE PROTECTING SERVICE LEVELS AND INCREASING INVESTMENT IN CORE ASSETS – UPDATED

Just appalling. No headline should be written in all caps, let alone a run-on one like this. Twenty-four words is far too long, and because it’s written in capital letters, it is harder to read than if the correct mix of upper- and lowercase letters is used. The Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition) says:

1. Capitalize the first and last words in titles and subtitles … and capitalize all other major words…
2. Lowercase the articles the, a, and an.
3. Lowercase prepositions, regardless of length, except when they are used adverbially or adjectivally…or when they compose part of a Latin expression used adjectivally or adverbially (De Facto, In Vitro, etc.).
4. Lowercase the common coordinating conjunctions and, but, for, or, and nor.

Practical Typography also notes why all-caps headlines are harder to read:

We read more lowercase text, so as a matter of habit, lowercase is more familiar and thus more legible. Furthermore, cognitive research has suggested that the shapes of lowercase letters—some tall (d h k l), some short (a e n s), some descending (g y p q)—create a varied visual contour that helps our brain recognize words. Capitalization homogenizes these shapes, leaving a rectangular contour.

But wait, there’s more: service-based should be hyphenated. The hyphen between budget and balancing should be a comma (and if you must use a horizontal break it should be an em dash, not a hyphen). It really should have the word “updated” (with a colon) at the start so readers know immediately that the content has been altered from previous forms. Anyone with even a modicum of editorial skill would have broken this into two decks: a headline and a subhead, not one long, difficult-to-parse sentence.

The piece opens:

January 8, 2024
Category: Council, Finance
At the Monday, January 8, 2024, meeting, Council approved the 2024 Operating & Capital budgets focusing on maintaining current service levels, addressing growth pressures, and facing increasing costs.

First: why the category tags? They’re not searchable and have no role to play. They’re merely decorative and superfluous. Second, you have the date twice. Why not replace the second reference with “Tonight” to reduce the verbiage? Third, the ampersand should be “and” because, as CMOS states it, “There are very, very few acceptable uses of & in proper written English.” The main use of an ampersand within text is in logos or when “joining names to indicate a firm or a partnership.” And why are operating and capital capitalized? They should be lowercase (but if they must be capitalized, then for consistency so must Budgets).

I would also suggest a comma after budgets because it now reads like the budgets do the focusing, not the council. Inanimate objects don’t focus.

Next comes the paragraph of rationalization: the town whinging that everything costs more so they need to take more from our pockets and hire more staff, as if taxpayers weren’t burdened with the same inflation. Did the release mention that both staff and council get raises in this budget? Didn’t think so. Council made sure they paid themselves to cover any tax hikes they approved. Careful, they are, to conceal that.

This paragraph reads more like an excuse and to avoid it being seen as merely self-serving should be appended as a footnote, not pushed into readers’ faces at the top. But it’s also weasel-worded: nowhere in that paragraph does it mention that previous councils since 2015 have approved tax hikes to cover rising costs every year. Every year! Nor does it say that the tax hike is largely due to adding more staff to an already overflowing and bloated townhall. Or that the town would have had at least $10 million more in its coffers if a corrupt council hadn’t wasted it pursuing the private vendetta of Brian Saunderson through his wasteful and unnecessary judicial inquiry.**

Collingwood residents will see a 1.67% or $40.71 per year increase for the median assessed Collingwood household, for municipal operating expenses and capital investments. For this year, a blended rate of 1.95% (Municipal, County and School Board) $75.66/year, pending the School Board’s proposed 0% tax rate increase.

Nope. First, tax increases are made only to property owners, not all residents. And they won’t just “see” an increase: they will receive it (see is another weasel word that suggests it won’t have an impact). What’s the “median assessed Collingwood household” valued at? It doesn’t say anywhere, so readers are left in the dark as to what it means to their own property (nor does the town provide an online calculator to estimate your tax increase). And you can bet that your increase will be a lot higher than the lowball median household’s. A lot.

The town used the same, vague, bureaucratese in its release about the 2023 tax hikes without explaining it then, either. Any search for the term on the town’s user-hostile website produces only these two releases, no actual explanation. Just another example of keeping residents in the dark.

The Chicago Manual of Style (which I prefer) recommends that the percent sign be written out in nontechnical content like this release, so 1.95 percent. The Canadian Press Styleguide recommends the same but spells it “per cent.” The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook as well as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style) allow the “%” sign, so the latter usage can be justified if you want to look casual or American. But a town release should look official and formal.

Then we see more of that egregious capitalization: Municipal, County and School Board, when none of them require a capital letter. Bureaucrats love to use caps in their writing because it makes them and their work seem important, but as far as proper grammar and style go, they’re simply wrong. An editor would have fixed this.

A bit further along we read:

Affordable Housing – Council has prioritized affordable housing by continuing with a $350,000 investment to move forward with actioning the recommendations in the Affordable Housing Master Plan.

No, they’re not “continuing.” That risibly-described investment*** is a new budget item. It was approved for inclusion in the budget back in October, but until it got passed, nothing was being continued. Along with raising taxes, council also already raised development charges knowing full well that would make new homes less affordable, so any suggestion the town cares about affordability here is suspect.

Let’s stop with the verb “actioning.” It’s nails-on-a-blackboard awful. We already have an intransitive verb: to act. For a transitive form, we have enact. Act gets made into a noun by the suffix “ion” to become action. There is absolutely no need for the addition of a second suffix to make it into a gerund: actioning. That’s a clumsy verb-noun-verb construction that makes my eyes ache to see. Council or staff can act on something or enact it; they can take action, but they cannot do actioning, not in a nation where we have at least a semblance of respect for the language. An editor would have fixed this.

But what are they allegedly “actioning”? There’s no link to the master plan, so residents have to resort to that awkward, uninformative website search to find out. As I’ve written in the past, council’s affordable housing plan is just virtue-signalling without actually solving anything. So you click the link to go to the actual budget to see what they’re doing with our money and… the final budget document isn’t there. The latest draft version is from November; two months ago. Nor does the town’s page about the plan (last updated in November) explain where the money will go (it isn’t going towards homelessness which the report says to ignore). Once again, the town is being secretive about its spending.****

Apart from hiring yet more staff, Council is also spending your money on more reports and consultants, although the release isn’t clear about that (and, predictably, there are no links to click for more information). For example: Art Centre Feasibility Study ($100,000; but where will the money come from to build it?); a Collaborative Feasibility Study with the Town of Blue Mountains to move toward a Multi-Use Recreation Facility ($125,000; which neither community needs or can afford, but council is still pushing Saunderson’s agenda in this), and a Transportation Master Plan (TMP: $463,000 but since townhall is dedicated to adding more vehicular traffic, more noise, and more pollution to our already busy streets, we know what this will recommend).

Plus taxpayers are on the hook for making the Spit look nice for private developers so they can build their 24-storey millionaire’s waterfront condo tower: Revitalization of the Grain Terminals and the surrounding lands ($500,000). Plus we’re installing the infrastructure for them at the cost of several millions of our dollars, and giving them 85% of Millennium Park for their parking garage. Isn’t this what the Municipal Act refers to as bonusing?

Our council also approved a new website and “engagement portal” for  $128,500, despite having a full-time IT staff of 5.3 people with an annual budget already topping $1 million. While I look forward to a site designed to actually serve the needs of the residents, with proper linkages, a working search tool, and an ergonomic interface, I have to wonder what this department has been doing all these years instead of remaking the existing website.

Community Spaces – Council continues to support investment in Community Spaces…

Community spaces should not be capitalized in the second reference because English, style, grammar, and common sense say not to. Spending money on consultants’ reports isn’t investing, it’s preparation for planning by hiring outsiders to do the work for you. And reports aren’t “community spaces,” either.

Council continues to support moving forward with the revitalization of the grain elevator and Terminals…

Supporting “moving forward” isn’t actually doing anything: it’s like being almost maybe possibly considering to support the chance of debating perhaps doing something in the potential future. And they’ve already agreed to sell the public heritage building to a private developer for an elite condo tower, so who’s doing the moving here?

Doesn’t even one person in town hall have a current style guide to consult before publishing? I’d be happy to provide the town with a list of essential style guides, usage guides, and other recommendations for effective communication.

There’s more to critique (like the reference to the flaccid nine-year-old “Community Based Strategic Plan” which was neither community-based nor strategic and was a wishlist without proper measurables or budgeting rather than a real plan… I was surprised this long-outdated and ineffectual document is still being flogged) but I think the above is enough to explain why I believe the town needs someone with both editorial and grammatical skills to prepare future releases. All of the errors I’ve pointed out are now in the public domain and make the town’s communications look needlessly amateurish.*****

Collingwood deserves better.

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* Local media? All that CollingwoodToday did was reprint the town’s release verbatim: no questions, no investigative reporting, not even an explanation of how the money will be spent. That’s lazy and sloppy, but what we’ve come to expect. It’s sad and demoralizing to see local media become the shills for townhall instead of doing even the basics of journalism. The former Collingwood Connection (Simcoe.com) has nothing at all, and the last council story on that sad, uninformative site is from Dec. 19. I predict it won’t last the year before TorStar shuts it down, too.

** The release notes that the budget includes “Asphalt resurfacing projects of nearly 7KMs of road ($2M); Second Street Bridge Rehabilitation ($1.5M).” Imagine how much more resurfacing of our potholed and crumbling roads we would have had since then if five council members hadn’t voted for Saunderson’s Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (the SVJI). But they preferred our money to go to out-of-town, sole-sourced lawyers, some of whom worked for Saunderson’s former employers, instead. Note that the release doesn’t say which roads will be resurfaced. That would be open and transparent.

*** Another weasel word. An investment is something you expect a return on, “a thing that is worth buying because it may be profitable or useful in the future.” This is just paying more for staff to do the work they are already paid to do.

**** You can find some of it here: most of the money, it seems, goes to pay for staff to do their jobs (which begs the question: why do we have to pay more for staff to do what they already receive a good salary for?). None of it actually goes towards building housing, towards finding anyone affordable homes or rental properties. And the master plan makes it clear that Collingwood should ignore low-income earners. So, no council isn’t “actioning” anything: they’re just spending your money but gaslighting you about the reason.

***** I’m sure there are plenty of out-of-work Metroland editors and reporters in the area who could be hired or contracted to do the job.