injusticebusters 2005 > > Mayor Don Atchison:

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Mayor Don Atchison

Atchison's personal pothole

Gerry Klein, The StarPhoenix, March 30, 2005

With slightly more than a year to go before he has to face the voters, Mayor Don Atchison will have to spend the next couple of weeks reconciling reality to the fictitious world of politics.

By most accounts, Atchison's tenure in the mayor's office has been a success. Part of that success stems from the relatively low expectations people had when he took office. That cynicism wasn't a reflection of Atchison so much as it was a general sense of malaise, evidenced by the turfing of longtime mayor Henry Dayday in the 2000 election and the dissatisfaction that caused Dayday's successor, Jim Maddin, to rank fourth in a field of six in 2003.

And in the days immediately after being sworn in, Atchison hit the national stage with a short-lived policy to require formal dress for anyone want-ing to visit the mayor's office. It was a political blunder that caused him to be voted Canada's craziest mayor -- a nickname that sticks to him to this day.

A couple of weeks ago, when the Globe and Mail reported on Saskatoon being one of the few cities able to maintain Standard & Poor's Corp.'s highest credit rating, Atchison's status as the country's craziest mayor led off the story.

This is patently unfair to a mayor who has brought more decorum to council meetings (although it took a while before he would use the gavel to control rowdy gallery observers) and who has clearly taken a lead in getting things moving in Saskatoon.

But the troubles Atchison will face during the next few weeks as council goes over this year's operating budget are of his own making.

When he was vying for the job, Atchison stooped to the basest of politics. He challenged Maddin's control over public spending and accused the former mayor of allowing Saskatoon to become a contender as crime capital in Canada by changing the police service, opening ineffective store-front detachments and giving civilians too much control over the police commission.

Atchison also pulled out that most cynical of political tools, promising a tax freeze in his first year as mayor.

It is one thing for an outsider who has never been through the budget process to predict he will freeze taxes, but Atchison began his career on council in the wake of an ugly, 101/2-week strike precipitated by the previous council's determination to freeze taxes without allowing the civic administration to cut any of the nearly 200 programs it was running.

The only way to keep taxes from increasing was to reduce employees' take-home pay every year, forcing them to absorb the cost of inflation that was hitting the city.

The first priority for council in 1995, Atchison's first year as a councillor, was to repair the damage done to labour relations. Since then city hall has maintained peace by allowing at least a cost-of-living increase for its workers (something that was built into last-year's budget -- the one Atchison promised to freeze -- and was manifest as recently as last week when council agreed to an average 2.17 per cent annual increase in wages for transit staff).

Last year's budget increase for the city portion of our property tax averaged between three and four per cent. This year things look just as grim. My colleague Rod Nickel (who is pretty good at making these predictions) has calculated that property taxes would have to go up 7.3 per cent if councillors receive all of their desired program expansions.

When the civic administration tables its proposed budget later this week, that number will already be whittled down a couple of points or more, but it will still be far above the unrealistic promise of a tax freeze.

This is not to say I expect this council to be spendthrift. Its options are limited. The 2.17 per cent hikes in wages are built into contracts extending until the end of next year. Last year councillors opted to shave pennies off the budget by, for example, cutting back on money in the snow removal and ice management reserve, based on an erroneous believe that Saskatoon's drought could go on forever.

This year, on top of the realization that the reserve required hundreds of thousands more than was shaved off, the city is facing one of the worst pothole situations in a generation. Those potholes are the result of excess moisture and the freeze-thaw-freeze cycles Saskatoon has gone through this winter.

There is no cheap remedy and Saskatoon residents will be much more interested in the immediate future in addressing the impact of that freeze cycle on their roads than having one on their taxes.

But that won't let Atchison off the hook. There will be those who remember the cheap tax-freeze promise when he has to go to the polls next year. They will remind him that the police service continues to be poisoned from within and that the city is still neck-and-neck as crime capital.

The mayor should be able to deflect these criticisms by pointing out that he was in charge when something finally began to happen downtown. There may even be a cinema complex going up on the notorious Block 146.

He can say the River Landing development is naturally aligned along the river, bridging Saskatoon's east-west divide.

But Maddin had all but secured federal funding for Block 146, had come up with alternatives to ever-increasing property tax and had instituted changes within the police service that at least recognized the force's troubles, and he got derailed by the specious promise of a tax freeze.

The difference is that Atchison himself has placed the land mines that he must now avoid during the next year.
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2005

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell

Truth suppress'd, whether by courts or crooks, will find an avenue to be told. Sheila Steele, injusticebusters.com

If you hold the mouth of Truth, It will burst out its rib-cage. Somali proverb

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Revitalizing the archives

From 1998 until 2002, injusticebusters was in the throes of an identity crisis. What was it? What were we doing? We grappled with editorial policy at the same time we were learning the nuts and bolts of building and posting a website. Once we had a secure, paid site I had full editorial control, although I talked regularly to Richard Klassen who was forced to move his family several times and did not always have access to the internet.

I began following other threads to stories of police and prosecutorial misconduct and the site took on another facet to its character: a newsclipping scrapbook where stories could live longer than they would in print form. I also began picking up other stories of wrongfully convicted people. It was an explosion. By 2003 there were over 700 pages. I also had contact with several other people (Don Smith, Leon Walchuk, Monique Turenne, the Vopnis) and kept these stories going.

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Pre-sermonette Brash Comment

1998

Fall, 1998: Sask Sympatiko strikes again
2001

Muzzling the media


Sermonettes

2001

January: Legal Treachery to keep Dueck's lies safe

2002

March, 2002 -- Gay Bashing still a legal sport in Saskatoon -- Even when it turns to murder


2003

Feb. 1: Where we stand
Feb. 15, 2003: Has Saskatchewan learned anything?
March 1: Connecting the dots
March 23, 2003: From Micro to Macro
March 25, 2003: About libel and malice
March 27: Gangs of Saskatoon: the police and prison guards
April 28, 2003: The Naked Truth
May 5: How low will they go?
May 15, 2003: Come clean Calvert, Cline!
May 30: Still smearing Milgaard - defamation is alive and well on the lawn of the Regina legislature and Precendent has been set as we reclaim our institutions
June 11, 2003: --Eric Cline carries on a corrupt tradition
Nov 7: Courage -- the only reward is justice
November 20: Just following orders
November 24: Mayor Atchison, community policing and graffiti
November 25: Michael Jackson
November 30: Corrupt officials must be severely punished: otherwise they just keep on putting the administration of justice in disrepute!
December 1: Christmas comes early for injustice warriors
December 4: Wide open Saskatchewan?
December 16: Crawling through the tunnel of justice since 1991
December 24: The Crown keeps right on breaking the law
December 30: Who will find justice under their tree?

2004

January 1. 2004: Unprecedented publicity and Happy New Year
January 8, 2004: Malice still afoot
January 10, 2004: Shame and mugshots
January 14, 2004: Telling more truth about the undefamable: McKillop and Quennell, the static duo
January 17, 2004: Fifth Estate returns and A working class hero is something to be
January 22,23, 2004: Justice is still prevailing -- it is just taking longer and Bits and pieces are now coming together to tell the story of the century
January 27, 2004: Telling the truth about the undefamable, restoring reputations to the defamed.
February 5, 2004: Negotiations and strategies: getting an intransigent government to remedy its damage
February 10, 2004: How many lawyers does it take to ruin a province? and Lawyer continues to treat people's lives as a cruel game: monopoly?
Febrary 16, 2004: Calvert is not King Arthur
March 29, 2004: Counting down to the damages trial
April 16, 2004: The internet, the courts and now the movies -- We will so what it takes to get justice
May 1, 2004: If Frank Quennell is any example of what former Justice Minister Chris Axworthy called "evolving," Saskatchewan is ready to kiss justice good-bye!
May 27, 2004: Some observations on Saskatchewan and justice
June 7, 2004:Media coverage of Monique Turenne's story illustrates journalistic laziness
June 8:, 2004 -- The police not only failed to serve and protect Don and Lorna Smith and their children but set them up for false charges and community shunning
September 2, 2004: A tale of three cops: Dueck, Gobeil and Schinkel -- with an update on how they get away with criminal obstruction of justice
November, 2004: Wilfred Hathway, Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns -- RCMP stings offensive to community standards
November 11, 2004: Rogue Platoon? Identifying the rotten apples in Saskatoon Police Service and why we need a full public inquiry into our whole justice system
November 28, 2004: Can Justice Minister Quennell take a few more steps? The Prosecutors' office is still harbouring crowns who put the administrative of justice in disrepute
November 12, 2004: Saskatchewan Justice in chaos: The Stonechild report suggests it is.
November 28, 2004: The price for being a good judge or a good prosecutor
December 30: When the government interferes with the judiciary, we know a Police State is a dangerous possibility (The government appeal of the Klassen/Kvello decision)

2005

Jan 1, 2005: Chewed up digested and spit out
Jan. 5, 2005: More on chief Sabo
February 18, 2005: Tunnel vision: Darren Koehn, Wilf Hathway and Leon Walchuk
March 2: Fixing the system: Time to quit talking and implement previous commission recommendations
March 19, 2005 : Injustice as ShowBiz

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April 27, 2005

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