Run-around all over the town

Access to town hall is becoming real annoying. Real fast.
Getting direct answers to queries has never been more difficult and
frustrating than presently at the Town of Newmarket.
Actually speaking with a department head? It’s likely easier to phone the
White House and invite the president to an al-Qaeda sleepover.
It should not be next-to-impossible to contact a town authority, who, for
all intents, actually is on the taxpayer’s dime and should be available at
least during business hours.
In Newmarket, your initial call, received by the Department of Reception, is
passed along to the Department of Corporate Communications whose job it
seems is to perform the legwork and answer inquiries for the tall foreheads.
Never mind that it may take all day to find someone down the hall or that
actually speaking to the individual in charge is preferred.
In today’s episode, it required nearly five hours to track down a simple
‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a query for the recreation department regarding the
installation of lights at a soccer field at the Magna Centre.
But, jeez, they do make plans to tear down swimming pools, melt down arenas,
build playing fields and such. So squeezing a couple of return phone calls
to explain these actions shouldn’t be that tough.
Ridiculous.
It was the City of Vaughan, I suspect, that stumbled upon the notion of a
locked down, sound-proof city hall a few years ago when scandals seemed to
crop up too regularly. Since gossip has a way of traveling quickly from town
to town, next thing you know bright bulbs in other municipalities figured
it an excellent means to control the information seeping through their
walls.
The problem is, the media is shut out and, by extension, so too are
citizens. Loose lips sink ships, one supposes, but this apparent siege
mentality is way overboard and out of control.
The cone-of-silence attitude is not only annoying, but disrespectful to the
citizenry. It smacks of paranoia, too.