That is the plan. Getting it in front of people costs money, and every dollar comes from a neighbour.
Chip inRunning Town Hall costs 37 percent more than it did five years ago. And no line in the Town's books can say what our technology costs or saves. Here is the plan. It counts the hours, puts real services online, and locks the doors properly. And the counter stays open, with a person on the phone.
Try a little errand tour of your own town. You can buy a parking pass for the boat launch from your kitchen table in two minutes. Then your dog needs its licence. That one means a drive to Town Hall, Door 3, in person, and thirty dollars if you get there before March 15. A building permit goes by email or on paper to Door 1. To book a civil marriage, you call the Clerk. To pay for a business licence, you walk to the counter. And whatever you came for, come before noon or after one, because the building takes lunch. None of that describes the people behind the counter. They work with the tools they were given. It describes the tools.
My own level of technology is printing the important emails so I can read them properly. I am not the guy who fixes this with his own two thumbs. I am the guy who has signed thirty years of invoices. I know what an hour of skilled time costs. And when I walk through that building, I see the hours everywhere: forms retyped by hand, paper carried by hand, three trips where one click should do. Every one of those hours is your tax money. This plan is about going and getting it back.
The Town reports its finances to the province every year. One line is called general government. That line is the cost of running the administration itself. It went from just over $2.5 million in 2020 to almost $3.5 million in 2024. That is 37 percent in five years, with a 20.5 percent jump in 2024 alone. Out of that money, what do we spend on our technology, and what does it save us? Go looking: six years of reports to the province, the whole department budget, every spending category. There is no technology line. Point 5 of my platform opens the financial books. This plan opens the stopwatch.
This is the part where I could stand at a podium and promise you a big shiny savings number. I will do no such thing, and Toronto is the reason. In 2021 that city's staff promised council that a flashy new digital payments deal would return eleven million dollars over five years. In 2024 Toronto's own Auditor General went and checked. The Auditor General found those savings were never realistic. About six percent of tax bills moved online instead of the ten percent promised. And after three years, staff could not even produce the real number. The biggest city in the country got sold a forecast. A small town cannot afford to buy one. So the first promise in this plan is deliberately boring. In year one, a written audit of how Town Hall actually works. Every service, every step, every hour, on paper and in public. Which forms get retyped by hand. Which payments force a trip to a counter. Where the same information gets entered twice. What our systems truly cost. Then, and only then, we fix the worst waste first. And we publish what each fix saved. If a fix saves nothing, you will read that too.
The government programs that used to pay for exactly this kind of review are gone. Ontario's modernization fund for small towns no longer appears on the province's list of programs, open or closed. The federal asset-management program wrapped up in 2024. As of the end of August 2026 there is no grant with Hawkesbury's name on it for this kind of modernization. And I will not build a plan on money that may never come. This plan funds itself the old-fashioned way: by wasting less. If a program opens tomorrow, good. The Town's name goes on the application by a council vote, in public.
A consultant can map a building in eight months. The people inside it can map it in an afternoon, because they walk the waste every day. So the audit starts with them. Within my first month, every Town employee gets the same short letter, in both languages, signed by the mayor and the chief administrator. Three questions. Which step in your week wastes your time? Which form or file do you retype that a machine could carry for you? What would you fix with a week and a small budget? Answer on paper, by email, or in a twenty-minute conversation with someone from your own department. Every idea gets a number, goes on one list, and gets an answer in writing within sixty days from the head of that department: yes and when, no and why, or later and what has to happen first.
Elgin County, west of London, spent about eight months in 2020 going through how it works with its own staff at the table. The county's own review found more than 110 improvements, picked twelve to act on first, and put those twelve at a minimum of $3.7 million a year, more than five percent of its operating budget. Projected, mind you. Not banked. And almost all of that sum sits in one decision about the county's long-term-care homes, so take the shape of the exercise, never the sum. Owen Sound, a city of about 22,000 people, had its services reviewed the same way, found 53 things it could act on, and in July 2023 a three-year work plan to get through them went in front of its council. Oxford County, with the towns of Ingersoll and Tillsonburg, both under twenty thousand people at the last census, looked in 2021 at whether the three of them could go digital on how they receive and pay their bills, and the review projected staff time savings of up to 43 percent. That is the shape of the thing, and it is the only shape I will quote for Hawkesbury until our own count is done.
Asking is cheap. Answering is where most organizations quit, because a good idea from the counter usually needs three things the counter does not have: permission, a little money, and an afternoon. So the audit comes with all three. Permission: a written rule, voted by council, that a fix inside a department's own way of working, under a set dollar amount, needs the director's yes and nothing more, goes on the list, and gets read by council every quarter. Money: a fix-it fund in my first budget, a modest envelope voted in public, spent only on ideas from the people doing the work, every dollar of it in the yearly score. Time: a first group of employees, from every department and every level, gets a few days of training in the plain method the best-run towns use: watch the work, count the steps, take out the ones nobody needs, measure what changed. Mississauga is a city of seven hundred thousand, so take from it the method, never the size. By 2017 it had trained more than 1,800 of its own employees in that method and reported $1.6 million in savings and another $2.2 million in avoided costs since 2014, all from staff-run projects. One of its early fixes, in the parks department, cut public calls about park waste pickup by a quarter. The people who did the job changed the route. Sherbrooke trained 80 employees and 30 managers on their own real files, ran five projects, and within a few weeks a backlog of a thousand land-transfer-tax files was cleared. One rule for our fund: an idea from the counter gets the same hearing as an idea from the corner office. And one promise: a fix that frees an hour gives that hour back to the resident standing in front of you.
Credit where it is due. The Town launched a resident app in September 2024, and you can report a pothole in it. It launched a new website in December 2024, and the Town itself called that a significant advancement in its digital transformation. Council meetings stream live on YouTube. Keep all of it. But today the Town runs two separate payment systems from two different companies. One is for taxes, water and penalty notices. The other is for recreation and the boat launch. So a resident with a tax bill and a kid in swimming lessons has to use two different websites. An app that takes your pothole report but cannot take your building permit is a front door on a house with no hallway.
Smiths Falls has about nine thousand people. It runs a working online building-permit service. A contractor applies there, uploads his drawings and tracks his file without driving anywhere. Tay Township has eleven thousand people. It has taken building permits online since 2023, and the payment online since 2024. Clarence-Rockland is our own bilingual neighbour down the 17. Its residents can see and pay their tax and water bills online. Carleton Place has eleven thousand people. It put permits, tax bills, parking tickets, pet licences and recreation passes behind one single login, and a resident can report a problem online too. If they can, we can. The association that Ontario towns belong to has even negotiated a ready-made online-permit deal any town can join. My job as mayor is to shop those options hard. To read the contracts like a man who has been burned by contracts before. And to pick tools a town of ten thousand can afford, and can walk away from if the company lets us down. Towns do switch companies.
Ontario towns have been paying tuition for this lesson for years. Stratford paid hackers about $75,000 in 2019 to get its own files back. Woodstock refused to pay the same year, and the city's own bill still came to close to $670,000. St. Marys is a town smaller than ours. It paid a $290,000 ransom in 2022, and the bill came to $1.3 million all in. And in 2024, Hamilton refused a demand for $18.5 million. The city spent $18.3 million recovering. Then its insurer refused to cover the city's claims, because the basic two-step login had not been switched on in every department. That is the same login your bank makes you use. Doing nothing is not the safe choice. Old systems are the unlocked ones. But moving fast and careless is how a town ends up in those headlines. So we do it in this order: locks, then doors, then windows.
Everyone tells me they use AI now. With respect, there are levels to this. The national surveys back me up. A majority of Canadians have now tried an AI tool. But of the people who have tried one, almost three quarters used the chatting kind. Barely one in eight has touched the kind that does real office work. Me? My contribution to artificial intelligence so far is asking my phone for the weather and saying thank you afterwards, because manners cost nothing. The young people I keep around me are on another level completely. I watched one of them do a paperwork job in one afternoon. I would have budgeted a week for that job. I signed the invoice anyway. Pride heals. In the youth plan I wrote about hiring that generation into Town Hall.
So what does the serious level look like inside a town hall? There will be no robot at the counter. The serious level looks like this. A machine reads a scanned permit form and fills in the file, so the clerk checks it instead of retyping it. A machine writes a first draft of the meeting minutes, and a person corrects it and signs it. A service request goes to the right department the minute it arrives, instead of after two forwards. Bigger cities already do exactly this for their phone lines and for taking in permit applications. Every one of those saves hours.
And because there are levels, there are also rules. A county of sixty-five thousand in this province adopted a written AI policy in the fall of 2025. Staff fact-check everything the machine produces. No resident's personal information ever goes into these tools. And the public is told when AI was used. That is the model, and mine adds teeth. A human being reviews and signs everything before it reaches a resident. No chatbot will ever give you a legal answer at our Town Hall. An airline found out the hard way in 2024 what a chatbot's word costs. A tribunal made it pay for the bad answer its robot gave a grieving customer. New York's city chatbot told small businesses to break the law. Both of those failures have the same shape: a machine answering questions it had no business answering, with nobody checking. That shape is banned here on day one. And privacy rules for towns in this province are being tightened right now, which is one more reason to do this properly from the start.
The process audit goes in my first budget, and it counts the hours before anyone counts dollars. The goal is less retyping and more service. The savings come from overtime we stop needing, and from hours moved away from retyping and over to the counter, the phone, and the service backlog every department carries. Seniority stays seniority. The collective agreement stays the collective agreement. That is the union contract. And any union that wants to sit down about the audit will find me easy to schedule. Then the promise that holds this whole plan up: the counter stays open and the phone gets answered by a person, in French and in English, exactly as today. Nearly one resident in three here is 65 or over. This town runs on people who prefer a face or a voice, and they built the place. Every service this plan puts online is a new lane beside the counter, never a replacement for it. If anything, the clerk who no longer spends all morning retyping forms has more time for the person standing at Door 3.
Every promise on this page comes from the left column. If you ever catch me promising from the right column, hold it against me.
I cannot promise you a big savings number on a campaign page, and I cannot promise a shiny app by a certain date. What I can promise is to try for both the honest way: the audit first, the order of the work, and the published score. I cannot promise that I personally will ever stop printing my emails. And I will not let this plan be used to scare anyone. No grandmother told to go find a website. This town has been paying for slow paper for years without ever seeing the invoice. The audit is the invoice. Then we stop paying it.
I have renovated enough old buildings to know the rule. You do not tear down a place that works. You rewire it, room by room, with the lights kept on and the people kept warm. Town Hall works. The people in it work. The wiring is from another era, and the bill for that shows up in your taxes every year, with no label on it. Give me the job, and the first year buys us the honest map, the locks, and the first rooms rewired. Give the young people from my youth plan the logins, and give me the invoices. That split of the work has built everything I have ever built.
Count the hours. Keep the counter. Prove the savings.