MidlandToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). This letter is in response to February 10 story Let’s Rock Together charity event pulled, organizer upset with Tiny CAO.
Dear Editor,
I am member of the volunteer team who had been excited to help organize the Let’s Rock Together charity event which was recently cancelled and was the subject matter of an article.
In the article, Tiny CAO Robert Lamb inaccurately blamed the cancellation of the event on a failure of our project team to satisfy Tiny’s policies. He omitted to mention that:
- the event organizers in fact proposed a structure which substantially complied with all township policies and was the same as the structures for the two successful Balm Beach Family Fun Day events, which the township had previously supported and sponsored. This structure was turned down by township staff and council for no apparent reason.
- the structure that he recommended, and council approved, provided significantly reduced financial assistance from the township leaving the volunteer group with the impossible task of raising approximately $19,000 from other sources to cover estimated costs of the event.
Our project team was led by two township volunteer award winners, who had previously run two successful Balm Beach Family Fun Day events, and which raised approximately $27,000 for the Balm Beach playground.
One would have expected that, after two years of the pandemic, both township council and staff would have welcomed our proposal to put on Let’s Rock Together in 2022 and collaborated with us utilizing our well-established working relationship to find a mutually acceptable structure for LRT that would have offered an exciting event for Tiny residents and would have raised significant funding for the township.
Sadly, this was not the case as the inflexible structure recommended by CAO Lamb and recreation director Bonita Desroches was a roadblock to the success of the event. It was even sadder that Tiny council approved this unreasonable and inflexible position. As a result of this, our entire project team had no choice but to withdraw our proposal to proceed with “Let’s Rock Together”.
Tiny Council regularly makes public statements praising and encouraging volunteerism in Tiny Township.
A recent example of this is the following quote from Mayor George Cornell: “They (volunteers) are the heart and soul of our community.”
This message rings hollow considering their unreasonable and intractable approach and position in relation to Let’s Rock Together. Based on this experience, I, for one, will be reluctant to volunteer again in township events and I suspect others on our project team may feel the same.
Nicholas Leblovic
Tiny
