Harrison Hot Springs mayor says he isn't responsible for 'nasty politics' while blaming 'nasty' opponents

Yesterday, we wrote about Harrison Hot Springs’ struggle to decide what to do with three massive aging trees in the centre of town. 

While we were researching that story, we spoke to Harrison Hot Springs Mayor Ed Wood. Wood has feuded with his council for more than a year, leveled accusations about “moles,” and dealt with an exodus of staff.

“It’s nasty, nasty, dirty politics at its worst,” he told us, when we started asking about the trees.

Today, we have the full interview, in which we ask Wood whether he felt any responsibility for the chaos on council. 

‘Nasty politics’

FVC: “Don’t you bear some responsibility for that?”

Wood: “For the nasty politics? No, I don’t believe it. My responsibility is to try to make us operate.”

FVC: “Have you seriously contemplated … what you could do to resolve these ongoing tensions?”

Wood: “That’s a whole other story on its own, Tyler.”

FVC: “Tell me that story. Have you thought about that?”

Wood: “Of course I’ve thought about that. I put lots and lots of work into this. Most of it happens in closed-door meetings so this is what makes it so unfortunate: that we can’t have that conversation.

FVC: “Right. I’m thinking of that average person in Harrison who probably didn’t vote in the last election, maybe doesn’t know the personalities involved and just wants their community to be run on a drama-free and simple basis.”

Wood: “I second that.”

FVC: “Right, but how do you get there? What do you tell those people when they see you and say ‘Can’t you guys just grind your teeth and get along and do the things and [make] the compromises that sometimes you need to do with people you don’t get along with? What do you say to those people?”

Wood: “This has absolutely nothing to do with conflict or with people with different ideas and management styles. This has to do—and I’ve said it a number of times—[with] the extreme nastiness that’s happening in behind-closed-doors [meetings]. If the public knew what, in fact, is actually truly happening, if they were to think the worst possible thing in their mind, they’re not even a tiny bit close to how bad the situation is behind closed doors. And this is just due to some really, really nasty, nasty people, council members.

FVC: “But when you say that, as the mayor of a municipality, doesn’t that not help the problem?”

Wood: “No I don’t think it helps the problem. People need to know what’s happening. There was a resolution from council almost a year ago to the province asking for an inquiry. And the province came back and they did not facilitate the inquiry. They sent an administrator who had many years experience and he was only a facilitator who wasn’t able to discuss any of the issues that were actually happening in the closed-door meetings. So the province facilitator has absolutely no idea what’s happening. And again, it’s a closed-door meeting and you would think the province facilitator would be able to discuss what happened in a closed-door meeting but he cannot. Extremely frustrating, right?

FVC: “It seems like there’s a lot of extreme frustration to go around. What I’m wondering is: You’ve got adults, people elected to run a place, why can’t you all just grit your teeth and, as frustrating as it is…your job is to vote at the council table and just vote on the things and move on past and put whatever nastiness that has happened aside. Why can’t that be done?

Wood: “I can’t answer for the other councillors.”

FVC: “But on your part, why do you feel the need to continue to battle? Because it is a battle. I think we can agree on that. Why the need to continue the battle for whatever reason?”

Wood: “Because we’ve been like this for many years and change has to happen. You hear the stories about a bunch of the senior staff that left. Well it was only five years ago when in fact even more of the senior staff left—not the last election, it was actually the one before. So in 2015 our chief administrative officer resigned within a year of the new council, the chief financial officer resigned, the operations manager resigned, the community resources manager resigned, the fire chief resigned.

So this time around, here we are. We haven’t quite lost that many of them but it’s the same scenario. We do a terrible job of looking after the staff. We’ve lost 31 staff members since 2015 in our tiny community. So the issue isn’t just with council. We all have a part of it all and council… I don’t know if it has to do with the age of the council. I know there are longtime battles between councils and the previous [ones]. I’ve never met any of these people before my election. So within hours of me being elected, all of a sudden it started up.

It’s absolutely just the fact they lost control. They lost the election, they thought they had the election and I came up from the bottom and things changed and they don’t like that change.

FVC: I’ll let you go but I have one more question. Thinking back to since the election, is there anything you would do over again if you had the chance?

Wood: Over or differently?

FVC: Yeah, differently.

Wood: I guess we can always say we can always do better. I mean I always strive to do better. But there’s nothing that specifically that jumps out with this. Change is hard and that’s what I was elected to make. I was elected to come in and ask the hard questions. We’ve got massive development that we’ve permitted here with infrastructure that hasn’t been touched.

There’s a lot of people with concerns on the infrastructure, I’ve got a lot of infrastructure management experience. I’ve got a lot of that inside information and we need to make change here.

The old story that all is great—is not all is great. It can all be fixed but we just need to start. We need to start with some good policies, processes, procedures. Staff get frustrated because they don’t know how to answer the question. Somebody comes in with a development proposal and a lot of it is old bylaws. There’s 15 different bylaws we just looked at the other day just for a development application.

Developers are frustrated, the staff are even more frustrated. And the councilors, they don’t even understand what it is usually that they’re going through. I put a big proposal at the last council meeting to hire a third-party independent planning consultant to come in and give us a review and help us out. That was rejected by council. It makes absolutely no sense, but the decisions are clearly being made on hatred. I can’t physically go in and change their minds.

The opposition

We sought to speak to Couns. Michie Vidal and Leo Facio, the two opponents who most frequently spar with Wood at the council table.

Vidal couldn’t speak by phone. But asked by email if there’s anything she would have done differently since the election, Vidal wrote: “It certainly has been a challenging year for Harrison Hot Springs Council. In hindsight, adoption of a revised Code of Conduct policy and adoption of a revised Council Procedure Bylaw would perhaps have aided in more productive Council meetings. I hope and will encourage our Council to move forward with these important items in the new year.”

Facio said he couldn’t speak because the issues are “ongoing.”