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Letters: Disagree with editorial

Micro-managing committees will provide clear direction

Your approach to interaction between municipal councils and committees they form is not good management practice. (“Micro-manage and you fail” Aug. 22, 2012 issue)

Senior management (in this case elected mayor and councillors) should give each committee clear direction on scope of their task, and check on them occasionally. (A past over-used phrase was “management by walking around,” in one sense that is spot-checking.)

Otherwise a committee may work away and only find itself afoul of council at the end of its effort. At that point redoing their work will take more months, during which the original problem they were to advise council on continues to exist to the discomfort of, or cost to, citizens.

I am against municipal committees because they often do not have balanced representation, sometimes being full of naive do-gooders. Municipal councils and bureaucrats make excessive use of committees and expensive consultants, instead of doing their job.

Keith Sketchley

Saanich