Want Information?

posted May,28 2024

When trying to understand something as complex as Cobden's water billing, a reliable information source is essential. In this case, the major source is the township office. Unfortunately, the township staff are busy people. But fortunately, a lot of the township's documents are publicly available through the on-line Portal accessible at https://whitewaterregion.civicweb.net/Portal/VirtualLibrary.aspx.

Before rushing off to the Portal in hopes of discovering everything that needs to be known, be aware that the mountain of Portal documents cover ALL township business, and the water bills occupy just a small corner. Township staff have kindly suggested that using the key word search feature with the keyword WWTP (stands for Waste Water Treatment Plant) is a good way to find documents associated with the history of how we ended up with our current water bills.

Most people won't want to invest the effort to explore the Portal. We get that, and hope they never have to! The documents are very dry, and their purpose is council business. Instead of slogging through the Portal, the general public will likely gain their understanding from things said by others. While this is a perfectly human approach, it can result in misinformation and confusion. We appreciate that most people would like to have information confirmed by reliable Portal sources, but in practice, will get by on something less. This comes with the caveat that information without a referenced source is really just an opinion.

We hope that our blog posts can be a bridge between the Portal sources and a practical understanding. We are keenly aware of the potential for misinformation, and our posts include reference links to Portal documents whenever possible. Our posts attempt to distill the relevant points from the Portal sources to simplify their understanding. Those who might doubt the content of a blog post can follow the links to confirm or refute the presentation. If you disagree with our interpretation of a source, please let us know. We hope this can meet the practical needs of most people.

For those who just can't wait to explore the portal, here are a few tips based on our experience:

• Searching the WWTP keyword (on May 26, 2024) resulted in a list of 116 documents ... a lot of reading. Sure, some of them are (near) duplicates, but its still a lot. Note that documents like the minutes of meetings can easily exceed 100 pages with the WWTP-relevant content present in only a few of the pages.
• The default search lists the documents in "Relevance" order; which begs the question what does "Relevance" mean? Fortunately, the documents can also be sorted by "Date Created" (and "Title"). The Date Created sort gives a reverse chronological ordering (i.e. most recent docs first).
• Changing the search Order Type to "Ascending" in a Date Created search gives the earliest documents first. This was the most useful search approach for us as we waded into the sea of docs trying to gain a foothold. After gaining a foothold and building an initial understanding, the sort by Relevance seemed to make more sense.

Enjoy exploring the Portal (or not 😀)!

TWP