March 16, 2011
Council may cut
meeting schedule
by Vance Gutzman
Deep River council may be holding two meetings a month instead of three.
Whether that happens or not, all depends on the outcome of a pending
debate amongst council members over the town's proposed new procedural
bylaw.
The draft bylaw came up for discussion in February, and again last week
when council members met in committee of the whole, where they
discussed doing away with committee of the whole meetings altogether.
Committee of the whole meetings differ from normal council meetings in
that they are intended as a forum for discussing issues and then making
recommendations to council.
The town currently holds three regular meetings each month.
The first, on the first Wednesday of each month, is a regular council
meeting.
A week later council members meet in committee of the whole, and a week
after that they again hold a regular council meeting.
The draft bylaw which council members are currently reviewing is a
hefty 56-page document, containing several annotations on practically
every page from council members and staff who have provided feedback on
the document.
Discussing each annotation page by page would be a time-consuming task
to say the least, but council members decided to focus on whether
or not to abrogate committee of the whole meetings from the document.
Doing so would solve a couple of problems right of the get-go,
according to the town's chief administrative officer, Michelle Larose.
For one thing, she told council members, eliminating committee of the
whole meetings from the procedural bylaw would eliminate several
tertiary issues, thereby cutting back on the length of time needed to
review the rest of the draft document.
Wordsmithing aside, eliminating committee of the whole meetings would
also save a lot of wear and tear on the town's administrative staff.
Staff are recommending that the town hold just two regular council
meetings each month because of the short timelines they have to deal
preparing all the necessary paperwork for three consecutive meetings.
"It's a very tight turnaround," Larose said last week.
"I'd like to see two longer meetings each month, rather than three in a
row."
Council members were supportive of the CAO's recommendation, including
Councillor Daniel Banks, who generated most of the feedback annotations
in the draft procedural bylaw.
"It would allow staff more time to prepare agendas and reports," Banks
said of the idea of eliminating committee of the whole meetings from
council's monthly schedule.
Councillor Chris Carroll was also onside with the idea of icing
committee of the whole meetings, and he had actually suggested doing so
last month, when the draft procedural bylaw first came up for
discussion.
"We can always hold a special council meeting if need be," Carroll said.
But Deputy Mayor Mary MacCafferty (who was filling in as chair of last
week's committee of the whole meeting in the absence of Mayor David
Thompson), wasn't so sure that the town could conduct all its business
in just two monthly meetings.
"We never could have operated with two council meetings a month because
the agendas were too big," MacCafferty said of her experience on the
past two terms of council.
"We would have been here until eleven o'clock at night most of the
time."
(As things currently stand in the draft procedural bylaw, all meetings
shall adjourn no later than 11 pm unless a motion to go beyond 11 pm is
approved.)
MacCafferty went on to say that council should hold off on making any
recommendation to do away with committee of the whole meetings until
the mayor is present.
"I think Dave needs to be here to discuss this," MacCafferty said.
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