The City of North Bay has adopted changes to its procedural bylaw.
“The whole idea of the procedural bylaw, and it should be updated on a regular basis, is to modernize it so you can at least have an efficiently running council,” said Mayor Al McDonald
City Councillor Mike Anthony says while he agrees with many of the procedural bylaw changes, an area of concern for him was the loss of the five-minute public presentations.
“Personally, I would have preferred to keep those extra five-minute presentations. There were weeks where we had none, but there were weeks where people would make four, five and six of them and it would be on an issue they were passionate about. And that is lost now,” said Anthony.
“You can still speak to any matter you want in the 10-minute presentations. So those are still available. If members of the public want to come and speak to something before council that is still available to you,” said Anthony.
“With the 10-minute presentation, you need to give a little bit more notice to council and to the clerk about what you are going to be presenting about, who you are and a brief outline of what your presentation is going to be. You still have an opportunity to come and address council.”
But the 10-minute presentations are limited to just three.
"However, under the planning act, you can have as many presentations as the amount of people in the room. So for example when we were doing rezoning, an unlimited amount of people can make public presentations, and an unlimited amount of time too. So if there were three hours of public presentations, that is allowed under this procedural bylaw," said McDonald.
City Councillor Scott Robertson agreed that it was “unfortunate” to do away with the shorter presentations.
“I thought that was a good opportunity to give residents the chance to speak to issues that are before council. But I supported the procedural bylaw because I think it mitigates the loss of five-minute presentations with the inclusion of two yearly townhall’s,” said Robertson.
“I think it is actually going to be better when engaging with members of the public because it will give council and members of the public the opportunity to have an exchange, an actual conversation, and communication. Whereas when you make a five-minute presentation here, we’re not allowed to ask questions other than for clarification. We don’t really get into a discussion.”
Robertson supports the change in the committee structure.
“Right now in our committees, our community services, our engineering, and our general government committees, because of the way it is set up and there are so few members of council that sit on those committees, if the chair and the vice-chair have a meeting together with management, that is considered materially advancing the business of council and it is an illegal meeting of council,” said Robertson.
“So, it makes it really hard to communicate with the chair of your committee. As a vice-chair, I found it very limiting. It is hard to get together and sit down, in my case with Johanne Brousseau the chair of my community services committee, to talk about what is coming down the pipe. So, this brings all members of council onto those committees which makes quorum different and allows the vice-chair and the chair to sit down and have a meeting with staff.”
Mayor McDonald said it is tough to run an organization “when you can’t even meet with a chair and staff member.”
Councillor Anthony was satisfied with the other changes to the procedural bylaw.
“The rest of the updates I think are positive updates to our procedural bylaw and how things will be run, things like efficiencies. Like if one meeting ends at 6:15 p.m., you don’t have to wait until 6:30 p.m. or 7 p.m. to start the next meeting. You can now begin the next meeting. There is nothing wrong with that. That moves along the business of the city efficiently.”
