Change is in the air at New Westminster city council meetings.
Shortly after being elected in November’s civic election, Mayor Jonathan Cote proposed that council eliminate the “council reports section” of the council agenda. The reports, which came at the end of the meetings, allowed council members to report on all the events they’d attended since the previous meeting.
Cote has indicated that other changes could be coming down the pike for council meetings.
“The city is looking at how we are operating our council meetings. Everything from, should we be spending an hour each evening doing council reports, going through our diary – is that a good use of city staff time? Even the structure of how we operate our meetings – committee of the whole and regular council meetings. This is the opportune time to say, are we operating efficiently? Why do we operate differently from other cities?” he told the Record. “We might have some very good reasons to want to do that, but I think we need to move beyond just doing things in New Westminster because we have always done them that way. I am prepared to actually talk about things that have been longstanding things if I think it is going to lead to a more efficient council meeting and lead to better results.”
The latest change to council meetings – as recommended by staff – is a new policy that restricts people from addressing council on matters after a public hearing date has been set. Cote said the recommendation was proposed as a way of creating “procedural fairness” in the public hearing process.
“Most other cities do not have open delegation, and certainly don’t have it as open as we have here in New Westminster. That’s why these kind of discussions are really not issues in other municipalities, because they don’t even have the open delegation process,” he said. “The council is strongly supportive of open delegations, and the opportunity it provides residents to bring up issues and concerns at any council meeting we have, but we wanted to make sure that the open delegation process didn’t become or allowed to become extended public hearing processes.”
The new change ensures people all appear before council on the same topic at the same meeting. Although people won’t be able to appear as delegations once the public hearing date has been set, they’re welcome to write letters and speak to city officials about the issue.
“I want them to. That’s what that period is for – for writing letters, for getting in contact, for open house,” Cote said. “I’m hoping we can actually explore new ways we can have a dialogue during that period.”
Soon after being elected, Cote announced his plan to establish a community engagement task force.
“I’d like to see what opportunities we have to have better dialogue throughout development and application processes and help better inform residents about upcoming decisions, but I’m not convinced creating these longer public hearings and using the open delegation process to do that is achieving that,” he said. “I think there are better means to doing that, while still maintaining the integrity of the public hearing day, which is the date that residents have the opportunity to speak as long as they want to be able to convey either their support or concerns regarding any application the city is looking at.”
