How Airdrie City council meetings are operated will soon be run by a new procedural bylaw after council voted to have one drafted by Legislative Services at their meeting on Oct. 20.
The vote was not unanimous with Alderman Allan Hunter casting the only vote against the motion that was made by Alderman Fred Burley.
Attempts to contact Hunter were not returned by press time.
A procedural bylaw covers how public question period is run, how long an individual can speak during a public hearing, how to handle a public disturbance of a council meeting and rules and procedures for how motions are presented, amended or withdrawn.
Mayor Peter Brown said he voted for the motion because he wants how council meetings are run to be made more clear to Airdrie residents.
“I’m very comfortable with how we manage our meetings so from that perspective all it’s going to do is define the role of the chair, it’ll define the role of aldermen, it will speak to all the things that we do currently,” Brown said. “I think it’s important that people coming in (to council) understand the roles, they know what public question period is, we want to encourage participation. It’s part of being an open and transparent organization.”
Manager of Legislative Services Sharon Pollyck said the City is one of the few municipalities in the province without a procedural bylaw.
“The biggest reason we haven’t had a procedural bylaw before is the way we’ve been operating has been working for us,” Pollyck said. “By not having a procedural bylaw you can be a bit more informal, which is a lot more comfortable for residents or people coming forward to City council.”
“A procedural bylaw can add a degree of formality that we may not necessarily have now. We’ll do our very best to entrench the way we do things today (in the draft bylaw). I know it’s really important to council to keep that welcoming, friendly atmosphere for residents,” she added.
According to Pollyck, the bylaw should be drafted and ready to be reviewed by council by the end of January 2015. Staff will look at the existing bylaws in five comparable communities: Lethbridge, Red Deer, St. Albert, Medicine Hat, and Grande Prairie while drafting the one for Airdrie.
Repetitive questions
Pollyck said the new procedural bylaw could include provisions for how to deal with the same issues being repeatedly raised by one resident. Council asked staff to look at a way to deal with these kinds of repetitive questions at their Sept. 2 meeting.
Brown said he raised the issue because he is concerned by the amount of staff time spent on questions that are raised over and over.
“We’ll often get repetitive emails about the same issue from the same individual and often times they’ve been responded to on many occasions,” Brown said. “My thought was specific to staff time; how much time should they allocate to sending the same person the same response over and over again. I’m interested about (the issue of) wasting of staff time. I’ll be interested to see how that looks in the procedural bylaw.
Pollyck said it was difficult for staff to quantify the amount of time they spend responding to questions because this information is not currently tracked.
“The response to an initial question does typically take longer because there is investigation that needs to be done. Once we get a duplication of that question, usually the work has already been done and it’s just a matter of making sure the information is still valid,” she said.
The recommendation from staff was that a timeline of one year be set for how often an issue can be raised by residents at the council level.
Alderman Candice Kolsen expressed concern that having the issue written into a bylaw could leave residents feeling unheard.
“What are the implications to this,” asked Kolsen. “Do people have recourse if they feel they’ve been shut down with their questions? We have appeal processes (for other things).”
Pollyck explained that council is the last resort of appeal.
“Typically, once council has made a decision, council has made a decision. It would be up to council to determine how often they wanted to entertain that question,” she said.
Alderman Fred Burley’s motion included allowing Council to retain the right to discuss a specific issue at any time, regardless of how long it had been since it was last before them. “Issues can change in a heartbeat, things can happen. I can’t imagine if something shifted here around a particular issue that we wouldn’t entertain listening to it,” Brown said. “I don’t know that you can put a time limit on things.”
