Councillors needed on NPCA board: Professor
Sancton report to come before Region’s elected officials
Despite calls for change to Niagara’s embattled conservation authority, at least half the organization’s board should continue to comprise regional councillors, says Western University political science professor Andrew Sancton.
Several municipal councils including St. Catharines, Pelham and Fort Erie have approved motions to appoint community members with conservation expertise to the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority board, in response to concerns over NPCA’s past leadership.
But Sancton — he was hired this year at a cost of $78,000 to conduct an independent external governance audit for Niagara — recommended against filling the board entirely with community representatives.
The audit, which looks into several aspects of Niagara Region governance, also recommends against appointing a deputy regional chair for two or more years, while recommending that the Region change council’s meeting schedule to every four weeks, rather than the three-week schedule currently in use.
Other recommendations in the report included limiting the size of standing committees to 16 members, scrapping several dormant advisory committees, and that regional councillor education sessions be held in public.
In regards to NPCA, he said
almost all municipalities across Ontario appoint only elected officials to conservation authority boards because conservation authorities can directly levy taxpayers.
“The regional councillors are the guardians of the public purse on that, so they have an important role to play,” said Sancton, who co-wrote the report on the matter with his colleague at the university, Tim Cobban.
The report, being considered at a special council meeting Thursday afternoon, also recommends that Niagara Region obtain a legal opinion regarding board appointments, and rather than rubberstamping lower-tier government decisions, it says the Region should ask local municipalities to recommend elected officials as well as community members, allowing regional council to make the final decision.
“There have been a number of people talking about how you need to have people on conservation authorities who are experts on conservation,” Sancton said in an interview, Monday.
“However, when we’re looking at governing bodies of organizations like the conservation authority, what you really want are people who understand the Region and the main interests of people in general.
“You don’t necessarily need people with technical knowledge. That’s why you have staff on the conservation authority and at the municipality. Nobody said that people who are running for municipal government should be experts on sewage treatment.”
Sancton said other conservation authorities aren’t typically fraught with controversy as Niagara’s has been.
“When we were handed that mandate, we hadn’t really been aware of conservation authorities being this controversial,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sancton said voters may have already resolved the concerns about the organization.
“Everybody has to be careful that we don’t make a whole bunch of institutional changes in order to fix problems from the last council, when it’s quite conceivable that the election fixed those problems,” he said. “We have to try to look at the institutions without looking at the particular problems that emerged last term.”
At their inaugural meeting last week, Niagara’s regional councillors voted to replace all existing NPCA board members with interim representatives, who would serve for three months to give municipalities time to identify people to appoint to the board.
Sancton will be presenting two more reports to regional council early next year.
The upcoming reports will deal with potential revisions to council’s code of conduct, and prevention of leaks of confidential information to the media.
“I don’t know if we’re going to have anything very useful to say, but we are going to cover it,” he said on the matter of leaks.