Report probes closed-door meetings
Report from city staff finds 14 per cent of meetings held behind closed doors
After reviewing the amount of time Calgary councillors spend behind closed doors, city administrators are recommending council take new steps to improve transparency when discussing matters in private.
Provincial legislation requires council to hold its meetings in public, with some exceptions for personnel issues, legal matters and certain business items involving land acquisitions or proprietary information.
The report, scheduled to go before council’s priorities and finance committee on Tuesday, proposes that closed-door meeting reports be presented in the council agenda with a clear, consistent description of the items to be discussed in private, without revealing confidential information.
A notation describing the legal exception to public disclosure of the matter should be included, according to the staff recommendation.
City staff also propose that any written closed-door meeting reports include a public component where possible.
The city’s review of 104 council and committee meetings between May 2017 and May 2018 found that 306 agenda items, or about onefifth of the 1,480 total items, were discussed in private.
Council spent more than 76 hours behind closed doors during that time, which was about 14 per cent of the nearly 550 total hours they spent in meetings.
“One of the problems that I’ve been seeing in the last year or two was it’s not so much the amount of meetings, but the amount of time for each meeting was concerning,” said Coun. Peter Demong, who brought forward a notice of motion in April directing city staff to examine the closed-door sessions.
“We do sometimes have a tendency to diverge from the actual point, and I think that’s something that we need to focus on.”
Starting in the new year, city staff recommends that all closed-door meeting reports be given a deadline, which, when reached, would necessitate that the city automatically release the reports to the public or take them under further review to see if confidentiality is still required.
As some exceptions to public disclosure cease to apply after a certain amount of time, council could set “earlier dates/triggers for which a confidential report is to be released publicly,” city staff wrote.
“The appropriate trigger date would depend largely on the circumstances outlined in the report, such as events, when sales are finalized, or when agreements are signed.
Once those events have happened, then disclosure is no longer harmful, and the information may be released.”
The report compared council’s in-camera sessions to those of other major cities across Canada, helping to inform these recommendations.
Demong added he’d be “shocked” if the proposals didn’t pass unanimously on council.
Coun. Jeromy Farkas, who brought forward his own notice of motion in October with proposals to reform council’s closed-door meetings, called the report a positive step, but one that leaves a few stones unturned.
“What happens at city hall belongs to Calgarians. It’s not council’s business, it’s the public’s business,” Farkas said.
“It’s good that we’re starting to measure this but it’s clear that it doesn’t go far enough. A lot of the issues that we discuss at city hall, they’re uncomfortable political questions, but that doesn’t always mean that there’s a good legal reason for it to be behind closed doors.”
He said he was concerned by the report’s methodology, noting that it didn’t include time spent in-camera by council’s Olympic committee.
Farkas said an investigation process allowing councillors or members of the public to challenge whether a closed-door meeting was appropriate would also help restore public trust.
“The piece that I really want to push on is having a paper trail. A lot of these secret meetings, they’re just done verbally and there’s not really a strong legal documentation about what it is that council discussed, what we decided and so on,” he said.
“I’m still going to keep pushing on it, but ... I think in the long run there’s going to need to be more teeth.”