Cutting to the chase
How to run shorter, but efficient meetings
Penticton City Council is addressing the issue of its marathon meetings by asking staff to explore how other municipalities conduct council business. Averaging four hours, several times Penticton City Council has gone well past 11 p.m. including one night when adjournment was at 12:40 a.m.
A staff reports suggests beginning at 9 a.m. (we like that) but other suggestions include Tuesday meetings with public hearings scheduled for the night before.
Councillors Helena Konanz and Andre Martin favour the West Kelowna model where council begins at 1:30 p.m. on one day of the month and 6 p.m. on the other.
It’s important to have meetings when the public is available. The City livestreams all of its meetings and they can be found online afterward.
Realistically, except for several die-hards, most people attend council only when there’s an issue which affects them directly. Meeting during the daytime wouldn’t be that much of a sacrifice to the public. If there was an important issue for a certain citizen, they would likely be able to sneak away from work for an hour or make the time up later.
The problem with daytime sessions is it would weaken the pool of candidates. In the good old days when time demands were less on municipal politicians, town councils and school boards would often include a doctor or dentist, a lawyer, the town’s biggest community booster, a college instructor and a major employer. Not anymore. The way it is now, a doctor would never shut down his/her practice for a day. It would cost the doctor income and also deny patients access.
What that often leaves us with is retirees, unemployed, and home-based business people with flexible hours.
It will be interesting to see what council comes up with.
There are other ways of shortening the meetings without changing the night or format. Here are a few suggestions:
• Councillors talk too much. If a point has already been made, it doesn’t need repeating. We can see where each councillor stands on an issue by the way they vote.
• With presentations by staff, much of the material is already covered in the agenda packages (which is mandatory reading for councillors) and could be summarized.
• Mayor Andrew Jakubeit should watch some old Dan Ashton videos. When Ashton chaired a meeting, it moved along at a reasonable clip and not at the cost of community business.
• Delegations from the not-for-profits are a nice touch but quite often volunteers will be happy just to have a proclamation signed by the mayor earlier in the day.
• Senior staff and the mayor need to be more skilled at building agendas. When Mike Pearce was mayor, his meetings sometimes lasted only 45 minutes. Why? Staff wouldn’t dare present Pearce with one of the ridiculous agendas that this council has had to soldier through.
• Public question period needs to be for that — questions. Too many “delegation” type comments are being made. For those citizens who want to editorialize, a skillfully-worded question can do the trick.