Councillors spend 252 hours a year in meetings

Potential candidates for city council can now get a better understanding of how many hours of meetings await them should they win.

Coun. Mairin Loewen suggested Monday that a study of council and committee meetings over the past three years could be used to help candidates understand the commitment.

The study was presented at Monday’s meeting of council’s governance and priorities committee, which includes all members of city council.

“We should also add as a sidebar how many hours of reading we have to do before those meetings,” Coun. Troy Davies joked.

The study by the City of Saskatoon’s director of government relations, Mike Jordan, analyzed three years of meetings, from August 2014 to July 2017.

The study showed that city council and its five committees met for a total of slightly more than 757 hours or 31.5 days over the three-year period, an average of 252 hours or 10.5 days per year. Only the mayor belongs to all committees. The governance and priorities committee includes all city councillors and the mayor. Each councillor belongs to two other committees.

A concerted effort to conduct more business at meetings of the four standing policy committees appears to have reduced the number of hours council meets as a whole as the governance and priorities committee.

As a result, a greater share of total meeting hours is split between the other four committees: transportation; finance; planning, development and community services; and environment, utilities and corporate services.

The study also suggests that council is meeting less behind closed doors, from 40.9 per cent of all meeting hours during the first year to 21.5 per cent and 26.2 per cent in the second and third years, respectively.

“I think this council is doing a good job of trying to improve and be as clear and transparent as we can,” Mayor Charlie Clark said at Monday’s meeting.