City council schedule to change for 2019

City council voted a final time Monday night to change the schedule for council meetings in 2019, even though one citizen said there wasn’t enough public consultation on the matter.

Marie Bongard told council that although citizens could fill in a survey about the best times to hold council meetings, that survey was online – making it inaccessible to many seniors.

“Lots of people were excluded in this survey,” Bongard said.

Still, council voted to implement the schedule changes.

Meetings will start at 6 p.m. instead of 5:30 p.m. on Mondays, starting in 2019, and will operate on a four-week cycle instead of the current three-week cycle under the new schedule.

Under the current arrangement – adopted in January – councillors meet as the general committee on week one, take a break on week two and meet as city council on week three.

But the arrangement needs tweaking, states a city staff report, because several special meetings called this year to deal with a surfeit of reports at general committee meetings.

On occasions when it appeared there would be too much business to cover in a single sitting, special meetings were called (allowing agenda items to be spread over two meetings, instead of one).

This led to unpredictability for the public, states the staff report: some citizens were unsure when meetings were taking place.

That’s because there were 11 special meetings called – some on short notice, some on evenings when there was no regularly scheduled meeting.

The new proposal is for a fourweek cycle: on weeks one and two, general committee will meet. There will be no meeting on week three, and then on week four there will be a council meeting.

If there are five Mondays in a month, there will be no meeting on that fifth Monday.

Also at the meeting Monday:

Police office at terminal

Council voted a final time to allow Peterborough Police to open a small office in an unused cafe space in the downtown bus terminal as part of a larger effort to increase security.

A new city staff report states that over the last year, there have been two reports of sexual assaults in the stairwells at the upper-level Simcoe Street park-

ing garage, which have no security cameras.

The garage has also had 25 vehicle break-ins between April and June, and city police are called to the area about 13 times a month.

Council had a preliminary plan to renovate the empty cafe in the bus terminal so it can serve as a mini-police office, at a cost of $50,000 – now the plan is ratified.

There are also other security upgrades planned for the parking garage: a second full-time security guard, for instance at a $62,000 cost for a year, as well as security cameras in the stairwells for $42,000, panic alarms on all parking levels for $12,000 and new

LED lighting.

New Public Works yard

Council voted a final time to spend $23.5 million – rather than $22.5 million, as planned last year — to renovate a city-owned property on Webber Avenue to serve as the new city public works yard.

The city bought the former Coach Canada property on Webber a few years ago for conversion into a new public works yard. The idea was to move the yard there from an overcrowded site on Townsend Street.

The renovation on Webber Avenue started last fall and is expected to take a year – until this fall – to be done.

On Sept. 17, councillors gave preliminary approval to increase the project budget by $1 million. Now that plan has been ratified.

A staff report explains that the cost overrun is due to factors such as soil contamination and poor site drainage.

There was also an issue with the roof of the former Coach Canada office building, the report states, as well as a problem with the structural steel in the large on-site garage.

In early 2017, council hired J.R. Certus Construction Co. Ltd., of Vaughan, to do the renovations.

Parking restrictions on Rubidge St.

Council approved a new staff plan to allow only 15 minutes of free parking along Rubidge St., outside Rubidge Hall retirement home, rather than the current 60-minute limit.

The free parking zone outside Rubidge Hall is meant for Handi Vans to come and go, states a new city staff report.

But lately staff have noticed motorists parking there and doing errands elsewhere in the neighbourhood, making it difficult for the Handi-Vans to pull up.

Council voted a first time on Monday and then ratified the vote the same evening since it’s the last meeting of the term.

East City land:

A thin strip of land along the recreational trail off Hunter St. E., in the commercial core of East City, was declared surplus by council and sold for potential development.

Councillors ratified a plan Monday to sell the vacant land at 115 Hunter St. E. and 124 Robinson St. to Ashburnham Realty and to Graham Hawkins.

The lands are adjacent to the Rotary Trail just east of the building that houses Matsu Sushi on Hunter St. E.