Attendance optional?

Back in the day, Prince Rupert City Council used to meet every week, a tiring and sometime repetitive process that seemed a tad excessive for a town of less than 18,000 people at the time.

Eventually that onerous burden of office was reduced to the bi-monthly process that we have today. Every two weeks (or so it seems) our elected municipal officials would be expected to gather in council chambers to provide public access to the wheels of municipal governance.

Of late though the public meetings grow shorter and the in camera ones grow longer, while it seems that the empty desks rival the occupied ones on a more and more regular basis. A case in point was the most recent council meeting which had its details covered quite fully but the princerupert.com website.

The Monday meeting apparently went on as scheduled despite the fact only four councilors were available for the session. Two of the other members of council, including the Mayor were unavailable due to the fact that they were out of town. This coming a week after much of council had spent close to a week in Victoria at the UBCM meetings.

Now one can understand the need to keep to a more or less regular schedule, and there are times when someone just can’t make a meeting. But if close to half the people tapped to form municipal guidelines can’t make the meeting, how good a representation is the average citizen really getting at Council. And is there perhaps a need to find a more councilor/mayoral friendly schedule to strive for full attendance if possible.

The Monday meeting also once again disappeared into the much debated closed session, which seems to be the norm most meetings now, again though one wonders if over half the council is unavailable if the closed session, how binding any decisions that they make might be? Is there recourse for the absent members to bring those items up for debate again, and if so does it not pose a bit of a redundancy on the whole flow of government?

The princerupert.com site does a fair amount of background work on the happenings at city hall, though at times the website is a bit hard to navigate. Once you figure out its peculiar directions there is some decent information (and of course opinion) available...

One item posted recently suggests that the Atlin Terminal parking lot lands may have been sold, which would be of interest to the local population considering the history of development in that part of the city.

The Daily News used to run a scoreboard of sorts on council meetings, a listing of who attended (or didn’t), and how they voted on key issues of the meeting. Perhaps its time for something similar to be provided once again, including a running total on how many of our councillors can make it regularly and who misses the sessions the most. Also handy might be a comparison of the amount of time in open session and that dedicated to the in camera period, as well as what issues each councillor felt were important in each session.

It might go a long way in helping the locals determine how open our local government really is and whether we have the full attention of our elected officials when it counts the most.