Can you believe it’s already been almost one month since I officially became a city councillor in New Westminster. In the four weeks that followed the inaugural ceremony, I’ve had the opportunity to attend a significant number of briefings and one regular meeting of council.
Let me first clear up a misconception. The position of councillor in a city the size of New Westminster is not considered a full-time position. In fact, besides Vancouver and Surrey city representatives, most civic officials are considered to be contributing their efforts on a part-time basis.
So exactly what does a ‘normal’ week in the life of a rookie councillor look like? Well, besides all the Monday and Wednesday briefing sessions organized by city staff, there are a lot of citizen inquiries that have begun to flow in.
As an elected official, I’m expected to review all the correspondence that comes in to city hall each week – and in some cases provide a direct response. I can assure those individuals and business owners who have submitted a letter or email to the mayor and council that they most definitely get forwarded to all of us for review.
On Monday, November 28th I attended my first regular meeting of council. This included a few staff reports and bylaws that required our approval. I took the opportunity to pull out of ‘consent agenda’ a report detailing our operating and capital expenditures.
What followed were a series of questions to staff about how we were investing your tax dollars. I want to applaud our Finance Department staff for the thoroughness of the report and their responses.
In my view, as expressed in council, I think these types of reports should not be included in a ‘consent agenda’. A ‘consent agenda’ is a bunch or reports that all get lumped together and voted upon at one time with no debate or discussion. I think major financial reports should be pulled out – and perhaps also include a formal presentation from our staff.
After all the reports were completed and voted upon by council, we had open delegations from the community. A total of 10 people were allowed to speak under our current Procedures By-Law. They spoke on a range of issues including crime and safety, bike lanes and the elimination of the Royal City moniker. If you want to read more about this, you can click on the Record stories here and here.
On a personal note, it was great to see so many passionate citizens taking the time out of their evening to come and speak to council. This is an important part of our civic democracy and it was definitely alive and well.
A day after our council meeting the snow began to fall. What ensued on the streets of our Metro Vancouver region was nothing short or horrific. There was massive traffic gridlock regarding what I refer to it as the ‘night of 100,000 stories.”
As a civic leader, I felt it was my responsibility to ask questions as to what happened and how we could have done better. That’s why this week Surrey Councillor Linda Annis and I called upon Minister Rob Fleming and Mayor George Harvie (Chair of Metro Vancouver) to host what we refer to as a ‘Snow Summit’
The Snow Summit is intended to pull all of the key stakeholders together under one roof to have a discussion on what happened and how we could have done better.
I’m hoping the Ministry of Transportation, Metro Vancouver, TransLink, Coast Mountain Bus, Mainland Contracting as well as representatives from our first responders will be there. It is not a ‘blame game’ exercise, rather, I want it to be an opportunity for us to learn from what happened to ensure it is not repeated again anytime soon.
There was a lot of public and media interest in the summit, but to date I have not heard back from Mayor Harvie or Minister Fleming as to whether they have any interest in hosting this review. Both Cllr. Annis and I will keep up the pressure in the coming weeks and hopefully we can secure a date and venue! I’ll keep you posted of any new developments.
On that note, I want to say I’ve really enjoyed my first few weeks ‘on the job’ and I hope I’ve helped to make a difference. If you have any questions, comments or queries, don’t hesitate to contact me at dfontaine@newwestcity.ca. I’ll be back at the keyboard soon with my next blog entry…so stay tuned!
