Council members still mum on reduced Schedule for 2018

With two council sessions now out of the way from a schedule of but seventeen for the year, members of Prince Rupert Council have yet to take advantage of their public forum to offer up  an explanation as to why they have decided to reduce the public council session calendar for the year.

The topic came up at Monday night's City Council session, with city resident Larry Golden making use of the public comment period of the Committee of the Whole to raise the issue of the reduced schedule, which will eliminate any Council sessions from September to just before the November municipal election.

As well, Mr. Golden as part of his line of questions for Council also inquired about the city's frequent use of Closed Meetings and whether they had any plans to reduce the reliance on them.

With Mayor Brain absent on the night, Councillor Barry Cunningham was serving as Acting Mayor on the night, and while he challenged Mr. Golden on a number of his other comments from the public access portion of the night, he offered up no response to the inquiries related to council scheduling or the use of the closed council session process.

The Acting Mayor was not the only one to disregard the question, as the meeting came to an end, the remaining four council members in attendance (Councillor Mirau was also absent on the night) did not take up the topic of the Council schedule for the year, or the closed sessions as part of their own period of the meeting that is set aside for commentary or questions.

That despite a Monday evening session which lasted but forty seven minutes on the night, which should have offered up a good opportunity for commentary and discussion on the topic from the elected officials.

By choosing not to respond to the inquiry, they for the most part have left the very legitimate question from a city resident about the most basic element of municipal government to go unanswered.

You can review the exchange between Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Golden from the City's Video Archive starting at the fifteen minute mark, the City Councillor's time for comments and observations comes at the thirty one minute point.





We first made note of the City Council decision to reduce the workload for 2018 back in December with this item from the blog.

For more items of interest from Monday's City Council session see our Council Timeline feature here.

Further background to the work of City Council can be found on our Council Discussion page.



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