Three Prince Rupert City Councillors and Mayor Herb Pond will be taking on some additional reading work in the weeks to come, that after Council decided to strike a sub committee towards a Policy Review Report and listing of documents presented at Monday's Council Session.
The Mayor opened the commentary towards the work by praising the staff in delivering on the report and then observed that the next step towards it should be turned over to a Council subcommittee for a fuller review.
"I'm very thankful for the overall putting together of this Council Policy Binder, I think it's a big step in the right direction. But I think tonight, I'd like us to contemplate it as just a stop.
There will be some suggestions around some cleaning up around the existing policy.
But I believe that Council in the end needs to strike a sub committee, who will take some time over time, to thoughtfully look through, now that policies have been assembled; thoughtfully look at what could be removed, what could be changed, what's missing, what could be added.
So the stage that I'm trying to set is I'm not anticipating we're going to do all that work tonight, but rather we can begin on the journey"
Mr. Buchan concurred with some of those thoughts noting how if more detailed discussion is required, a sub committee would be the way to go. The City Manager noting of four items that might be of some interest to the Council early on in their review.
"I would note that we don't know when the last time when Council, any Council has had a look at all of the policies.
There appear to be some dates where there's been some policy work in the past, so we've endeavoured to pull all of them that we can find together, so their inventoried and centralized and put into current format.
The changes that we've made initially here, really aside from formatting changes, two of them have some minor changes and four are more substantive.
So if you wanted to go to a recommendation that this simply go to a subcommittee that might be a time saving at this point, or of you want we can go through the four policies that have major changes to them for discussion"
The four policies identifies as major includes those related to Proclamations, Liquor License Referrals and two related to Vending Sales and Vending commercial use on public property.
A short discussion with Council members related to the four major policy changes came with some guidance towards a question from Councillor Adey on whether Council should fast track those items.
On that theme, the City Manager noted that there was no time urgency towards the policies up for review.
"I don't see this as time urgent and if you're going to strike a subcommittee to work on this, I think that's really the most efficient way is to just go there directly. The four with the more substantive, I think that the committee should very ably be able to deal with those"
Mayor Pond then moved to form the sub committee.
Towards that initiative, the first members of Council to take on the work will be Councillors Cunningham, Forster and Niesh along with Mayor Pond.
The full overview of the Policy Review can be explored through the document presented as part of the Committee of The Whole session on Monday.
The Discussion of the work ahead can be reviewed from the City's Video archive at the 39 minute mark of the Monday night session.
More notes from Monday's Council session can be reviewed through our Council Archive page.
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