Quinte News is clarifying and correcting a story published Wednesday night regarding a special Prince Edward County Committee of the Whole (COW) meeting regarding proposed changes to council’s Procedural Bylaw. Such a bylaw governs meeting time limits, number of delegations, length of time for delegations to speak, and length of time for members of the public to speak under public input at council and COW meetings.
It had been proposed at Wednesday’s special meeting that the number of delegations allowed be limited to three and if more people expressed an interest in speaking to council on a particular subject council could call a special meeting to deal with it.
Quinte News’s article gave the impression that county Mayor Steve Ferguson believed holding the number of delegations to three was “reasonable.”
That was not at all the case and we wish to apologize for the error. Essentially COW made no changes to the Procedural Bylaw currently in place and the matter will come before council again February 8.
BELOW ARE THE MAYOR’S COMMENTS FROM WEDNESDAY’S SPECIAL COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE MEETING
Everyone at this meeting, particularly the elected representatives, willingly put themselves into the position to receive comments from the public in any form about any issue. Email, phone calls, letters are the norm, so too are casual conversations on the street – lord knows that for many of us there is no such thing anymore as a quick trip to the grocery store. And I must confess that I enjoy that public interaction that enables me to appreciate how members of our community feel about matters we may have to make decisions about.
The avenues available to the public to talk to their elected officials collectively, as a group, about a matter they are passionate about are generally limited to public meetings including council meetings and CotW meetings.
The limitation of numbers of deputations and comments from the audience are of great concern to me. Whether for 10 minutes or for 3, people are investing time and energy to talk about subjects they are passionate about. For many of those people it takes considerable guts to stand at a microphone to present their concerns.
First of all, from what I see in the report, we don’t have a history of excessive numbers of deputations – so what problem are we trying to solve? It seems we may be creating another problem by putting the Clerk and the Mayor into the position of being the decision-makers of who can speak and who cannot, and I certainly won’t do that.
The criteria outlined in the current procedural bylaw has worked well and at this time I don’t think any deviation is necessary, so I would like it to remain as is.
As for comments from the audience, there is currently a limitation of 30 minutes for comments, a time allocation that seems reasonable. However, over the course of our term we have had many occasions when we have waived part 6.4 of the Procedural Bylaw to extend the amount of time and the number of people who could express their opinion, if such was necessary. I can think of no time over the course of my two terms where such a motion was not carried.
A further complication will be when we return to live hybrid meetings and members of the public pre-register to comment and other people show up at the meeting in person.
I would like the current practice to continue for the duration of this council, as I hope it will into future councils.
