Our City maintains its integrity by being very careful to follow our bylaws and procedures; sometimes rules are broken, and action must be taken to be sure errors are not repeated. Many people don’t realize how long the process is to encourage reform in a municipality, especially when facing the stonewalled resistance of City Hall.

Mike Sullivan’s delegation at last week’s council meeting marks (we hope) the end of a four-year effort to convince the City to abide by the municipal act and stop illegally meeting and deciding things in secret. If they follow the protocol Council adopted (although the clerk advised that it was not enforceable) then maybe Stratford will be truly open, transparent and democratic.

Secret proceedings can affect you and your family in a very direct way. Without public oversight and direct citizen engagement, Council runs the risk of leaving many of us out of the decision-making process on housing, social and public services, taxes and development. If the new closed meeting procedure is followed, we can be assured that Council’s decisions will be fair to all sectors of our population.

While we congratulate staff on what has been accomplished, Mike pointed out two possible issues. First, there seems to be no way for a councillor to ask for the meeting to return to open session if a topic comes up that should not be confidential. This was a recommendation in the Closed Meetings Inspector’s report. Council’s discussion of this point came later in the meeting (at the 3rd hour and 13 minute mark).  Staff believe that there is a duplication in other city documents that should cover moving into open session. We will be following this issue; training is to be scheduled to help councillors determine when it is appropriate for a matter to be held in secret. Hopefully a mechanism will emerge to allow councillors to easily share their deliberations with the public when it is appropriate for them to do so.

Secondly, the authority of the CAO has been significantly raised to include the hiring, firing and salary of all employees rather than just those below the rank of deputy director, which implies an abdication of responsibility on the part of Council, and seems to be unrelated to the question at hand.  This was discussed later in the meeting; staff believes that the CAO should have the same authority as the new HR Director; Councillor Hunter asked whether councillors would still have input on the number of employees, even if they no longer could comment on employee qualifications (the answer was yes). 

 We continue to work on the closed meetings issue. We have requested the minutes of more illegally closed meetings and illegal votes, which are still not available to the public. Unfortunately, we have been informed by the City Clerk that we will have to pay $800 to see them. It seems unreasonable to have to pay for council minutes that should be open to the public, so we are putting in a complaint. We’ll keep you posted on how it turns out.