Saanich council will have fewer meetings spread over more meeting weeks. However the meetings themselves might not get any shorter.
Staff are now revising Saanich’s procedural bylaw after council picked its way through several recommendations designed to improve public input and deliberations.
The most significant pending change concerns council’s decision to alternate between regular council meetings and committee-of-the-whole meetings. Council will hold 21 regular council meetings and 20 committee-of-the-whole meetings for a total of 41 meeting weeks. The current practice sees council hold 66 combined regular and committee-of-the-whole council meetings across 33 meeting weeks.
Council’s decision to separate meetings came after a report from Ken Watson, director of legislative services, in which he warned against letting meetings go past 11 p.m. Since May 2016, 30 per cent of all meetings that started at 7 p.m. adjourned after the stipulated adjournment time of 11 p.m, according to the report. The average meeting adjourned at 10:15 p.m., the latest at 1:37 a.m.
Cited reasons long meetings included among others council’s decision to schedule regular and committee-of-the-whole meetings on the same date. This arrangement does not constitute “procedural best practice” because it threatens decision-making, said Watson. “After several hours of concentration, especially late at night, the ‘intellectual capacity’ of any group is compromised by mental fatigue,” said Watson earlier this month. “This can lead to less effective communications, and reduced decision-making quality.
While council unanimously approved this splitting, some members of council openly suggested that their choice might not actually shorten meetings.
Coun. Fred Haynes noted that the actual amount of allocated meeting hours is the same from the current arrangement.
“I did not see a material decline in the number of [debate] hours,” he said. Speaking before council Monday, Watson said it is hard to foresee the impact on the length of meetings. “Of course, the length of the agenda depends on what business needed to be accomplished,” he said earlier in responding to a question from Coun. Leif Wergeland.
Mayor Richard Atwell said it is possible that the number of the agenda items for each category of meeting could double, adding that regular council meetings often go quicker than committee-of-the-whole meetings. “On one Monday, may be we are done by 10 p.m. and on another Monday, we might be done by 11 p.m. or later. It really depends on how good we are in scheduling the more contentious items and trying to limit the number of those.”