Richmond Hill turns down request for recorded council votes

“We are unable to commit staff time to complete this task for you."

Yorkregion.com
June 25, 2019
Shelia Wang

Which way do your councillors lean, where do their loyalties lie, and do some of them vote as a block? These are questions Richmond Hill residents have raised but cannot be easily answered.

Richmond Hill’s city clerk turned down a request filed by The Liberal May 29 for a compilation of recorded votes on council since the start of the term.

“The Office of the Clerk does not have a database that tracks recorded votes,” Richmond Hill communications adviser Carrie Pitcher wrote in an email response.

“We are unable to commit staff time to complete this task for you. You are welcome to visit the website to find this information.”

This council -- sworn in on Dec. 3, 2018 -- has caused quite a stir among residents from the very beginning of the 2018-2022 term as a result of some controversial decisions, the comments and behaviour of some councillors and factional bickering between members of council.

It has left many residents wondering what is going on.

“They're an embarrassment and it's obvious they have an agenda to vote together to pass whatever they've (been) coerced to do,” resident Joan Engel wrote in a letter to the editor, published on yorkregion.com May 31.

She singled out five councillors -- Carmine Perrelli, Joe DiPaola, Greg Beros, Tom Muench and Castro Liu -- calling them a “gong show.”

At the most recent council meeting on June 11, the five councillors voted to refer a motion regarding climate change to staff to bring back a report within six months, which consequently delays the declaration of a climate emergency.

Engel was one of several residents who suspected an underlying voting pattern on council, according to letter and comments collected by The Liberal.

In an attempt to find out in how each councillor voted on issues where a recorded vote was called for, The Liberal filed a request to the city for a list of the results of all recorded votes from the council meetings in the first half year of this term.

A recorded vote is a written record that shows how each member of council voted on a specific Item or motion. A member present at a meeting at the time of a vote may request a recorded vote.

While it's not very common for municipal government to track these records since it is not mandated, some municipalities have taken it upon themselves to make it easy for residents to access.

For example, the neighbouring town of Aurora has been tracking recorded votes separate from the minutes since 2015. Every recorded vote by every councillor is compiled in a single spreadsheet, available and accessible to the public.

The City of Toronto has taken the reporting of recorded votes a step further by offering an interactive tool for people to easily generate the voting record for any council member.

But not here in Richmond Hill.

The clerk's office pointed to the city’s official website where the recorded votes are documented in the archive minutes of each meeting.

Ten council meetings have taken place between Dec. 17 and June. 11 where an unspecified number of recorded votes were taken, including the adoption of the new parkland policy, and the repealing of the downtown secondary plan.

Without sifting through the 20-page long meeting minutes of every meeting where recorded votes are not always clearly marked, there is no way the information can be collected.

The Liberal is working on compiling the recorded votes.