Town of Whitby delegates emergency authority to mayor, CAO due to coronavirus

Mayor: 'If hard decisions are being made I really want you (councillors) to share in that, trust me'

Yorkregion.com
March 18, 2020
Tim Kelly

Extraordinary times call for, well, extraordinary measures and on Friday morning at a hastily called Whitby Special Council meeting, council decided to delegate special emergency authority to the town’s mayor and chief administrative officer.

The reason for the 9 a.m. Friday meeting was, of course, the coronavirus pandemic, and, with all nine members of council present, it was unanimously decided that, in case of an emergency, Mayor Don Mitchell and CAO Matt Gaskell could act without council’s permission or consent to conduct emergency town business.

The mayor made it clear he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the notion.

“I would rather have it structured so council would always be called together (for a decision) except when that is truly impossible for whatever reason,” Mitchell said.

The CAO added that council would be advised within 24 hours of the use of delegated authority by the mayor or the CAO.

And just to make sure councillors got the point that he really wasn’t excited about using delegated authority Mitchell said: “If hard decisions are being made that are going to upset a lot of residents, I really want you (councillors) to share in that, trust me.”

Much of Friday’s meeting involved a briefing from Durham Region’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Kyle, who filled in members of council on the latest issues surrounding the pandemic at the Durham level.

Whitby’s regional councillors had received a primer from Kyle on all coronavirus issues a few days earlier so this was chiefly of help to the four local councillors at Friday’s meeting.

Before Kyle briefed council, Reg. Coun. Elizabeth Roy, a frontline health care worker, who worked through the SARs virus in 2003 and H1N1 in 2009 and is working at Lakeridge Health as a medical radiation therapist, urged her colleagues to try not to be “too over-reactive and to use good hygiene.”

In a reference to all the coronavirus misinformation floating around these days on the Internet she quipped, “Google is our enemy!”
Kyle admitted the health care system is “stretched” as it is currently flu season on top of the coronavirus pandemic hitting.

West Ward Coun. Deidre Newman asked Kyle if Durham had adequate testing resources for larger numbers of cases.

Kyle admitted there was an increasing shortage of test kits indicating the main supplier of Durham’s kits was, ironically in Italy, the second hardest hit country for coronavirus in the world after China.

Councillors had a brief discussion about closure of most of the town’s public facilities including all libraries, Iroquois Park Sports Centre, McKinney Centre, Whitby Civic Recreation Complex and Whitby 55+ (Whitby Seniors’) Centre, among many others. They voted to close the facilities for at least three weeks.

Whitby CAO Matt Gaskell also pointed out at the meeting that 5,000 people had signed up for town programs, the bulk of which are offered at town facilities and said refunds would be provided to registrants.