In-person Council meetings, opening of Town Hall eyed for September return

Thestar.com
June 25, 2021
Brock Weir

Members of the public could be welcomed back into Town Hall as early as September.

This was the timeline presented to Council last week as numbers of new cases of COVID-19 continue to decline Ontario-wide.

First up could be a return to in-person Council meetings in September, according to CAO Doug Nadorozny, but just how those meetings will take shape still remains up in the air.

“We are now in the midst of planning what a Return to Work looks like,” he said. “There is a lot of work being done at the municipal level in general and specifically within York Region. All the municipalities in York Region and the Region have been together working on the future of work, taking lessons learned from the pandemic in how we might be able to offer more permanent changes to the delivery of service and to how work is done in the interests of a more efficient organization.

“For us, we are working on what that means if things continue on the trend they are now and numbers keep dropping. We believe there is a good prospect to start opening up Town Hall and allowing the public back into Town Hall. We also want to, at the same time, start the implementation of staff to [return] to Town Hall as well.”

More information on this aspect of the re-opening, he added, is hoped to be available by the time Council meets in July on “what the September time frame looks like.”

“As a guide, we’re using January as a time to establish when maybe more permanent changes as to how we operate might be proposed for Council’s consideration,” he said. “We have put off the probability of any in-person Council meetings over the summer period. We’re also planning for a return to Council chambers in September and will have more information on what that looks like, whether it is a hybrid or whether all public parts of the Council meeting are hosted in Council chambers. We’re working on that as well. There will be no change from a meeting perspective and working remotely until after Labour Day.”