Stouffville to try evening council meetings

YorkRegion.com
May 20, 2015
Sandra Bolan

All Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville council meetings will be held at 7 p.m. starting in July.

The new schedule will run for six months.

Council meetings are currently split between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Tuesdays.

“It really comes down to the residents. We’re here to serve them,” said Councillor Rob Hargrave during Tuesday afternoon’s meeting, which had a full house.

Hargrave has been lobbying for all evening meetings the past 11 years.

Meetings have been held at 3 and 7 p.m. in Whitchurch-Stouffville since September 2007. That is also when council in committee and council meetings were amalgamated into one meeting, Karen Ewart, deputy clerk for the town, told The Sun-Tribune.

Prior to 2007 and dating back to 2003, council meetings were held twice a month on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. she said.

The change to an afternoon and evening meeting was part of an overall procedural bylaw review conducted by town staff.

Also voting in favour of the change was Councillor Iain Lovatt, who noted 3 p.m. meetings are notaccessible to his Ward 5 residents and as councillors, they have an obligation to make any meeting open and accessible to anyone.

Maurice Smith and Hugo Kroon were the only councillors to oppose the change.

Despite pushing all meetings into the evening, the town’s senior managers, who are obligated to attend council meetings, will not cash in or get more time off.

Council passed the CAO’s recommendation to provide managers with only a half-day in lieu time for attending evening council meetings, with a cap at five days of accumulated lieu time.

Until now, the 13 staff members required to attend council meetings received 3.5 hours in lieu time, per meeting.

On average, there were 15 evening council meetings per calendar year, which resulted in $187,050 of lieu time for town management, according to the May 5 staff report.

“We hire them by the job, I assume, not by the hour,” said Councillor Rick Upton, adding it’s unheard of for people to get paid lieu time for evening meetings and a change in mentality is required.

In a calendar year, there would be 30 evening council meetings, if the new schedule remains intact. Those meetings would result in 630 hours of accumulated lieu time, valued at $183,435, according to the report.

Under the new rules, those 30 meetings will result in 225 hours of lieu time, valued at $16,012.

Council also approved on Tuesday the opening of municipal offices Dec. 29 to 31 this year.

According to Altmann, the building was busy last year, in part because Yorkworks, one of the building’s tenants, was open during the holidays.