Changes to St. Albert city council’s procedural bylaw have been delayed until January after council approved two amendments.
While council gave second reading to the bylaw at the Dec. 5 meeting, chief legislative services officer Chris Belke suggested third reading should wait until two amendments could be properly written into the final document, which won’t be until January because of council’s Christmas break.
The initial intent of revisiting the procedural bylaw was to increase the length of time between publicly posting agenda reports and closing a public hearing from three days to 17. However, council has also made several other minor changes to the procedural bylaw and pulled out some sections into separate bylaws or policies.
Council debated limiting councillors to 10 minutes of debate each on any given topic, and how often seating assignments are changed.
Coun. Cam MacKay put forward a motion to remove the cap on how long each councillor has to debate each change, arguing that lengthy debates have not been a problem for this council and the democratic process demands a full consideration of the issues.
“I think we’d be better serving the public if we didn’t restrict ourselves to an artificial time period for debate on a matter that comes before council,” he said.
The motion passed with Mayor Nolan Crouse and councillors Wes Brodhead and Cathy Heron voting against the change. Heron argued the limit is in line with Robert’s Rules of Order, on which council procedure is based, and regardless councillors should strive to be succinct.
“You can say a lot in a few words, and I think that is a focus we should all be trying to work towards,” she said.
Coun. Sheena Hughes brought forward an amendment to remove a section of the bylaw that would have had councillors changing their seating assignment once per year, rather than once per term as is the current practice.
“I don’t think it’s necessary for us to play musical chairs every year,” she said.
Crouse and Heron were the only two councillors to oppose that motion, arguing there are benefits to council changing up seating because then councillors can get to know each other’s perspectives a little better.
The procedural bylaw changes have been in the works for two years, since Coun. Osborne first suggested the public hearing process should be changed to allow the public longer to assess administrative reports.
Under the current bylaw, the agenda package including administration’s report on any given public hearing is posted to the city’s website around 3 p.m. the Friday before the Monday meeting, giving members of the public just three days to read the information and prepare.
The amended policy will require the administrative report on the public hearing topic to be made available to the public online before the public hearing is even advertised, 17 days before the public hearing.
As part of the same discussion, council also approved a separate bylaw defining the council agenda committee, which established what items end up on which agendas, and two policies related to the public hearing process and meeting through electronic communications.
