With each new term of Council, the rules for how City Hall operates gets tweaked. After a conversation with new and returning councillors, senior staff and the Mayor, those tweaks get brought forward as a package of proposed changes in an omnibus report called the Governance Report. On Wednesday, that report was tabled at Council, and we’ll debate it at our meeting next Wednesday.
It’s a mammoth document and can be a bit tough to wade through without some context. You can find the report in French and English below, and the associated annexes through the link above, but I wanted to take a moment to boil it down into something more digestible. Below, for your consideration, are the proposed changes to City Hall rules I like, and the non-change about which I’m concerned. This isn’t a full list of all the changes, but I’ve done my best to capture the ones that are most significant, and that represent a significant departure (or in some cases not) from past practices.
In no particular order:
Committee structure changes that I support
Other changes I support
Changes about which I’m concerned
1. It is proposed that Council’s procedure by-law be “clarified” to make it clear the Mayor can only move a motion if they leave the chair, except with the will of Council. While I recognize that Council is always free to run its meetings as it chooses subject to statutory constraints and the will of Council, we should not be explicitly contemplating motions by the Mayor at Council when the Mayor is also acting as chair. When the chair of a meeting is also the mover of a motion, the potential for at least the perception of unfair procedural rulings is always present. That may be the most “Ottawa” thing I’ve ever written.
Continued budget “cap”
1. One of the key proposals in the Governance Report with which I am concerned isn’t a change at all. When Council prepares to move a budget forward, it provides “budget directions” - a target tax rate that will largely govern the increases provided to any given department. City staff will work with that cap adding and removing to the budget for items that are “pressures”. My concern is that in past, Council has treated the target tax rate as a hard cap on the budget. In an extremely challenging financial environment, and with unknown impacts arising from the provincial planning downloads, I encourage my colleagues to consider the budget flexibly. We may have to make hard choices to keep the budget to a level we consider affordable for residents, but that decision shouldn’t be based on an arbitrary tax cap.
Conclusion
I know councillors and civil society are poring over this document, which is large and pretty unwieldy. I'll continue to hear from residents and colleagues about surprises that they've found and absences they consider should be addressed. Feel free to drop me a line if you think there's something I've missed. The details in this report matter. Governance matters. Our attention may be on LRT today, but getting governance right and addressing the culture at City Hall are fundamental building-blocks to the issues raised by Justice Hourigan.