Owen Sound City Hall. (Photo by Claire McCormack. July 2024)
Owen Sound is making some changes to its public question period during council meetings.
Council passed a series of motions Monday evening to update the city’s procedural by-law, and the format for public question period will be altered with them.
Public question period will be changed to “public forum,” and comments, not just questions, will be welcomed from community members during it. Public forum during council meetings will be limited to 15 minutes, while each speaker will be allotted a maximum of three minutes. That’s a shift from the current framework, where speakers get up to five minutes and there’s no limit on the overall length of question period.
Council also passed a motion to ensure that only items within the jurisdiction of council & committee could be placed on meeting agendas — such as delegations or correspondences — at the discretion of the mayor and city manager. But another motion to limit comments during public forum only to items on council’s agenda was voted down.
What does all that mean? Essentially, you can show up to public forum and speak up to three minutes about anything, but the entire forum won’t last more than 15 minutes. And now some delegations or correspondences could be kept off council agendas if the mayor or city manager decides it’s not in the purview of council or committee, but public forum is still wide open for those issues.
“It won’t really be that much different from how we’re doing it,” Owen Sound clerk Briana Bloomfield told councillors. “We do try to accommodate the majority of requests, but currently there’s nothing in the procedural by-law to provide an opportunity for us to suggest to somebody that there is a different option for them to have their issue looked at.”
City councillors had a lengthy discussion during Monday’s meeting about the procedural by-law changes.
Coun. Marion Koepke felt they spend too much time on issues that “we can’t resolve directly around this table.”
“I think our local taxpayers are getting ripped off on our time, because we’re spending a lot of time on social issues,” she says. “I know there are social issues that will come to this table … but we don’t have a budget line for these social issues. I just think we need to stick to our own business and resolve some of that. We’re getting off base.”
Coun. Jon Farmer: “If we pre-emptively limit what can come before council, then we’re not actually creating an open space for the community as a whole to come and bring their concerns to identify areas for advocacy.”
Deputy Mayor Scott Greig: “I think we should remain receptive on the ability to entertain various dialogue on various matters that come to the council, that are concerns of the community.”
And Mayor Ian Boddy says “we aren’t supposed to be a public forum on everything.”
“That’s not really the purpose of what we do here,” Boddy says.