Come and See!

I struggled with what to call this blog post, because there’s so much on this week’s council agenda to talk about that you really just need to come see for yourself! If you’ve never been out to a council meeting before, this coming meeting (Monday, March 25 2024) is a good one to come to. The agenda is packed with good information and action. I’ll quickly run through the agenda, and why it matters to residents. While this is just one agenda of the year, I hope it illustrates the kind of important information you can gain by participating in our meetings.

Public Meeting

While everything we do has some public impact, matters of particular importance have a carve-out in the agenda for presentations to keep council and the public informed.

This week we will be presented with a review of the finalized 2024 budget, complete with charts and graphs and highlights. If you’re concerned about how the municipality spends our collective money, this meeting is the best place to see how we’re planning to spend it this year. (There’s also a spot in the agenda for Citizens’ Comments, if you have something to say about it!)

We will also get an updated presentation on the water and wastewater rate study, which recommends increasing the rates we pay for our water and wastewater in order to ensure that we have enough money in our reserve fund to pay for future improvements to the system. (Also, I can’t mention water and wastewater without pointing out that these services are NOT funded by taxes — so if you live in an unserviced area, you are not paying for them in any way!)

Delegations

Delegations and presentations are a portion of the agenda where we get to hear from the public and/or from groups that we’ve asked to present information. This week we have one delegation from Gift from the Heart, a local oral health charity, updating us on the good work they’re doing. GFTH has been a recipient of municipal grants, and we appreciate them showing us how they’re spending that money to support the community!

We will also be getting a delegation from Doug McRae, a longtime local biologist, on the impact of invasive species in the bay. Doug’s information relates to a Notice of Motion later in the agenda about Mute Swans.

Staff Reports

This section usually makes up the bulk of our time in a meeting. Staff present an issue they’ve been working on for council’s information, and it almost always comes with a recommended course of action. These recommendations are extremely important, because we councillors are NOT the relevant experts on any topic we are presented with; our job is to weigh the evidence provided by staff against any concerns that the public might have, or any other matters that may not have been considered by staff, to determine what is best for the community. When staff present us with a particularly thorough report, we often don’t even have any questions! While some folks might consider us to be “rubber stamping” the work of staff, I want to point out that our staff generally do an excellent job, and our role is to provide oversight, so it’s a very good sign that we generally don’t have much to say about staff reports. If we have too much to say about staff reports, that shows there’s either a problem with staff, or a problem with council.

This week, Deputy Clerk Jessica Polley will present us with updated goals for the Accessibility Committee. I have the privilege of sitting on this committee, along with Councillor Faretis and several passionate residents, and I can’t say enough how much of an asset Jessica is to this team. The updates she’s recommending here have already been through the Committee, and while some of the updated goals are fairly ambitious, they also represent the least we can do for our residents. I’m hopeful we can really move this issue forward this year.

We’re also getting an update on an opportunity for the public to engage with our Economic Development department, which has undertaken to get Brighton a new municipal logo! Council saw it at our last meeting, and I quite like the idea. Do you like the proposed design options? Come and see how you can participate.

Staff are also presenting reports on major expenditures, including a new fleet of four pickups for public works and the tender for the first portion of the Harbour Street reconstruction. We’re getting right to work now that the budget has been passed, and I appreciate that our staff are wasting no time!

And finally, there was some public concerns expressed recently about council remuneration. If you want a detailed report about what we all made last year, there’s a report about that too.

Notice of Motions and Motions

This section is the only place where council gets to initiate action. Most of the matters we decide are initiated by staff or the public in the above sections of the meeting, but here we get to propose motions. Currently our procedural bylaw states that we need to start with a Notice of Motion, which is included in the agenda for all to see but is not discussed or voted on until the following meeting. So some of the items in this section this week are a Notice of Motion, which will be dealt with next meeting; and some are Motions that were initiated at the last meeting.

This week there are more than usual, including three from me. Two of the Notices of Motion I’m bringing this week relate to the Northumberland Inter-Municipal Task Force on Housing and Homelessness, which has been attempting to contribute positively to the current concerns around shelters and encampments. My third is a motion being promoted by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, asking the federal government for more sustainable funding. Another Notice of Motion relates to the environmental damage being caused by the Mute Swan, an invasive species that’s disrupting the ecosystem of the bay (and ironically, is featured on our municipal coat of arms!).

There are, of course, more dry parts of the meeting such as the approval of minutes and the like, but that part is over quickly. If any of the rest of the agenda catches your interest, please come out; or live-stream the meeting or revisit it later on our YouTube channel.