Committee Consolidation

I first started blogging in seminary to help me think through an issue thoroughly. How to have a successful resident committee is something I’ve been thinking about for the past five years, off and on, and that issue is coming to a head at Monday’s council meeting. So now is the perfect time for a thorough post on committees!

Why Have Committees At All?

Brighton has about a dozen committees made up of residents, staff, and members of council. That’s more than any nearby municipality, and each one has a specific purpose. But the thing they all have in common is that they exist to engage residents directly in matters the municipality is considering.

We sometimes forget that councillors are, in fact, still residents. The point of having a council is to have the business of the corporation of the municipality directed by residents. Through the election process, councillors are supposed to be hearing directly from our neighbours and having our perspectives informed by them. And after the election, our contact information is available and we encourage everyone to give us a call, or send an email or letter, or even to bring a delegation to council, so that we can continue to hear from you all. So, at least in theory, the whole operation is already resident-led, right?

But councillors have dual roles: we represent the residents to the municipality, but we also represent the municipality to residents. We have to see both sides, and weigh them when we make decisions. Residents who sit on committees are able to maintain more of a one-sided perspective when they speak directly to council, and that’s a good thing; it can keep us grounded.

That distinction between councillors and other residents is also very evident in terms of perception: councillors are very often not seen or treated as residents. That shows in the demand for resident committees: councillors are residents who represent residents, and yet many residents feel that they need a committee in order to have a voice. (That’s worthy of a post or two on democracy and its limitations!)

And some committees are formed because of the expertise that is needed to adequately address certain issues. During the last term of council I brought a delegation to council requesting the formation of a Sustainability Committee because I recognized that the municipality did not have a climate action plan, nor any staff with the expertise to advise council on environmental matters. During this term of council, the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee was formed for similar reasons: in the absence of policies and perspectives on staff or council, diverse voices needed to be engaged and represented in municipal governance.

Types of Committees

So we have resident committees in order to provide an avenue for resident input and expertise, which helps inform and ground councillors as we make decisions on behalf of residents; and to help ensure that residents feel heard in municipal processes that affect them.

Some of those committees are statutory, which is to say, required by provincial law: this is true of the Accessibility Advisory Committee, for example. Others are quasi-judicial, which is to say, they exist to uphold the law: the Property Standards Committee, for example, cannot have a sitting councillor on it, as that would politicize property standards disputes and by-law enforcement in the community. (I sat on Property Standards before I was on council, and could not keep my seat there once I was elected.)

Some committees are designed to provide oversight on certain matters, often related to partnerships with outside groups or agencies. The Brighton Landfill Liaison Committee meets infrequently, but given that our subject matter is usually related to monitoring the environmental impacts of the landfill in our community, it will continue to meet (probably infrequently) long after the landfill is closed. I was assigned to the Brighton Wildlife Area committee when I first joined council, being a committee oriented around the management of specific lands owned by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in Brighton; but it never met, and was formally disbanded by the ministry before I could attend a single meeting, which means that Brighton no longer has regular or direct input into the management of those lands unless it is initiated by staff.

Other committees are Steering Committees, such as the Applefest and Community Events committees. They are oriented around specific events, and provide a force of volunteers who support municipal staff as they do the legwork to organize and shape the official events in our community. They’re very hands-on.

Advisory Committees exist to advise council on matters within their respective areas of focus and expertise. I already mentioned the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Advisory Committee, which brings perspective from racially diverse and 2SLGBTQ+ residents; and the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committee, which advises council on environmental issues on an ongoing basis. I use these two examples because I’m on both of them, but other advisory committees are similar, including the Rural Advisory Committee.

Finally, some committees are designed to exist for a specific purpose and for a short time. The Strategic Plan Committee was struck to organize the creation of a new strategic plan, and to review it mid-term; once that was done, the committee dissolved. The Brighton Homelessness Task Force was struck to examine the issue and provide a report to inform council of the scope of the issue and make recommendations for addressing it; once that report was received and the recommendations adopted, the task force was dissolved.

The Problem(s)

All of this makes sense, at least in theory. So why is council considering this issue on Monday? There are quite a few issues, and the recent proposal to change committee structure has emphasized some and surfaced others.

Some are very practical:

• Committees are difficult to recruit for, and committees with low membership or attendance often struggle to make quorum, which means that meetings get cancelled and committees become less reliable;
• Committees take a considerable amount of staff time to run. While some committees exist in order to support staff, or to provide expertise that doesn’t currently exist on staff, those same committees can often take considerable staff resources just to facilitate meetings and input;
• Committee members are not staff: they do not have formal training in procedure or municipal structure, which means that they are sometimes unsure of when they can or should speak in a meeting, who is responsible for what, etc., which can reduce their effectiveness and sense of purpose;
• Committee members have noted that they don’t always have time to thoroughly review the agenda before attending the meeting, which reduces their ability to provide input.

Those first two issues (recruitment/retention, and staff time/workloads) were the catalysts for this review of committee structures. Our staff have been struggling with them for a long time. Part of the issue is that we’re experiencing growing pains: larger municipalities often have a member of the Clerk’s department dedicated solely to this kind of work, or dedicated to the specific areas that we have committees for (e.g., a Sustainability Officer or EDI/Accessibility Coordinator), but our Deputy Clerk wears all of those hats in addition to her many other duties.

The latter two issues above are relatively straightforward: we need to provide better training for committee members, and perhaps to extend the time between the meeting agenda being published and the meeting itself so that members have more time to understand the issues and prepare input.

But other problems are more systemic and procedural:

• Our systems and procedures are oriented around a staff/council relationship, and there are many mechanisms that ensure that staff get input from council; there are very few mechanisms for ensuring that advisory committees are called upon to advise, much less to have that advice implemented:
  • If staff does not remember to seek the advice of an advisory committee, then they’ll bring an issue to council, which must then make a decision without the committee’s expertise being included, or must send the matter to the committee. (It is worth noting that there are disagreements about the right order to do this in; some hold that matters should be referred to committees by council, which leads to a situation in which a matter comes to council, then goes to committee, and then comes back to council, a process that might take months!);
  • If council isn’t on the ball, we might make a decision on the matter without remembering to seek the advice of the committee. Remember the issue with the swans? That issue did not receive any input from the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committee, and by the time it was sent to the committee there was already much confusion and frustration in the community, AND many on the committee felt frustrated, disrespected, and useless;
  • If a matter does go to the relevant advisory committee, the mechanism for that committee being heard is to make a recommendation for council. In the absence of deeper procedural training for committee members, many members don’t know that they need to make a motion to recommend something to council; and if the councillor(s) appointed to that committee don’t remember to do it, then the committee might end up having a robust conversation that never results in anything. This has happened a few times on committees that I’ve been a member of, and while I am getting better at ensuring that my committees always pass motions making recommendations and requests of council, I’m far from perfect in this regard.
• Our organizational design as a corporation is oriented around departments, each with their own leadership and structure designed to have clear workflows and deliverables. Committees largely exist outside of those structures and workflows, sometimes with subject matter that doesn’t fit clearly into any department. Our Director of Planning is the staff liaison for the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committee, which makes about as much sense as possible given our current org chart, but his regular work is mostly only tangentially related to the work the committee wants to do. Which department should look out for Accessibility, or Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion? Those both fall to the Deputy Clerk, who also serves as secretary for those meetings, just for lack of other options. If there is no-one on staff dedicated to the subject of the committee, then there’s no-one specifically integrating the work of that committee, and things done off the side of someone’s desk don’t always get the attention that they deserve. But reorganizing is hard work: Organizational Behaviour is an entire academic field that draws from the fields of Social Psychology, Economics, and Management Theory, and it’s nonetheless a science that is incredibly difficult to implement.

All of these things lead to committee members showing up (or not showing up) and saying “what are we even here for, if council doesn’t seek our advice, or doesn’t hear it when we offer it?” And I don’t blame them.

Advisors vs Doers

One of the tensions that the Sustainability and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committees have felt from the beginning is between advising and doing. Volunteers tend to be people who want to roll up their sleeves and do something, and compared to most volunteering opportunities, advisory committee meetings feel like nothing is happening. We meet 4-ish times per year, discuss things, make a recommendation, and then later hear back that our recommendation was implemented. Our sleeves remain firmly un-rolled, for the most part.

Which is not to say that we can’t do anything. The question becomes, are we the right people to be doing the thing? For example, both of those committees (and I use them as my examples because I sit on both committees, perhaps it’s true of others too) have a Terms of Reference that includes supporting annual events. The Sustainability Committee initially supported the ENSS Environmental Committee when they were putting on Earth Day events at Memorial Park; and the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee supports community groups as they put on Pride events each year. But neither committee’s membership is in a position to be organizing events from scratch, which means that our involvement tends to be financial (donating money from our budget) and volunteering some time (as members are able). When ENSS stopped organizing Earth Day events, we weren’t able to pick it up entirely. If the municipality wants to have events, should they be organized by the Events committee? If community groups want financial support for their work, shouldn’t that go through Grants in Aid? There’s some ambiguity and overlap that makes events challenging for these advisory committees, which I think is why the current proposal for restructuring includes language like “working group” and “work plan”.

But even as a working group, what are we capable of? Would the Sustainability Committee just become the Earth Day Committee, or can we take on actual projects? If those projects are substantial in workload, and volunteers are limited in their ability or time, shouldn’t we just make a recommendation that council direct staff to do that work? Which brings us back to being an advisory committee that’s advising rather than doing. Jobs that are small enough for a handful of volunteers seem too small for the municipality, being the central organization of residents’ resources, to take on, and there are other volunteer groups that already do jobs like that (e.g., Rotary Club, who plant trees annually); and jobs that are bigger than that seem too daunting or impractical for volunteers. Where is the sweet spot that makes all of the meetings and volunteer and staff time worthwhile?

When it comes to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, what does doing really look like? We want to promote diversity in our community, but aside from events (again, are we stepping on the toes of the Events Committee?), what does that look like? We participate in events from the community (e.g., Pride events, Applefest), and this year we have t-shirts to identify us as committee members when we serve as a sort of welcoming committee at Applefest. But should we be seeking out justice issues in the community? What would we do when we find them? We are not a judicial body (there’s a Human Rights Tribunal for that), nor are we a committee of the HR department for the municipality. Trying to get our name and ideals out into the committee, so that residents know who we are and what we do, is challenging to say the least. The goal is to be a resource to equity-seeking residents in Brighton, to normalize and celebrate diversity in the community, and to make everyone feel included and welcome here. Those are wonderful goals, but they don’t have a clear to-do list attached to them, and certainly nothing with clear, measurable outcomes that we can celebrate and plan for.

Conclusion

I don’t yet know what council will decide on Monday night. I know that the Clerks make recommendations based on the practical realities they face, and that their suggestions are based on their experience trying to organize committees who are struggling. This process of review has identified things that can be improved by both staff and council, and so no matter what happens on Monday, we’re making progress!

I am hopeful that, no matter what the redesigned structure of these committees looks like, we can implement at least some of the recommendations to ensure that committees are better trained and utilized moving forward. Residents deserve the opportunity to have that direct voice, and the training and resources to ensure that they can make good use of it.