Should local committee meetings be held virtually or in-person?
That was the question facing Grey Highlands council at its meeting on Aug. 2. A relatively straight forward request from Coun. Dan Wickens that the municipality’s Road Safety Community Partnership Committee hold an in-person meeting set off a series of tricky procedural moves and a council debate.
Wickens said the safety committee would like to hold an in-person meeting as a team-building exercise.
“We wanted to meet once in-person to get to know each other. We’re not asking for hybrid meetings. It’s just that simple,” Wickens said during the discussion.
Grey Highlands has an official policy that all council and committee of the whole meetings are hybrid style – both in-person and virtual. All other meetings including: committees, task forces, public planning hearings, police services board and committee of adjustment are held virtually.
Because Wickens was requesting a change of official municipal policy, his resolution to hold an in-person meeting was subject to a reconsideration vote by council. Such a move requires two-thirds of the council vote in favour to take another look at the policy. The reconsideration motion narrowly passed in a 5-2 vote.
Coun. Paul Allen worried that council was changing policy on the fly.
“This is going to open the whole floodgate for committees. What we do here, we’ll have to do for all,” said Allen.
Clerk Raylene Martell explained that committee meetings have been held virtually in order to reduce the amount of staff time required for the meetings. She said the hybrid council/committee of the whole meetings requires the presence of two members of staff – one to deal with the minutes, resolutions and council inquiries/questions and the other to run and manage the live video stream and related equipment.
Martell said the virtual-only meetings require less staff, but offer the same ease of access for the public to attend online from anywhere.
“There are pros and cons for everything,” she said.
Coun. Joel Loughead said the request from the safety committee was to hold a single in-person meeting.
“This is not about flip-flopping between the two (virtual or in-person),” said Loughead.
Allen reiterated his concerns about a potential policy change and said that virtual meetings had made the professional lives of councillors easier. Allen noted that previous to the COVID-19 pandemic, when all meetings were in-person, his travel time to a meeting would often be longer than the meeting itself.
“It’s a way to do this job without taking 80 per cent of our life,” said Allen. “I’d hate to see it go back to every meeting in-person. We need to think of all the ramifications to allowing all the committees to go back to in-person.”
After a significant discussion on the matter, Loughead proposed a compromise amendment to the resolution from Wickens that would see local committees permitted to meet twice a year in-person after a two-thirds majority vote of the committee approved the meeting.
Council approved the compromise unanimously.
