REGINA - Many Saskatchewan communities think their own council meetings are too long, but Regina’s meetings are something else.
Their regular Wednesday council meetings at City Hall have routinely lasted several hours in recent months, starting at 1 p.m. and often not wrapping up until 8 or 9 p.m. at night.
The most recent meeting on Wednesday lasted a grand total of seven hours and eight minutes, factoring in the mandated 15-minute breaks every 90 minutes of discussion as well as a longer break for dinner.
The previous week, their Executive Committee meeting started at 9 a.m. and didn’t wrap up until into the evening — a grand total of eight hours and 40 minutes, counting all the mandated breaks.
It’s a long day not only for councillors and the administrative team, but also for the various delegations sitting in the gallery waiting their turn to speak. There is also added frustration when meetings are so long that council cannot accommodate all the items on the agenda. Those other topics will end up being deferred to a future meeting — a situation that has happened from time to time.
However, there is a proposal before Regina council to address those issues and have the process speed up for council and Executive Committee meetings.
Councillor Bob Hawkins has brought forward a notice of motion for the city to adopt a Consent Agenda, and to use the model currently in place at the City of Saskatoon for their meetings.
What a consent agenda is is an agenda in which routine or non-controversial items are adopted without debate upon approval of the meeting agenda.
As well, under this model, any member of committee or council can request that any item of business on the consent agenda can be removed and placed on the regular agenda for full debate, with such request being automatically accepted without debate.
The discussion of Hawkin's consent agenda motion will come back to the June 21 meeting.
In speaking to reporters Wednesday, Mayor Sandra Masters said the consent agenda idea came out of discussions at the recent Federation of Canadian Municipalities meeting they attended in Toronto.
“We had this discussion not just with the big city mayors, but other mayors we were running into. Almost all of them had consent agendas," said Masters.
She noted instances where a consent agenda would have saved time. One example Masters could point to was a council vote near the end of Wednesday’s council meeting in favor of the city’s Housing Accelerator funding application to the federal government.
It was “unanimous, no one wanted to talk because we ready to go. We could’ve voted on that and multiple others just to get them through and probably saved ourselves an hour.”
