Your city of Nanaimo councillor receives the agenda for the following Monday council meeting by 5:00 pm on the Thursday preceding the meeting. Sometimes those agenda amount to hundreds of pages of information.
Directors at the Regional District (7 of which are city counillors) receive the agenda for the following Tuesday meeting on the previous Friday.
The above image shows that for the January 13 city council meeting, councillors would have received a 106 page agenda to understand before making decisions that effects everything the city does, and how your tax dollars are spent.
Members of city council who also sit on the Regional District would have received a 1096 page agenda last Friday, which they are expected to have studied, ready to make million dollar decisions by tonight.
How can councillors give meaningful oversight to these guiding decisions without relying nearly totally upon the opinions of staff to guide them.
Do we really need elected directors and councillors, or is it time to elect the heads of departments within the city and the RDN making the real decision makers responsible directly to the electorate?
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