Tuesday, January 13, 2015

New Nanaimo City Council Shows Backbone

The January 12th COW meeting of Nanaimo City Council was the first opportunity to observe if our new city council would be any different than our old city council.

I was delighted to see that there is the difference of night and day. The old city council would have hauled out the official rubber stamp and approved staff's request for funding of items not currently in the financial plan. Our new council however demonstrates they want more input than merely a staff recommendation before making million dollar decisions.

They did give their approval to move forward with projects that were already approved in the 2014 - 2018 Financial Plan budget. Staff was looking for early approval of nearly $13,000,000 worth of projects they want to get under-way before this year's final budget is approved in May.

The unanimous support of Councillor Kipp's motion to change council meetings to Thursday rather than Monday further demonstrates this council's desire to rely on their own due diligence rather than having to rely so heavily on staff recommendations.

The next improvement I would like to see is a council that will insist on staff providing more background information with their reports which should include an extensive cost/benefit report clearly showing the fiscal impact of different decisions.

allvoices

5 comments:

  1. A good start but I think we should wait for the next song before we start to dance. especially liked Bill Yoachim's remark about needing to stay within a budget just like they do in real life......
    Cliff Marcil

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  2. Earn that paycheque to remain on board the Ship of Nanaimo.

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  3. Whats wrong with staying on budget, that too is refreshing coming from council and I think there is some hope at last for the people to be heard and good things to happen. Good Job council!!!!

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  4. Submitted by Janet Irvine:
    I have today, Jan. 16, written to Mayor and Councillors to ask if the regular open council meetings that begin at 7:00 p.m., will continue to be televised from the Shaw Auditorium, as Shaw TV Channel 4 televises the “Voice of BC” program (Vaughn Palmer), weekly on Thursdays at 7:00 p.m.

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  5. Janet, you need to call Shaw as they are the ones in charge of putting council on their channel.

    ReplyDelete

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