City council skips through a short meeting - all the votes were 7-0

By Staff

January 29th, 2019

BURLINGTON, ON

We are seeing a lot of those 7- 0 votes at city council these days.
Both Council and the Mayor are settling into a space that has little in the sense of design to it. It is hard to tell who the Mayor is when watching a web cast.

Hard to miss the Mayor when she wears her chain of office – except for when she is in city council chamber.

There are three people at the head of the Council Chamber; the City Clerk, a Clerk’s assistant and the Mayor who is usually identified as the person wearing the Chain of Office.

The seat the Mayor sits in isn’t elevated and you can’t actually see the Chain of Office Meed Ward is wearing.

The desks members of council sit as look as if they could be moved easily. Not much in terms of design to the space. It does look like it was designed by a civil servant.

The city crest could add some colour to an otherwise bland space – Council Chamber

The city crest tells something about the history of the city – it could be placed on the wall that has the city logo on it. One could probably place a winning bet that the Historical Society didn’t have a word of input on the design. It was done on the cheap and it shows.

Hopefully the wimpy look isn’t a reflection of the members of council.

Both the Mayor and the members of council are getting up to speed on the procedures that are part of municipal government. There are members of this council who have not done their homework – they fumble with the documents in front of them.

Surprisingly, the Mayor doesn’t have the grip one would have expected on procedure. There were too many nervous laughs, occasions when the Clerk had to offer direction. Meed Ward has probably delegated more than anyone else in the city and has been a member of Council for eight years; this stuff should be second nature to her – she’s not there yet.

Interim city manager Tim Commisso appeared to be the only city official at the meeting other than people from the Clerk’s Office.

There was one interesting bit of news that came out of the meeting. Interim city manager Tim Commisso has been asked to keep a closer eye on what the different levels of government are doing for the municipal sector.

The concern was with what the province is going to ask the city to do; suspicions as to what the Premier will try to do with rural lands is still ripe.

Figuring all this out is to be the subject of another Council Workshop.