Councillor Cunningham calls for more public updates for Council sessions

The tail end of Monday's City Council session found Councillor Barry Cunningham returning to an occasional theme of his when it comes to how City Council is viewed by the public.

With one of the longer serving Council members once again seeking to have Council invite civic department heads to Council chambers, in order to provide a public update on current projects and upcoming plans as part of the regular council sessions.

Mr. Cunningham noted that it would be beneficial for Council to have department heads appear at such sessions, so they could share some information with the public. He also observed for his fellow Council members how there is always a call from the community for more transparency at City Hall.

And while he added that the city is not hiding anything, he did stress his desire to see a more regular approach to such updates, noting that not everyone in the community gets their news of civic activities from the Internet, offering up a few opinions towards how he views the local paper and what he called their diligent coverage of local issues.

As well as the prospect of a parade of civic officials to provide updates, Mr. Cunningham also included the request that the RCMP be included in the list of potential participants in such forums, noting that was something that Council had included in the past.

And while that's a good start, Council perhaps could even expand  on Mr. Cunningham's invitation list further. As we noted in our year end review of Council's year in December, this current city Council hasn't offered up many opportunities for such reviews over the course of their first two years.

Among some other areas of interest for the public and where an update could be helpful could be offering up some background for the community on the latest developments from Watson Island, CityWest and the Legacy Fund to name a few key areas of note.

You can review Mr. Cunningham's quest for an increase in the flow of information from the City's Video archive, he introduces the topic at the thirty nine minute point.




A full overview of Monday's City Council session can be found on our Council Timeline Feature here.

An archive of some of the notes taken from the Council sessions can be examined on our Council Discussion page.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review