A St. Albert councillor says daytime committee meetings and earlier council meetings could deter people from seeking office in the future.
In response to the release of council attendance records earlier this week, Coun. Cam MacKay said the recent decision to move meeting times to 2 p.m. on Mondays makes it difficult to juggle a full-time job and municipal duties, which is reflective of his own attendance record.
The records, posted online on July 7, cover regular council meetings, committee of the whole meetings, standing committee meetings and council’s assigned internal and external committee meetings from January until the end of June, and show that although the majority of council have spotless and near spotless attendance records, McKay, who also works as a business consultant for Subway Devco, has missed 18 per cent of meetings this year.
The numbers show that Coun. Sheena Hughes and Mayor Nolan Crouse have never missed a meeting, Coun. Tim Osborne has only missed one meeting due to vacation and councillors Cathy Heron and Wes Brodhead chose to call in during the meetings they could not physically attend last month.
The only councillor with a less than perfect attendance record was MacKay, who has missed six meetings so far this year – four in the first quarter, which ended March 23, and two in the second.
Even former councillor Gilles Prefontaine, who now occupies the role of chief community development officer, had impeccable attendance before handing in his resignation, but left the table one councillor short for a total of 12 meetings.
While MacKay’s absence during the March 2 regular meeting of council was due to illness, the others are due to juggling multiple commitments, such as his full-time employment – something other council members don’t have to worry about, he said.
“This council is a bit of an aberration in that it doesn’t have a lot of people who work. It’s a part-time vocation and I should be able to fit it in,” said MacKay, noting that the current schedule makes it hard to balance a full-time job with municipal duties and could potentially be deterring qualified people from putting their names on the ballot.
“When I started this job, council meetings were at 4 p.m. so an average person could have a job and serve their community. Over the course of the term it’s been moved to 2 p.m., which makes it more and more inconvenient … If you’re an average person in this community, most people can’t run for council,” said McKay.
Following the 2010 election, council meeting times were pushed up an hour from 4 p.m. Recently, meeting times were again bumped up, with the remainder of 2015 calendar reading a 2 p.m. start.
He added that considering he was the only member of council with a job he thought his attendance was “pretty damn good.”
Compared to last year’s records MacKay missed one extra meeting in 2015.
Mayor Crouse said that the meetings were moved up to improve accessibility to the public.
“That might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s not. If you start your meetings at 2 p.m. you have more opportunities for more people (to come). We’ve got school classes coming, where you wouldn’t have been able to have them come if you had evening meetings. Coaches, hockey moms, hockey dads, realtors, lawyers, accountants can come at 2 to 4 p.m., where they might not come at 7 to 11 o’clock at night,” said Crouse.
He also said he doesn’t see how attendance is related to start times since councillors attendance can be recorded at any time during the meeting, whether they show up late, leave early or only stop by for a minute.
The records also demonstrate council’s attendance at assigned internal and external committee meetings, of which Brodhead missed two of 33; Heron missed six of 34; and Hughes missed four of 22; and Osborne missed four of 22.
Prefontaine missed three meetings in the weeks before he resigned. Before that his attendance was perfect. The mayor was present at all 40 meetings scheduled in the first two quarters of 2015.
Out of the five of his scheduled meetings, McKay was present for three, once acting on behalf of Hughes during a Subdivision and Development Appeal Board meeting.
McKay again attributes his absence to daytime meetings. The Capital Region Waste Minimization Advisory Committee, on which he sits, meets in Edmonton at 9 a.m. every third Thursday of the month and all Intermunicipal Committee meetings this year were held during the day.
Currently, the City of St. Albert has no policy dictating the number of meetings a council member can miss.
