WELLINGTON COUNTY – Township mayors in the county are waiting on provincial legislation so they can resume important business.
The COVID-19 situation has meant councils have been unable to meet for council and committee meetings.
“When you have a situation like we’re in right now, it’s not a good practice to have all the members of council in one room talking about anything,” said Kelly Linton, Centre Wellington mayor and County of Wellington warden. “It makes moving forward with government business a lot more difficult.”
Under the municipal act, electronic meetings are not recognized as official meetings. Even if legislation is passed to allow this, Mapleton mayor Gregg Davidson said current procedural bylaws don’t allow this. Councils still may have to meet in person to change this bylaw.
“We’re hoping the province will say ‘You know we’re going to make the measures, we’re going to change them right now so that you are allowed to do that without having to change your procedural bylaws,” Davidson said. “It doesn’t make any sense to make us come for a meeting to make us change procedural bylaws so we can not meet.”
Guelph/Eramosa mayor Chris White said business isn’t frozen at the township but this legislation will help move pressing things along.
“For example, you got a water report that has a legislative date, unless you get waivers on that we need to do certain things,” White said. “It would be good if they got this up and running.”
White explained that electronic meetings have been discussed as a possibility for a decade. Exact legislation and mechanics of how it works had never been figured out.
“I would assume this particular issue we’re going through right now is going to force them to figure out how to do it,” White said.
Davidson said the biggest challenge that a small municipality will face with this is how to keep it open to the public.
“I don’t know how they’re going to come about with keeping those meetings open to the public,” Davidson said. “We want to make sure that we are open and transparent to our community that we serve.”
Linton explained that Centre Wellington is set-up for this but the County of Wellington would have to invest in some equipment and both would need training to make this feasible.
“We might need a little bit of training for some of the councillors who haven’t used this technology in the past,” Linton said. “It’s going to take some work, it’s not something that we could do tomorrow.”
Davidson said despite having a video system installed last week, Mapleton isn’t set up to do video meetings the public could access. He said government funding would help but isn’t the most needed thing in his town.
“The funding that is needed is to support our small businesses and community members that are having a hard time with financing,” Davidson said. “As municipalities, we will figure out what we can do with the financing that we currently have.”
