Merritt city council is going to be releasing more information about issues raised during closed meetings, often call in-camera meetings, but they have rejected a plan to release closed meeting resolutions once every three months.
Shawn Boven, the city’s chief administrative officer, did confirm that council had looked at the option of releasing closed meeting resolutions on a quarterly basis, but voted against the idea after conducting some fairly extensive consultation with other small cities in British Columbia.
“The idea was initially brought up by staff and we did some investigation and discovered there are only two cities in all of B.C. who are doing it (releasing quarterly resolutions from closed meetings),” said Boven.
The City of Nanaimo and another small community on Vancouver Island have introduced bylaws to release resolutions discussed during closed meetings once every three months, he said.
That information was brought back before Mayor Neil Menard and members of city council and they opted against the idea, said Boven.
However, council has made a commitment to release much more information that is discussed during closed meetings than has been the case over the past several years, he said.
“We still want to work with the community to release as much information as we possibly can from these closed meetings as soon as appropriate,” he said.
There has been a common saying for many years when it comes to municipal politics that the “three l’s … labour, legal and land” are the only matters that must be discussed in private and outside of the public and media, but that’s not necessarily accurate, said Boven.
“It’s still true that we are not allowed to discuss in public matters relating to labour, legal and land, but there is much more than that,” he said, without getting into details. “We are bound by law to discuss certain issues out of the public eye.”
The reason behind first bringing the idea before city council was to renew the city’s commitment to greater transparency in municipal government in Merritt and Boven is confident local citizens are going to be happy with this renewed commitment.
“The members of council have committed to more open and transparent government and releasing as much information as we possibly can from matters discussed in closed meetings is a big step in the right direction to increasing that transparency,” he said.
In an effort to promote the commitment to municipal government transparency, Mayor Neil Menard is continuing a series of scheduled meetings with regular members of the public.
