Council approves additional meeting

Black Diamond’s mayor and councillors will get down to business with one more opportunity to make decisions each month.

Town council decided at its Oct. 19 meeting to replace its monthly daytime Committee of the Whole (COW) meetings the last Tuesday of each month with a regular meeting to give council another opportunity to make decisions.

The first daytime meeting is scheduled for Oct. 25 at 9:30 a.m. in the municipal building.

“The number-one benefit is we can actually make decisions at these meetings whereas at the COW we couldn’t make decisions,” said Mayor Glen Fagan. “At the COW meetings there is no public input, unless you’re a delegation. We discussed issues and they would be passed forward to the next council meeting.”

Fagan said discussions about the value of the COW meetings came up during the post-election training session in September after Fagan was elected as mayor and Brian Marconi as councillor in last summer’s byelection.

“It’s one opportunity where council can sit down and have a full-blown discussion on issues, but we couldn’t make a decision,” Fagan said. “We were hoping this would allow us to not have stuff pushed over to other meetings.”

Fagan said council wants to continue offering the public an opportunity to attend a council meeting during the day, as the regular meetings are held in the evenings the first and third Tuesday of each month.

The decision was met with opposition by Councillors Jackie Stickel and Judy Thomson, who both voted against the third meeting.

“I just feel that we don’t really need three council meeting,” said Thomson. “I don’t think we would have enough business to fill it, really. When it was committee of the whole that was different because we could discuss things and no decisions were ever made there.”

Thomson said with council’s two regular evening meetings and the new community engagement meeting that was initiated in September, there are plenty of opportunities for the public to engage with council each month.

Last month, Black Diamond council approved hosting a monthly informal community engagement session as a six-month trial in the municipal building the second Tuesday of each month from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. The sessions are an open format for general discussions between council and the public, with at least two council members in attendance.