Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Following local government is almost impossible in our city which does no favours for our democracy

One of the biggest problems in this region in trying to keep up on local government is that we have 14 of them.  When you have so many local government meetings it would be more than a full time job just to keep up on the basic meetings of councils let alone on the various committees.

In November we have following number of Council Meetings or Committee of the Whole of each local government:

  • CRD - 1 meeting (12 committee meetings)
  • Central Saanich - 2 council meetings
  • Colwood - 2 council meetings?  The Colwood website if the worst in the region and I have no idea about their media schedule.
  • Esquimalt - 3 meetings
  • Highlands - 3 meetings
  • Langford - 2 meetings (6 committee meetings)
  • Metchosin - 2 meetings (4 committee meetings)
  • North Saanich - 3 meetings
  • Oah Bay - 3 meetings
  • Saanich  - 3 council meetings
  • Sidney - 4 meetings (this is from October because I can not find any information on November meetings)
  • Sooke - 3 meetings (4 committee meetings)
  • Victoria - 2 meetings (7 committee meetings)
  • View Royal - 3 meetings

We have a total of 36 full council meetings in November.   I only listed some of the committee meetings because many council do not seem to have an easy way to quickly find out about when committees were meeting.

This is way too many meeting for a region with only 330,000 people.   It is a waste of human resources in all the time people spend in meetings.

This many meetings also makes it impossible for the public or the media to keep abreast of what is happening in our city.   Decisions by Saanich or Langford impact me and whole city but with so many meetings we all end up in the dark and councils make decisions without the people of this city.

Without the scrutiny of the media and the public democracy has real trouble functioning well.

I have tried to make a page with links to all the agendas and minutes for the councils in this region.

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