Dear Editor:
On February 15 YTW published an opinion piece from former City Councilor and businessman Dick Deryk. He points out he was “flabbergasted” for Councils decision to change the schedule of Council meetings from every second week to every third week. I too was “flabbergasted” as someone who spent over a decade on Council would have an opinion that current council are looking to do less work or somehow in it for the money. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
My understanding looking back on previous Councils, there was usually 20 Council meetings and 2-4 strategic planning meetings. With this decision we will have 17 Council meetings and 9 strategic planning meetings.
So the public is aware, a Strategic Planning meeting is an “in-camera” (private) meeting where we have presentations from department directors, experts and specialists, administration, etc. to help us better understand issues, answer questions and work towards solutions. In these meetings we will spend more hours than past Councils on big picture stuff, like long-term infrastructure plans, in fact long-term plans of all sorts. It is here we try to figure out where the money is going to come from to pay for it all. If council doesn’t look at the big picture, nobody will, and we end up with lots of problems and no long-term plans with how to deal with them. These meeting can run from 3-7 hours. These meetings have proven themselves to be of utmost importance in gaining information. This allows us to ask many questions prior to making decisions that will have huge impact on the citizens. It steers administration in the direction council wants to go, prior to being presented at public Council meetings.
Keep in mind no decisions can be made in those meetings and anything that would come from them would be brought before the public in an open Council meeting. Let’s put it this way, would you use a lawyer who didn’t first go to school, become educated in the law from expert professors, learn how to apply the law, and do research for when they appear in a public courtroom? Remember, Council’s job is much more than just saying Yay or Nay to items put on the agenda by the administration.
There are Council meetings at some times of year that are under an hour long and the preparation time for that meeting can put a strain on our administration. The thought was the schedule change would make those light meetings less often and we also wouldn’t take six weeks off in summer, which would have continued with following the schedule that has been in place for several decades. Sometimes continuing with the status quo isn’t beneficial to the modern era. To quote a friend of mine, “Change is good.”
We saw inefficiencies in the way the schedule was. I maybe cannot speak for everyone but I know that I was elected with the expectation to continue to do things my way and to correct inefficiencies should I find them. Having 3 fewer council meetings and 5-7 more strategic planning meetings will allow us to be more informed and efficient as a Council.
To Dick’s point about the approximate number of hours we serve the community and how we are paid it is truly disappointing that a previous elected official is so uninformed as to the amount of hours spent working for the citizens of Yorkton. Saying because we have 3 fewer meetings a year, ended the 6 week summer break, and increased our strategic planning meetings by 5 should correlate to a decrease in pay is an insult to all of us who were elected.
As an example, in the past two weeks I have participated in a 6 hour Strategic Planning Meeting, a Protective Services Committee meeting, a Gallagher Centre Management Board meeting, a Yorkton Airport Authority meeting, an orientation meeting with the Fire Chief on our Fire Department and a public Council Meeting. This doesn’t include the hours spent preparing and reading and re-reading information packages, engaging citizens on social media, email, and telephone and taking time to visit with them at my place of work.
However, I thank him for bringing up the issue as it gives me the opportunity to address concerned community members and give insight on what takes place with the Council. It is my feeling there wasn’t enough communication from previous Councils and it’s an issue I aim to change. I have been the most active City Councilor on social media in the history of Yorkton, I am available to the public almost every day at my businesses and have encouraged people to come and see me. I will be talking to Council and Administration to see if we can do more to make people more aware to the content and agenda of a Strategic Planning meeting, because minutes are taken the whole time, and there could be more transparency there.
I have been enjoying my time on Council, have sacrificed time away from my family and am extremely proud of the other council members for doing the same. I continue to look forward to working hard to make Yorkton where good things happen.
Aaron Kienle
Yorkton, Sask.
