Boldly going

Size of council debate resurrected

Report of the Composition of Council Committee – Click Here

County of Prince Edward Ward Configuration Maps – Click Here

It’s back. The long-simmering and, at times, bitter debate about what is the right number of councillors to best represent the people of Prince Edward, is about to be brought back to life once again.

THE TORTURED HISTORY
Since the former townships, villages and town of Picton were marched into amalgamation in 1998—there has been disagreement over the size of council (large by any comparison) and the population imbalance between wards (e.g. Bloomfield is represented by a councillor with just 510 eligible electors while Wellington, with more than three times the number of electors, also has just a single representative on council).

Sophiasburgh Councillor Kevin Gale has raised the issue regularly since at least the spring of 2004 when he asked council to take a look at itself to determine if 15 councillors and a mayor is the best way to govern the 25,000 residents of Prince Edward County. He has argued for at least a decade that council is too big and unwieldy— that its sheer size has hobbled and impaired in its decision-making ability.

“When amalgamation was implemented there were a lot of deals, handshakes and fights in the parking lot to arrive at the model we are using today,” said Gale in 2008. “Since then we have had lots of organizational and departmental reviews—but we’ve never looked at ourselves.”

In 2008 Councillor Bev Campbell along with Clerk Victoria Leskie guided and informed a process designed to lead council to a decision on the issue—once and for all. Campbell chaired an ad hoc committee of councillors and the general public to research alternative models of municipal representation. Leskie compiled reams of facts and figures.

So contentious was the issue at the time that council refused to allow the committee to make a recommendation. Instead it limited the committee’s role to gathering research and information.

The result was 14 options for council to consider (see sidebar). They ranged from maintaining the existing structure of 10 wards, with 15 councillors (plus the mayor), to eliminating wards and choosing as few as eight councillors at large—as the mayor is elected currently.

Council made several attempts to choose among the 14 options, but each vote became deadlocked. The next spring it was clear to Mayor Leo Finnegan that this council wouldn’t be able to overcome this impasse so he proposed turning the issue over to the electorate in the form of a ballot question.

But a group of citizens believed council had given up too easily and tried to force council to make a decision. Their argument was based largely on the inequity of the imbalance of population among wards. They had precedent, in their view, in a London decision in which an Ontario Municipal Board adjudicator ruled against the municipality and redrew the ward boundaries in that community.

The citizens’ group filed an OMB appeal that was heard in the fall of 2009. The appeal failed, in part, because the municipality argued that it had not abandoned a review of its representation model but instead a process was continuing to unfold in the form of the electoral ballot question.

In the municipal election that followed in 2010, 80 per cent of respondents to the question said they were “in favour of council commencing a public consultation process to review the size of council.”

Still, the new council was reluctant to reopen the divisive debate. Some councillors argued that fewer than half of eligible voters answered the question on the ballot and therefore didn’t reflect a majority of opinion, which they understood to mean most were satisfied with the way things were. Some said council had more important work to do.

Councillor Alec Lunn says he voted against reopening the issue because he felt it would be an unproductive use of taxpayer dollars to ask residents to wade through 14 models of municipal governance.

“I felt that a facilitator taking all this stuff to the public would be expensive and inconclusive,” said Lunn.

ONE MORE TIME
But now Lunn is leading a new initiative he hopes will enable council to navigate its way through the swamp that has consumed so much time and energy over the past five years.

On Tuesday night Lunn tabled a two stage plan. The first will see council winnow down the alternatives on its own. The second will bring council’s recommendation of a preferred governance model to the public for comment. All this is to be done before the end of February.

Key to Lunn’s plan is that council will determine its own way forward—a facilitator will only be used to present its recommendation to the public. “We may consider bringing the top two or three ideas to the public,” explained Lunn. “But I think we can make a decision, and in fact we are required by the province to go through this process, only then do we bring in an arms-length facilitator.”

To do this Lunn is proposing a “leadership convention” model to sort through 14 or more competing options that will be on the table. Council will continue voting and eliminating the model with the least number of votes until one emerges with 50 per cent plus one of the votes around the council table.

“In a leadership convention, if the candidate gets 50 per cent or more, they win,” said Lunn. “If nobody does, you keep voting until one does.”

Lunn believes it is council’s responsibility to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the various models and make a determination. He points to the federal government that is currently proposing to change riding boundaries for the next election.

“They are presenting a single recommendation and asking for comments,” said Lunn. “I think we should be taking the same approach.”

Lunn has his own ideas about what governance model might work best but he isn’t saying what they are just yet. He is more interested in launching a workable process.

“I am not trying to peddle a particular idea—I just think we should look at it. Anybody can look at this and find imbalances and injustices. I don’t know if we can address them but we have to try,” said Lunn.