The new edition of Kincardine council has been presented with a big issue to chew on, right off the bat.
At the inaugural session on Wednesday — Council was given three choices for the future governance of the municipality.
The current committee system, uses a series of committees which discuss issues and then report to the Committee of the Whole, eventually going to council with recommendations for resolution.
Council is toying with the idea of going to the Committee of the Whole system where all issues are presented to the Committee of Whole at the begging which discusses the issue, making a recommendation to council.
It eliminates one layer of bureaucracy.
Mayor Larry Kraemer likes the proposed change with an appropriate amount of special purpose committees, such as the Airport Governance Committee.
Kraemer says the new system would be more transparent to ratepayers since they would have the opportunity to address council directly rather than working their way through some other committee.
Councillor Randy Roppel though, wants the system left as it is.
Roppel says the ground work should be done at the committee level utilizing the myriad volunteers that work on those bodies before it comes to council.
He says if it goes the other way, he can see a lot of long council sessions where the public may wish to speak out on a subject and they would have the right to do so.
Roppel also questions the speed at which this item is to be dealt with.
He says there are new councillors around the table who need to spend some time at the job before any major alteration is made with the local governance.
At Wednesday’s session, it appeared the new Committee of the Whole System was favoured.
More discussion and perhaps a final decision will be made on December 8th.
