It’s back to the drawing board, or in this case the CRD Board, when it comes to the North Cariboo Joint Advisory Committee’s request to record their meetings and post them on the City of Quesnel’s website.
The original motion was unanimously approved and sent to the entirety of the Cariboo Regional District Board for approval but it was rejected.
That didn’t sit well with City Councillor Scott Elliott.
“I think that it’s important for transparency and accountability, and I think people should have the ability to watch these meetings. And as far as consistencies, we’re completely different, they run their shows differently. I was told they don’t have microphones but we’ve got microphones, so we’re doing okay. We should be able to, and we voted unanimously on this is I’m not mistaken, we should be able to record these in our house if we want to.”
Elliott went on to call the decision hypocritical.
“The CRD itself is live streaming, it’s not actually recording but it’s putting out their meetings, so why can’t we have the ability, without spending 15 thousand dollars in this time of a terrible economy where we’re working hard on our budget to keep it down, why can’t we put ours out when there’s going to be absolutely zero cost to us ? I don’t think we should stop, I think we should look in house and do whatever we want as far as recording.”
CRD Board Chair Margo Wagner confirmed the reasoning behind the decision to reject the idea.
“The Board is live streaming its meetings on a 6-month trial basis. So that’s the first reason, we don’t want to start doing rural and joint when we’re only just starting to do it at the Board level. Secondly, if we’re going to do it at one joint planning, we need to do it in all of them. The District of 100 Mile does not have the ability to do that. They do not live stream their Council meetings, and we don’t have the ability to live stream joint meetings there. So because the joint planning meetings are a function of the Board, they’re not a function of city, the Board has the overarching rights to say whether we do it or not.”
John Massier, the CRD Director for Area C, still liked the idea but questioned if the timing may just not be good right now.
“The CRD, we do live stream but we’re in a 6 month trial period, so it was brought in January, we’re going to give it 6 months, and then there will be some feedback from the staff and from the Directors at that time. As they get comfortable with the idea of live streaming maybe they will be a little more amenable to this idea a little bit further down the road. I don’t think it’s something we give up on at this table yet, but I think by the time that 6 months is up and we get a staff report we’re looking at probably mid-summer, and we’ve got an election coming up this year, so maybe it’s just a good idea that we keep in the back of our minds and the next group of people that are sitting around this table after the middle of October this year, maybe that’s the ones that carry this idea forward.”
Elliott was not a fan of that idea either.
“We’ve been talking about this for a year at least. It’s come up in previous terms as well, just be patient, I mean to what end ? Why not start now ? We’re open to the public, we’ve got media here that records us and puts out different things, people are in here taking pictures, why not just be transparent ?”
Elliott added that “we should be able to control our own meetings here.”
In the end the committee decided to send it back to the CRD for approval, along with a suggestion that Councillor Laurey-Anne Roodenburg made.
“I think with this motion, we need to include that we look at some of their concerns and answer some of their concerns. Making sure we understand their concerns and have answers to their concerns. It just seems kind of silly, just because the center and the south don’t do it. Perhaps try it with us and if it doesn’t work with us, great the center and the south know they are not going to have to try and do it themselves.”
The letter will also explain why the North Cariboo Joint Advisory Committee wants to do it.
The vote was 6-2 with CRD Directors John Massier and Nicole Audet opposed.
City Councillors Mitch Vik, Martin Runge and Debra McKelvie were not at the meeting.
