Regional councillor wants meeting votes to be public information
Posted May 8, 2023 04:12:49 PM.
Last Updated May 9, 2023 03:21:59 PM.
Regional councillor Kari Williams is recommending that all votes at regional council meetings be recorded and released as public information.
She presented her idea at Tuesday’s Administration and Finance meeting, proposing that the regional clerk prepare an amendment to the procedure bylaw to require the recording of all votes during meetings.
The motion was passed unanimously by the Administration and Finance committee.
It will now be sent for a vote at the next Regional Council meeting on May 24th.
If the motion is approved, all council votes will be made available to the public starting on June 6th.
Williams explained that the purpose of the motion is to increase transparency and hold representatives accountable.
“I just thought it would be a good idea to have this all in our minutes so people could look it up really easily,” Williams said. “If there was an issue they really found important, then they could look and see, ‘Did my councillor vote the way I thought they would?'”
Currently, the votes are made online with the click of a button, and just the clerk can see who made which votes.
“It would be fairly easy, they said, to just cut and paste, and then we would just attach it to our minutes or our agendas, because those are all public information,” she said. “They would be on the website and people could just pull it up from that day, whichever day they wanted, and then they’d be able to see it right there.”
People always ask Williams how she votes, and she said she always tells them.
“Having this information readily available would make it so much easier for the public to actually see what’s going on,” she said.
Her own past experience was one of the initial reasons she decided to recommend the motion. Williams used to do political research and found that she was always wishing for more transparency and information from the region.
Even now, being at the table, she said it’s important to her to see what representatives are voting for and how councillors are agreeing as a whole.
