When you consolidate power to one or two individuals, you remove the ability for public oversight.
This is where we are at in Prince George right now. The public has no real oversight into the operations of our city hall and none over our mayor and council. We don’t have a recall policy, other than 10 folks signing an affidavit to the B.C. Supreme Court to have an individual removed from office.
Mayor and Council are in essence supposed to control the direction the city is moving toward. However, time and again power is dumped into the lap of a hired employee, removing all accountability of council and mayor to the public that elected them into office. Pretty cushy job; sit a couple times a month and rubber stamp decisions, and not even debating them (that’s the image anyone would get from watching a local council meeting).
This hired employee is now going to oversee council’s behavior’s under the new Code of Conduct policy before council for final reading. That employee is none other than the city manager and in the event they are unavailable, the next in the chain is the corporate officer. That’s a problem, because they are both “employees” of the city and should answer to council and mayor (though that is rarely the case over the last few years). We need a neutral party to address conflicts of interest and community complaints in a nonpartisan manner with a full open and transparent policy right from the start.
A Civic Compliance office would address all the issues we are seeing currently and be able to handle those problems well into the future of our community. Freedom of Information Requests (FOIs) should be handled by this office in full compliance with provincial regulations. This will uphold the trust of this office and transparency of city hall to the public and serve as a resource for council and mayor to get legislative rulings on provincial policy in an unbiased manner. There would be no more confusion as to the use of civic funds and expense accounts, as this office would ensure the policies are in place to prevent misuse of funds by council and mayor.
In the event of a conflict of interest, these would be handled away from anyone who may have played a part in the conflict including the corporate officer or city manager, both of whom interact with council and mayor. Removing involvement of these two officers and any perceived potential conflict as they are not involved in any investigation upholds the concept of open and transparent governance.
But the proposed Code of Conduct policy dumps even more responsibility and fog into any inquiry involving council, mayor and the city manager. If you forgot recent history, we had a city manager who did whatever she wanted to do and withheld information from council and the public. So consolidating power to one or two “employees” who are to answer to council and mayor is a really bad idea.
John Zukowski is a downtown Prince George business owner.
