Council is about to do its first bit of real, public work after being sworn in last week. There’s a meeting of the executive committee on Wed, Nov 14 at 11:45.
On the agenda there are a couple items related to committees. First, exec will be considering whether or not they should get city admin to conduct a review of the committee structure in 2013. Currently, there are 18 city committees. (There were 19 until July of last year when council callously decided to disband the Cemeteries Departmental Consultative Group without so much as a farewell party.) And apparently, supporting that many committees can get costly so it might be time to bundle some together or something.
Second, with a new council and a new year coming up, it’s time for all of our councillors to pick which committees they want to be on. The way it seems to work is everyone writes down which committees they fancy and if there are more councillors vying for a space on a committee than there are available spots, they hold a secret ballot to see who gets to go where.
Finally, the committee sending a stern message to the Rural Municipality of Sherwood and to the Provincial Ministry of Government Relations saying that we’re none too happy with amendments to the District Plan that the RM of Sherwood is proposing.
We’ve reported on clashes between the City of Regina and the RM before (in “No Shit, Sherwood” and “Sherwood Calls Bullshit“). And based on this report, the two municipalities haven’t kissed and made up just yet.
Seems the RM of Sherwood wants to build a random tire retreading plant to the west of the city — not too far from Harbour Landing, in fact; and, they also want to build some industrial and commercial developments on the eastern edge of Regina. Not surprisingly, city hall sees these as potential obstacles to future growth. Right now all we can do is “provide feedback” on the RM’s plan.
Anyway, we’ll see how all this turns out later in the week. If you want to read these reports yourself, you get them on the city’s website.