{"id":22532,"date":"2018-12-22T01:38:51","date_gmt":"2018-12-22T06:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=22532"},"modified":"2018-12-22T01:38:51","modified_gmt":"2018-12-22T06:38:51","slug":"committee-consolidation-leads-to-questions-on-community-input","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/committee-consolidation-leads-to-questions-on-community-input\/","title":{"rendered":"Committee consolidation leads to questions on community input"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

The possible amalgamation of Aurora\u2019s Parks & Recreation, Environment and Trails Committees into one citizen advisory committee with a broad mandate has led to some Council members questioning community input.
\nCouncil is poised to approve a recommendation this week that will see the establishment of five committees that will serve Aurora over the next four years: A Finance Advisory Committee that will be comprised of just Council members, as well as a Governance Review Ad-Hoc Committee, Heritage Advisory Committee, Community Recognition Review Advisory Committee and a Community Services Advisory Committee, each of which will have Council members and members of the public alike as members.
\nBut it was the establishment of the Community Services Advisory Committee that generated the most discussion last Tuesday at the first General Committee meeting of the new Council term.
\n\u201cThe proposed committee structure would resemble the previous term with the exception of consolidating the Parks, Recreation & Cultural Services Committee, Environmental Advisory Committee, and the Trails & Active Transportation Advisory Committee,\u201d said Town Clerk Mike de Rond in his report to Council, adding that more \u201cefficiency\u201d can be achieved by merging the groups.
\n\u201cThe Legislative Services division experienced multiple occasions where meetings were cancelled from these three committees due to lack of agenda items. Doing this would help ensure more substance and substantial discussions at the meetings.\u201d
\nThis viewpoint was backed by Councillor Michael Thompson who said this was often the case with the citizen advisory committee he chaired in the last term.
\n\u201cAs Chair of Parks & Rec, we struggled last term [with] having enough issues we felt really warranted the volunteers\u2019 time, energy and input and giving them enough to digest,\u201d said Councillor Thompson. \u201cI like the idea of combining things so that they are not wasting their time. I am okay with moving forward on it. If other members of Council wanted to increase participation, I would be okay with that.\u201d
\nOne such Council member who saw things differently was Councillor John Gallo, who said that each of the previously established committees had five members apiece; now, should the Community Services committee go forward, just five community members would serve overall.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re reducing community involvement by about 10 people, and I am just wondering if we can put a little more thought into those,\u201d said Councillor Gallo. \u201cI can certainly see Trails and Parks & Rec together [but] to me Environmental should be on its own. I have some issues, and maybe I am okay with trying it and seeing how it goes, but at first blush, to remove that amount of residents…I ran on a platform of more engagement, not less engagement, from the public and I get the feeling that that is what this is doing.\u201d
\nMayor Mrakas, on the other hand, struck a middle of the road approach. He said while he would like to see the amalgamated committee move forward and \u201ctry it out,\u201d he was not adverse to making changes if it doesn\u2019t work.
\n\u201cI do definitely agree that I would like to see an increase in the number of citizen members,\u201d said Mayor Mrakas. \u201cI don\u2019t think five is enough; I wouldn\u2019t mind going with nine. I think that brings us to a more reasonable number and I think it would also give us enough citizen members there that we could possibly be able to have a certain number from each field of expertise\u2026and make up that committee. I think nine would be a good number to move forward with.\u201d
\nCouncillors, particularly Councillor Gallo, also raised issue with an extra step that will now be in the Committee process where recommendations from each advisory committee would be vetted by senior staff to decide whether they should proceed to Council for action or whether they would \u201cbenefit\u201d from a further staff report to allow Council members to make a more informed decision.
\nAurora CAO Doug Nadorozny told Council that this was intended to avoid \u201cconfusion\u201d that has cropped up in the past where minutes would be passed at Council and there was an \u201cexpectation\u201d from Committee members that gears would start turning on their recommendations. In other cases, such as a committee recommendation to build a new gymnasium at the Stronach Aurora Recreation Complex, there was \u201cambiguity\u201d over next steps.
\n\u201cWe had other occasions where, quite frankly, something came up from committee, it was passed and was being done,\u201d said Mr. Nadorozny. \u201cThere was not really an opportunity, unless Council point blank asked a question, some of the things went by without even a staff comment and we maybe had concerns about implementation and what the ramifications were.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The possible amalgamation of Aurora\u2019s Parks & Recreation, Environment and Trails Committees into one citizen advisory committee with a broad mandate has led to some Council members questioning community input.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5Rq","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 06:43:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}