When all was said and done, Erin?s meeting minutes from Dec. 20 were accepted without any amendments.
At a previous council meeting, Mayor Lou Maieron had asked the approving of the minutes be deferred because they did not reflect all the discussion points about water servicing for downtown Hillsburgh.
Initial discussion was to approve minutes of four different meetings between Dec. 20 and Jan. 10. Three of the four were approved without discussion. However, part of that included a proposed amendment made by the mayor regarding discussions held at the Dec. 20 meeting.
That centred around the provision of water servicing along the main street of Hillsburgh between Mill Street and 114 and 115 Trafalgar Road.
As the vote was in the midst of being taken, councillor Barb Tocher noted they were proposed changes to the minutes – not those that were circulated.
?I think if you want them amended, you need to raise the issue,? she said.
Councillor John Brennan said if the vote was called immediately, the minutes would be accepted as circulated – and not with an amendment.
Maieron said at the previous meeting when the Dec. 20 minutes were discussed, he suggested perhaps the clerk had omitted some of his comments. ?So I?ve summarized them, and they are there. If you don?t think they are correct – let me know.?
Council has had a number of procedural wrangles over the past few months.
Brennan said, ?To be honest with you, I don?t recall this. The fact that I don?t recall this, doesn?t mean it didn?t happen … It was over a month ago.?
Maieron agreed it was a fairly long discussion.
Brennan suggested if council is going to make changes ?which were obviously not reflected in the clerk?s notes or they would have been reflected in the original minutes – If we are going to go into a back and forth of who said what, maybe we need to look at how the requirements for minutes under the Municipal Act [with no discussion].?
Brennan said he is opposed to that approach ?because you lose something.?
He said in reading the minutes afterwards, ?If it is just the motions and the votes, you really get no sense of what happened.? Further, he believes the minutes have been good up to this point.
Maieron agreed what he was presenting was a synopsis.
At that point, he started reiterating the points he?d made at the previous meeting. He was concerned with the consistency of decision making when council had decided not to make water hook-up mandatory, but even in looking at this particular case as an area improvement, ?Is this not requiring a mandatory hookup??
Brennan said up until now, he was very happy with the discussion being included in the minutes. ?But this is the first time there has been a major change,? and up to this instance, it had been only a few words or a sentence.
?This is quite a major change from what was circulated,? Brennan said.
Maieron?s argument was the points omitted were what led to the motion taking its final form. He said in his opinion each of council?s decisions builds upon previous decisions and all the town?s residents should be treated equally.
He said that while he respects council?s decision not to make water hook-up mandatory, he does not necessarily agree with it.
?But it is a policy we?ve created. Now there is a situation where four or five individuals want a service. Should we be asking the others to hookup??
He considers that key in the motion change from approving the project to consideration of the special improvement area project at a future council meeting.
Councillor Barb Tocher said, ?I believe we are discussing whether the minutes should be amended – not the merits of what was said.?
In that vein, she said in the past staff was given direction to include motions, resolutions and directions according to the Municipal Act, and leaving the descriptive part to a bare minimum.
Tocher said the proposed amendment is ?an extremely descriptive change.?
Councillor Josie Wintersinger wondered if it would be more satisfactory to council if the changes had been proposed prior to the last time council had reviewed the minutes. She said the mayor could have printed up the changes ahead of time and asked that they be included with the minutes – attached as reference.
?I agree it is a lot of words to put in,? she said.
Clerk Kathryn Ironmonger said the issue with minutes is ?They are supposed to reflect the decisions of council, not the debate of council.?
Ironmonger said she felt while she did deviate somewhat from that process, in part because of how things got derailed on the other water issue.
She said most of the points listed were in a bullet point format – so when a decision was made, council could go back and note some of the issues and concerns that came up at a particular time. Her primary concern is the minutes are not supposed to reflect the debate.
Tocher pointed out the minutes already reflected the point that more information was needed before a final decision was made.
Brennan said, ?What bothers me is that this would mean we would be second guessing our clerk.?
Maieron maintained his points were made because of the previous decision of council, and that they would be a reference to what he intended to say at the next public meeting on the issue.
Tocher said, ?The point we are trying to make is that the minutes are not intended to reflect what each councillor might say during a council meeting. It is what council decides ultimately.?
Yet Maieron believes they were, especially since the discussion included comments that every situation was different. He contends council cannot create decisions that contradict each other – to treat 109 people one way – and nine people another way.
Councillors maintained that is a different argument. The proposal to amend the Dec. 20 meeting was defeated, and they were adopted as circulated.
