I was in attendance and spoke last night at the public hearing on the new Official Community Plan, and I was in good company. By my unofficial count, over 160 people attended and about two dozen spoke (of which 3 spoke in favour of the OCP, one made comments that were not clearly in favour or opposed, and all the rest of which spoke in opposition to the OCP). People were given latitude in how long they were given to speak, which was a positive as some people had some longer, and some fairly technical, comments on the Official Community Plan. The strong attendance, one of the strongest I’ve ever seen at a Langford Council Meeting, shows that the community cares about this issue, and that’s a very good thing. Not only was the crowd standing-room-only, but it was spilling out into the hallway outside Council Chambers.

There were positives, but there were also concerns. It’s important to understand that a public hearing is meant to be a quasi-judicial process, and is therefore supposed to have a courtroom-like atmosphere. The Chair and the rest of Council are supposed to listen quietly, the Chair is to maintain decorum, and debating each other’s opinions is not allowed to make sure that members of the public aren’t intimidated from speaking for fear of others questioning or attacking their views. Last night I witnessed:

- while members of the public were reasonably easy to hear, the sound system did not appear to be working properly for the Chair and the others at the head of the room;

- cross-talk between the Chair and another Councilor and staff while the public was making submissions;

- the Chair appeared to, on a few occasions, debate and challenge speakers, and at one point specifically discouraged a member of the public from making a comments using a past-tense example to support his point;

- I counted 10 people in the hallway because of the overflow capacity of the room, opening the question whether those interested citizens could meaningfully participate in the process;

- while they were rare, there were a few catcalls from the audience that the Chair made no apparent attempt to rein in, and clapping was frequent and not reined in; these things aren’t allowed at a quasi-judicial public hearing like last night which is supposed to have court-room like sombreness to it (catcalls and cheers, depending on which side of an issue you are on, can certainly intimidate you from getting up to the podium, and one member of the audience shared with me afterward that he had in fact felt intimidated from speaking because of these issues).

While I was concerned about a number of these points, and it did raise questions about whether the proceedings should have gone ahead or whether they should have been put off to a larger venue to make sure everyone could participate and whether decorum should have been managed a bit more closely, things were at least being handled evenly. There was en even bigger concern that came near the end of the public hearing, though.

At a public hearing, the job of the politicians is to sit quietly and listen to the public. Deputy Mayor Denise Blackwell, who chaired the affair in the stead of an absent Mayor Young and two absent Councilors, reminded everyone at the beginning that the public hearing is, as the name suggests, a time for the politicians to hear the public, and that people weren’t to debate each other’s opinions. Unfortunately, she appeared to enforce this rule unevenly during the course of the evening. A Rainville Road resident (who was opposed to the Official Community Plan) made reference to the comments of another Rainville Road resident and was quickly and appropriately censured by Blackwell and asked to stick to his own thoughts and not comment on his neighbour’s. Yet, Ms. Blackwell said nothing when an speaker (in support of the proposed OCP) openly debated the comments that had been made previously in the evening by several other people. This speaker had even announced his intention to speak to points others had made when he first went up to the podium. I sat in the audience, incredulous, as he not only debated people’s points but referenced me by name when debating the points I had raised.

After he referenced me by name for the third time, I stood up and attempted to raise a point of order but Ms. Blackwell refused to hear it citing Read the rest of this entry »