Juggling apples and oranges in the in-camera numbers game

“If you think you’re gonna walk in here and tell us what to do and change the way we’ve been doing everything, and hold strategic planning meetings in public, you’ve got another think coming.”

— Incumbent councillor to mayor after election.

Change can be a good thing, but it ain’t easy, as the quotation above illustrates. And yet, the status quo has its risks as well.

After a letter from a Kamloops Voters Society member based on the society’s concerns about closed-door “shirt-sleeve” meetings, council has been feeling sensitive about the age-old secret-meetings issue.

So it asked for a report on the number of in-camera meetings held by the past seven councils dating back to 1991. As Coun. Pat Wallace put it, the KVS letter “casts a shadow” over council, even though Coun. Arjun Singh and Coun. Nancy Bepple pointed out that the KVS concerns arose from council’s strategic planning sessions, not in-camera meetings dealing with confidential matters.

The resulting report indicates a slight reduction in what might be called “regular” in-camera meetings during the past couple of terms but the numbers aren’t really very helpful — the number of those meetings has decreased because the number of weekly open meetings has decreased.

In-camera council meetings are approved at weekly open council meetings. For example, administration will ask today for an in-camera meeting next week to discuss a land-acquisition matter and another relating to negotiations on a municipal service.

Both are appropriate under the Community Charter, which allows or even insists that land, labor or legal matters be discussed in camera.

At roughly three-quarters of their regular weekly meetings, council approves an in-camera meeting for the following week for specific reasons. That’s just the nature of the business.

With the exception of strategic planning meetings, council itself almost never calls an in-camera meeting all on its own; staff handles the agenda (in consultation with the mayor), decides when an in-camera meeting is needed, and asks council to approve it.

That’s not the whole story, though.

For example, councils under Mayor Cliff Branchflower of the late 1990s held scheduled closed-door workshops once a month, without pretense that they were dealing with proper in-camera items.

They defended these as planning sessions, not real meetings at all. (Even using the current council’s definition of what constitutes a meeting, it’s unlikely locking the doors on a strategic planning session every month would fly nowadays.)

There’s also a hidden issue with respect to in-camera business meetings that no study can ever uncover, because it isn’t reflected in minutes or resolutions.

What can’t be calculated is the number of times issues that should be raised in an open meeting are brought up instead at a legitimate in camera meeting that has been called for an entirely different reason. That’s a matter for self-policing, and a mayor and council committed to accountability and transparency are the only safeguard against abuse of in-camera meetings.

If today’s report makes City council feel as though it has answered its critics, OK, but it’s a red herring — it doesn’t say anything to satisfy the strategic-planning complaint raised by the Kamloops Voters Society.

As for the quotation at the top of this column — yes, those words were directed at me shortly after I took office in 1999. And, yes, changing the way municipal government does things was painful back then, too.