Don’t judge an agenda by its cover. The docket for this month’s planning meeting of city council looked kind of plain, but looks can b deceiving and at least one item on the agenda opened up an opportunity take a deeper dive on demolition policy, or demolition by neglect policy to be precise. There will be more about that coming this year, but for now here’s what was said on the matter at this past week’s council meeting. Continue reading “This Week at Council: Demolition Bylaw, Man.”
This month’s Committee of the Whole meeting was a pretty usual affair, reports that were not really going to get anyone’s blood up unless they’re especially concerned about bylaws half finished or the scintillating world of auditing. What it will say on your property tax bill, what the City is planning to do to take care of trees on private property, and the workings of the Internal Audit team were all game for this meeting. Here’s the recap… Continue reading “This Week at Council: The Private Lives of Trees”
Council business wrapped up for the month of February with a meeting that covered a variety of topics, and included some special guests. A follow-up delegation about transit in St. George’s Square led to a robust conversation about the subject from a variety of points of view, and then council made some appointments, and talked about pretty big re-organization for a major committee that will have more direct City involvement now. Here’s the recap… Continue reading “This Week at Council: Transit Talk and a New Committee is Born”
There are busy weeks at council, and then there’s spending nearly half of a 28-hour period in the council chambers. That was the time frame this week at 1 Carden Street, and in that period there was a planning meeting, a meeting where council sat as tribunal on a matter of misapplied Development Charges, and, the big one, a marathon meeting about a Public Spaces Use bylaw. To see how it all turned out, consult this week’s recap below… Continue reading “This Week at Council: Planning, Tribunal and Encampments Form the Trifecta”
After a pretty light January, the first week of February brought a couple of packed agendas to the council’s agenda management software on their iPads. First, Committee of the Whole contained an unexpected report about the Housing Accelerator Funds, plus some grand plans about downtown. Also, there was a field trip to the east end of town for a special council workshop about the proverbial Cadillac of City services: waste management. Continue reading “This Week at Council: Downtown Renewal, Recycling Revamp”
It’s a slow start for 2024, at least if your jam is the business of Guelph City Council. At the one and only meeting for January, your friends around the horseshoe handled some very particular business in closed session and then quickly dispatched three piece of business in the open session. There was some discussion about the new development charges bylaw, and whether growth pays for itself, so it may be a new year, but we’ve still got the same problems. Here’s the recap… Continue reading “This Week at Council: One and Done For January”
Perhaps a bit anticlimactically, the year at council came to end this week with two back-to-back meetings that laid out the progress on the City’s shift to a new customer service strategy, and the approval of several hundred new housing units. Also, Mayor Cam Guthrie gave out some medals, including one for a Guelph recipient of the Order of Ontario who’s pictured above. So how did 2023 end at council? Let’s recap… Continue reading “This Week at Council: The Last Meeting… of 2023!”
This week at Guelph City Council, there was a little meeting and a big meting. The little meeting was the Committee of the Whole, which was over and done in about 20 minutes. As for the big meeting? Well that is – what’s the word? – complicated. The fallout from the Ontario government’s flip-flop on the Official Plan proved more trickier than you might have thought for a motion that was simply meant to reverse previous changes, but that’s what this recap is for… Continue reading “This Week at Council: Official Plan Drama as Council’s Lobbied Hard”
This week council took a couple of tough meetings. On Tuesday, there was a question about homelessness downtown, but the controversial motion proposed by Mayor Cam Guthrie had been pulled. Still, there’s was a matter of funding for Royal City Mission and their daytime shelter services, council had to decided how and if they were going to fund that further. And on Wednesday, it was the big one: The passage of the 2024-2027 multiyear budget! Continue reading “This Week at Council: Royal City Mission Saved (For Now) and The Budget”
Two meetings at council this week; one was easy and the other was somewhat harder. The easy one was the planning meetings, some straightforward applications and designations, but the hard one had to do with the budget. The added workshop meeting about finding options to reduce the budget was predictably difficult, but there’s still a few more days until a final decision has to be made. For now, here’s the recap of this week’s meetings… Continue reading “This Week at Council: Planning is Easy, Budget is Hard”
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