Let us wrap up a very busy, and a very difficult 2025 in the council chambers. You can click here for the amended agenda from City Hall, and you can click here for the Politico preview. For the complete blow-by-blow of today’s council meeting, you can follow along with the thread below, or you can watch the whole meeting for yourself by watching it on the City’s website here. Continue reading “RECAP: City Council Meeting for December 16, 2025”
Merry Christmas! City council’s present to you is a new vision for St. George’s Square assuming that they want to pursue it. That’s one of the items in what looks to be a fairly straightforward final meeting of the year, which will feature any final thoughts about the items from Committee of the Whole, a busy (and mysterious) closed meeting agenda, and some new appointments to the advisory committees. Continue reading “City Council Preview – What’s on the Agenda for the December 16, 2025 Meeting?”
StrategyCorp puts out a report every year called the Ontario Municipal Chief Administrative Officer Survey. The CAOs profiled have some strong feelings about Strong Mayor Powers, intergovernmental relations, housing, growth, financing, and and more, but what’s interesting is not what the CAOs had to say, it’s the fact that they said it. What are CAOs thinking when they’re given the cloak of anonymity? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #487 – Inside the Mind of a CAO (feat. Stacy Hushion)”
The CAO position is the highest ranking official in local government that doesn’t have the job title of either mayor or city councillor, and it’s the only staff position at city hall that’s hired by a committee made up of the mayor and councillors. So yes, it’s a pretty important job, and it’s not like there’s any shortage of issues or needs for the new woman in charge as she nears the end of her first year in charge. Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #Repeat – New-ish Year, New-ish CAO (feat. Tara Baker)”
So it was a short city council meeting this week. Really short. Good thing then that we have some unfinished business from last week’s council business, the Local Boards and Shared Services budget for 2025. The actual business of passing the budget was, itself, brief, but there was a lot explaining about what the budget is paying for, especially in the case of social services, the library, and the police. So let’s dig into two meetings for the price of one. Continue reading “This Week at Council: Six Minutes and Five Seconds”
We’ve made it to the end of the month! You can click here for the amended agenda from City Hall, and you can click here for the Politico preview. For the complete blow-by-blow of today’s council meeting, you can follow along on Twitter, or follow the tweets below. You can also watch the City’s own live-stream of the meeting here. Continue reading “RECAP: City Council Meeting for January 28, 2025”
The CAO position is the highest ranking official in local government that doesn’t have the job title of either mayor or city councillor, and it’s the only staff position at city hall that’s hired by a committee made up of the mayor and councillors. So yes, it’s a pretty important job, and it’s not like there’s any shortage of issues or needs for the new woman in charge as she enters her first full year in charge. Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #452 – New Year, New CAO (feat. Tara Baker)”
After a long winter’s break, Guelph city council got back to business with two meetings this past week, one was entirely closed to the public but deeply impactful and the other was Committee of the Whole where some administrative stuff happened. Not irrelevant, that “stuff” included a co-ordinated plan to petition upper levels of government about the issues that matter to Guelph. But for now, what matters is this recap… Continue reading “This Week at Council: Back to Work!”
The month at city council comes to a quick end with the regular meeting just two weeks after Committee of the Whole. On the agenda, aside from the ratification of the committee agenda, is an item for discussion in-camera and the approval of a grant funding agreement with the provincial government. Will there be any last minute controversy? Maybe, but for now you just get the preview of this meeting… Continue reading “City Council Preview – What’s on the Agenda for the January 28, 2025 Meeting?”
Have you missed city council recaps? They’re baaaaaaack. You can click here for the amended agenda from City Hall, and you can click here for the Politico preview. For the complete blow-by-blow of today’s council meeting, you can follow along on Twitter, or follow the tweets below. You can also watch the City’s own live-stream of the meeting here. Continue reading “RECAP: Committee of the Whole Meeting for January 14, 2025”
Guelph Politico 