An all-councillor open house being held by Mountain View County this week is an attempt, in part, to improve communication and dialogue with ratepayers, says Reeve Bruce Beattie.
In past years, individual councillors typically hosted individual open houses in their respective divisions, where they spoke with constituents, gathering input and then reported back to council as a whole.
The all-councillor open house gets underway at county council chambers starting at 7 p.m. on April 16.
“We want to be a little more efficient and see how it works out bringing people together,” said Beattie. “We haven't had particularly large turnouts at the recent individual open houses that we've had, so it's an experiment. It doesn't preclude us having individual open houses as well.
“We are trying to work on the communication aspects and this is another kick at the cat in terms of different options and different approaches.”
Asked if there are any particular issues or concerns he expects to be brought up at this week's open house, Beattie said: “I don't think there is anything specific. Certainly our levels of services, whether that's snowplowing or road maintenance and those types of things, we want to make sure we are on the right track. And we want to see how people feel about the land use bylaw that was recently passed.
“Whatever people want to talk about, whatever issues they want to bring up, they have an opportunity to meet with councillors.”
Following the meeting, council will review whether the all-councillor format will be repeated for future open houses, he said.
“And of course if individual councillors want to have different strategies for their division, that's up to them. One of the things we learned from the (ratepayer) survey we did is we need to do a better job of communication, so this is one of our tries to improve that situation,” he said.
Conducted by NRG Research Group, the ratepayer services survey gathered opinions regarding administration/council, legislative, community and agricultural service, public works, planning and development, and corporate services, including taxes and budgets.
“Generally speaking, ratepayers would like to see more information being distributed to residents on a number of topics, including public works, council decisions, the county's financial position and many other topics,” Tim Chan, vice- president of NRG, told councillors April 2.
"We are trying to work on the communication aspects."Bruce BeattieMVP reeve
