The city’s executive committee will hold their regular meeting in Scarborough this month amid an effort to move more meetings away from the downtown confines of city hall, Mayor John Tory says.
The March 19 meeting of executive committee will be held at the Scarborough Civic Centre rather than its typical home at city hall.
The moves comes months after Tory suggested relocating some meetings in order to make the city government more accessible to Torontonians.
“It is really to sort of try to see if there is a practice that we can begin to engage in on a regular basis to move these meetings around the city and make them more accessible to people who are from different parts of the city,” Tory said when asked about the move on Tuesday morning. “I have no doubt that people who really need to be at an executive committee meeting will get there but it is just that they often have to come a long way and we are trying to turn that around a bit and take the government out to parts of the city that are after all part of Toronto as well.”
Staff looked at holding meetings outside of civic centres
Residents are welcome to address executive committee on any proposal that it is considering, unlike city council as a whole where deputants are not heard.
As a result, dozens of stakeholders usually attend city hall to speak to executive committee on any number of matters.
“The meetings are always very well attended by all kinds of people but that isn’t the point,” Tory said. “The point is that a number of the people who do end up coming to city hall downtown have to come from Scarborough, from Etobicoke and from North York. I think it is time.”
Tory said that city staff initially considered holding meetings of executive committee in venues other than in civic centres but decided that the cost of doing so would be prohibitive.
He said that the Scarborough Civic Centre is “partially equipped” to host the meeting.
“It is a simple idea and a sensible idea but it is not simple to take all the steps necessary to have a fully legal compliant meeting in terms of technology and other things required to put them on,” he said.
