Prince George residents won’t have to give their address when providing some types of correspondence to City Council.
Under the City’s Council Procedures Bylaw, it is required that correspondence to Council includes a mailing address and a name.
According to a report that was presented to Prince George City Council at this week’s meeting, an increasing number of people have expressed discomfort with having their names and addresses published in online agendas and minutes, with requests to redact or remove old correspondence increasing as well.
City Council was presented with four options on having civic addresses contained in correspondence, these were:
- Continue to require addresses for both general and land-use correspondence (status quo),
- Do not require mailing addresses for any correspondence,
- Require only street name
- Mixed approach; no address for general correspondence and only only a street name for land-use correspondence
Councillor Cori Ramsay said the mixed-approach seemed the most reasonable.
“I think it’s important for Council to still understand where correspondence is coming from,” she said.
“As it pertains to development permits, being able to see that the individual making comment live within a reasonable amount of space with regards to the property, that’s important.”
Ramsay moved the mixed approach, with an amendment of requiring an indication of if the person sending the correspondence lives within city limits.
Councillor Kyle Sampson voiced concerns, saying he’s found there’s been an increase in correspondence from people living outside of city limits within the Regional District.
“Although they may be users, they’re not tax payers, and that’s a challenging thing because at the end of the day we want to respond to the needs and will of our taxpayers who are paying for these services, not just the folks who come into our community and use them,” he said.
Sampson said he would have suggested going on with the status quo.
Councillor Garth Frizzell said neither option provides a way to give “true authentication.”
“It would take five minutes and a bot farm to create a whole raft of individually tailored emails to staff claiming that we are a citizen and we checked the box,” he said.
Frizzell said he would support Ramsay’s motion.
Ramsay added her suggestion would reduce the workload on staff.
“The comments in the report from staff were that they’re spending an extraordinary amount of time going back to amend old reports to redact the addresses,” she said.
“I feel like this approach does reduce the burden of work on staff so that’s the deep concern here, we don’t want them spending time going to a report seven years ago that’s still on the system because someone’s address is publicly listed.”
Sampson said staff would still be going back to redact old reports anyways.
“If we said status quo, we want your address but staff just redact it on the public document going forward, I don’t see the increase there,” he said.
“They’re still going back to redact the old reports, that’s inevitable no matter what, they have to redact it, it’s already there, but at this point it would be going forward that they would just redact it on an ongoing basis.”
Ramsay’s motion was passed with a 5-4 vote. Councillor Sampson, along with Mayor Simon Yu, and Councillors Tim Bennett and Brian Skakun were opposed.
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