Prince George City Council voted on a number of recommendations from the City’s Heritage Commission at last night’s (Monday) meeting.
During a regular council meeting in March, Prince George Heritage Commission Chair Dr. George Davison outlined many of the issues the Commission has been facing, such as a reduced number of meetings, and a reduction in City staff support.
During the March meeting, City Council had voted on a referral motion to have a staff report come back on five recommendations Davison made to Council.
The item came back to the Council table at the regular council meeting on June 23rd, where Council voted to postpone the vote to last night’s meeting.
The first recommendation included was to increase the number of Commission meetings from four to seven annually.
Manager of Legislative Services Ethan Anderson stated increasing the number of meetings would have an impact on his division’s staff.
“With the introduction of the Public Safety Committee, the Citizen Recognition Committee, and the Remuneration Committee that you’re going to discuss later tonight, my staff are pretty stretched thin already,” he said.
“It’s just three meetings, but there’s all these other committees that are also adding meetings, so I would request that perhaps this be put on hold until 2027 when the election work and those committees have expired.”
Councillor Trudy Klassen moved to increase the number of meetings.
“We have a really eager group of people, highly skilled, highly talented, highly interested, and I think to honour their time that they’ve already spent in attending a number of meetings and due to the various issues that they outlined in their letter to us, they haven’t gotten much done,” she said.
“I think when we’re asking for members of the public to join our committees, we need to properly support them and enable them to have some success.”
The motion was defeated.
The next recommendation that came up was increasing the number of commission members from nine to 12.
Anderson stated staff would have to bring back a bylaw amendment to increase the number of members.
“We’d advertise, I believe there’s an appointment aspect of this, so we’d reach out to those organization,” he explained.
“We’d bring the applications to Council, and they would appoint the successful members.”
This motion passed.
A resolution to endorse reconciliation with the Lheidli T’enneh through future Commission projects was referred to staff.
“I would feel more confident having staff have a conversation with Lheidli to make sure that they are wanting to engage with us on this before we direct the Heritage commission to do that,” said Councillor Cori Ramsay.
A final motion to have a staff report returned to Council on increasing staff support for the commission was also passed.
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