The Municipal Act requires the City of Hamilton to have an Integrity Commissioner and a process for citizen complaints. The Act does not proscribe any qualification requirements for Integrity Commissioners, nor does it explicitly prevent the charging of fees. Hamilton is one of the few municipalities to charge a few.
Council’s Governance Committee heard from two residents suggesting improvements to Council’s Procedural Bylaw to improve meetings, and decided to recommend that Councillors pay for their own civic rings.
Council’s “Accountability and Transparency” Committee – now called the Governance Committee – meets to discuss the latest misbehaviour of Councillor Lloyd Ferguson, review increasing their discretionary ward budgets, create a new policy for proclamations by City Council, and create a draft meeting schedule for all Council meetings in 2017.
Live video at 1pm.
Council’s Governance Committee (responsible for accountability and transparency) meet to discuss municipal proclamations in Hamilton, a ban on corporate and union donations to municipal candidates, remote online attendance for Councillors to vote at meetings, and resignation from the Farmers’ Market Board which lead to a debate on term limits for citizen committees. Council voted to get a more detailed staff report on municipal proclamations, voted to take no action on banning union or corporation donations, asked for staff to further research remote online attendance in meetings, accepted – with reservations – the resignation from the Farmers’ Market Board, and asked for a future staff report on limiting citizen appointees to committees to two successive council terms (8 years). Full Agenda PDF
More in-depth:
There is a more in-depth The Public Record story from this meeting on the Farmers’ Market Board and Citizen Committee Term Limits:
Councillor’s Call Farmers’ Market Board Behaviour “Reprehensible”, Move to Study Citizen Committee Term Limits