A New Way of Dealing with Committees
This new council is looking at city committees, and how committee appointments are made, in a whole new way. We're hoping that the result is a set of committees that are functional, with defined work objectives, and that produce ideas that council can use in making decisions.
There are two types of committees to which council makes appointments. The first type is external committees – committees that are established by outside agencies, but that require representation from Prince Albert. The Library Board, the District Planning Commission, and the North Central Saskatchewan Transportation Committee are examples of these. Our council does not control the functioning of these committees, but council appointees to these committees are expected to keep council updated with new information that might affect Prince Albert.
The committees that are within council's control are called, appropriately, committees of council. These are set up to be a sounding board for issues that are brought before council, and are expected to give focused discussion on these issues, and make recommendations back to council on decisions that are council's responsibility. For example, in the past the Housing Committee has been asked to develop policy around the utilization of the Housing Trust Fund.
Our committee review process has three stages. The first was looking at all of the committees of council to see if there were any that were superfluous because their work was unnecessary, such as the Street Naming Committee, since there is a policy on street-naming in place. We were able to trim a few of the more than 60 committees on the list in that way.