THUNDER BAY – The council composition committee will meet Tuesday to discuss a report from city administration.
Cody Fraser, vice-chair of the council composition committee, said the report is on redistributions of the city's wards.
“That does not mean that we have made a decision on anything," Fraser said.
“We simply asked administration in June to come back with some options about what ward boundary reconfiguration would look like.
“We asked them to make population disparity a priority, making sure that the wards are as close to parity as possible, and making sure that configurations as far as neighbourhood character are considered."
Fraser said they have not closed the door on anything as far as at-large councillors or hybrid considerations.
“Contrary to what we may hear from some loud voices in the community, there does seem to be an appetite for looking at redistributing some boundaries and possibly even keeping hybrid.
“It does certainly seem that there's an appetite for less councillors, which is fine, something that we're considering and something we're looking at.
“But at the end of the day, again, no decisions have been made.”
Fraser served as the Neebing ward councillor and said he would not support an all at-large system.
“We're going to do the same kind of thing that we did in the first phase of consultation. This will generate some more conversation.”
Fraser said the consultation will be everything.
“I think the conversation shifts to, how many counsellors do we want? It's very clear to us, at least from the feedback we've got so far to go down to an eight or a 10 model from a 12 and a 13 model.”
Fraser said they wanted to get a large spectrum of people in the consultation.
“We were at the 55 Plus Centre. We have various community events throughout the city. We were at the library, who hosted some stuff for us which was very helpful. We were doing our best to target as many demographics as possible. Not necessarily people who are voting.
“We also reached out to school boards, got kids feedback. They won’t vote, we know that but it's important that the future voters understand what we're doing.”
There comes a point where public feedback is detrimental, he said.
“From a phase-one perspective, at least without having the rest of the wards, without having the ward boundaries redrawn, without having any options for anyone to even look at . . . I think we saturated that piece.
“The second phase of consultation coming down the pipe . . . will have a couple of options. And on Tuesday, when we meet, there may be a couple more things that we ask administration to do or maybe we take a couple out before we go to the actual community.
“We'll see what's going on and then ultimately, we'll make our decision sometime in early 2025.”
Tuesday's meeting will be held at noon in the McNaughton Room on the third floor at city hall.
