Curb marathon council meetings with speaker, city task force suggests

If you've been to a Calgary council meeting recently, then you know they have a tendency to drag on.

But according to Coun. Diane Colley-Urquhart, they've become especially "prolonged" in the last term.

Not only is this bad habit taking councillorsaway from duties in their own wards, it's wasting taxpayers' money, she said.

"Huge amount of overtime keeping staff to all hours, and then spilling over onto a second day which is pretty standard for us now and never used to be," the Ward 13 councillor, who has served on council for 16 years, told the Calgary Eyeopener.

"I think that we need to be a lot more efficient than we are," she said.

To keep Calgary's municipal meetings chugging along, a task force created last month to improve council's workflow is floating the idea of appointing a speaker similar to the speaker of the house on Parliament Hill and in provincial legislatures across Canada.

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"I think it takes a lot of skill to run a meeting according to the rules, and in politics, people like to talk a lot," said Colley-Urquhart, who chairs the three-councillor calendar task force.

She said the role of speaker would likely be taken on permanently by one city councillor,or the job would be rotated among all 14 councillors after "some sort of training."

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Mayor Nenshi, who runsthe Monday council meetings, actually floated the idea of a speaker in his first year in office but says he was shut down.

He said he's willing to "try anything" to make the meetings run more efficiently.

"The only complaint I ever get is [that] the meetings are too long. In other places in the world there are much, much bigger complaints. [So] if that's our biggest one, yeah we'll fix it, but it's not the biggest on my list."

With files from the Calgary Eyoepener