Residents and groups looking to present at Regina city council meetings will no longer do so.
Council has decided public delegations will no longer occur at regular meetings but instead at executive committee meetings starting in January.
Ward 1 Councillor Cheryl Stadnichuk said the decision comes as they want to make council meetings quicker and more efficient.
“We have gone through this past year of hearing the same delegations on numerous occasions, which takes up a lot of the council chambers,” she said. “We really want to hear the delegations at the executive committee. We want to have that time to ask questions and engage with them.”
Stadnichuk said that the decision isn’t a permanent thing if the community doesn’t like it.
“I do think they will make our meetings more effective, and I think it will be a good step forward,” she said. “We will have a chance to review it in a year again to see how things have gone, but we really do want to emphasize that it’s really important that we hear from delegations at executive committee that this is going to be a shift on how they see the council.”
The decision was part of a larger package that laid out the schedule for council meetings in 2022 and saw the council decide to move the start times of their meetings to 9 a.m. rather than 1 p.m.
The average time of the last five council meetings has been five hours and nine minutes.
