April Council Meeting Closed to Residents

Public portion of meeting has empty agenda

Lions Bay Council declined to hold a public meeting on Tuesday evening.

The April 15 meeting was set to be one of the eleven regularly-scheduled Council meetings each year, in which decisions requiring a Council vote are held.

However, when posted last Friday, the meeting's agenda included only a legal item that could "reasonably be expected to harm the interests of the municipality" if it was held in public, and was therefore to be addressed in closed. The public portion of the agenda was blank.

On Tuesday, Council briefly accepted public questions before closing the meeting shortly after 6 p.m. At that time, Mayor Ken Berry confirmed there were no items on the agenda for the public meeting.

At 7 p.m. when the public portion of the meeting customarily begins, Berry returned briefly online to note that there was no public meeting planned. No residents were present in person in the gallery and he did not open the floor to questions from online attendees.

Earlier in the day, several residents expressed their confusion regarding the appearance of a special meeting on the Village calendar. The meeting was listed for 10:05 a.m. on April 15. but the linked announcement instead pointed to a special meeting set for April 23 at 6 p.m.

Reports indicate that no Council meeting was held on April 15 at 10:05 a.m.

This follows a pair of overlapping meetings earlier in the month, when a special meeting was scheduled at the same time as a long-standing Committee of the Whole (COW) meeting. Residents attempting to attend both events were required to log on and off multiple times as each meeting had been given individual zoom links. Both meetings contained closed and open components.

Subsequently, in the days after the April 1 meetings, an hour-long video of one of the closed sessions was inadvertently posted to the Village of Lions Bay YouTube site. The error was noticed by someone online, and a link to the video was posted on Reddit. The video was viewed more than 80 times before being taken down.

The next morning, the video was replaced by footage of the open portion of the April 1 meeting instead.

Despite Tuesday's empty public agenda, Council faces a number of significant issues that remain unresolved. These include:

• the 2023 Annual General Report, due in June 2024 (as required by the Community Charter) has not yet been submitted to the province.

• the 2024 audit and Annual General Report is due June 29 this year, and must be made available to residents at least 14 days prior.

• the budget for 2025 remains stalled at second reading, a third of the way into the year.

• the village currently has no Fire Chief in place, and has not replaced the Emergency Program Coordinator (EPC) after Phil Folkersen left the position in May, 2024.

• as a result, a Village evacuation plan in the event of earthquake, wildfire or similar emergency is not currently in place.

• an update on the current State of Local Emergency and the status of mitigation of the massive landslide debris still piled above the highway at Brunswick Beach.

• information on dates and details of the upcoming byelection from the newly appointed Chief Electoral Officer Lisa Zwarn.

• the current status and timing of the new design of the Lions Bay Beach Park (LBBP) project.

• news about the anticipated Translink grant to assist in the provision of pathways as a part of the LBBP, and elsewhere in the Village.

In response to a question after the meeting, Chief Administrative Officer Ross Blackwell responded that the "open agenda was just a procedural step. To go into Closed, Council must start in open." He reiterated that there were no items for the open agenda.

The next regularly scheduled meeting of Council is a Committee of the Whole, set for May 6 at 6 p.m.

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