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January 02, 2014 | 24 pages
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Inside Borough councils off YEAR IN REVIEW the table for the rest of municpal term Laura Mueller laura.mueller@metroland.com
The second half of the Manotick News 2013 Year in Review begins with July and goes to December. -Page 4
OPINION
Columnist Mary Cook remembers the excitement of Christmas as a child. -Page 15
NEWS
Canada must go back to the drawing board as current prostitution law is struck down. -Page 16
News - As city council rounds the corner on the final year of its term, Mayor Jim Watson can check almost every single election promise off his list. All but one – reducing the size of city council. “I thought there would be greater support,” Watson said during a year-end chat with the Manotick News on Dec. 19. Even though Ottawa has the most elected representatives per capita of any major Canadian city except for Montreal, it’s also a big city, and shrinking council means expanding wards, Watson said. When council voted against his idea in favour of waiting until a scheduled 2015 review of council’s size, with it died another Watson campaign idea that intrgued many community activists: the concept of local “borough councils” made up of citizens who could advise the city on how decisions would affect their areas. “My plan, because I announced it at the same time, was a package deal,” Watson said. “With that went the idea of the borough council, because I saw them as intertwined,” he said. The purpose of making council smaller was to transfer some of that power to “smaller, regional blocs,” he said. “I’ll have to decide over the course of the next several months as I put together my platform for 2014 where I am going to go on that issue,” Watson said.
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Fun on ice Madeline and Charlotte Wilkins trekked from Stonebridge to the Rink of Dreams at city hall on Dec. 27 for a snowy skate with their grandparents and sister Keira. The refrigerated rink is located at the front of city hall at 110 Laurier Ave. W. downtown and is open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.
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He’s still of the opinion that a borough council system wouldn’t work without accompanying reforms and reductions to the size of council, but the current council works together so harmoniously that perhaps the reforms he suggested when the last tumultuous council was in power aren’t really needed, Watson said. “I am much more optimistic that the local voices through the individual councillors (are) in fact getting through,” he said. That wasn’t the case in the last council, the mayor said. Decisions were being made downtown with little regard to how those choices affected the suburbs or rural area. “I think a lot of that had to do, quite frankly, with the fact that there was a sense that that council just was not working well together,” Watson said. The mayor admitted the system only works that way if the elected councillors endeavour to listen to their residents and put regional squabbling aside. “I think it gives us and the public an incentive to make sure when we’re electing men and women to serve office that they bring forward a perspective that part of their job is actually to work collaboratively with one another,” he said. Even a borough system wouldn’t eliminate the problem of a decision that’s good for one area adversely affecting another area. “You’re never going to find a perfect system,” the mayor said.