have been acted upon<\/a>, including reducing the number of committees, and eliminating a rule that allowed board members to double their meeting salary once it exceeded four hours.<\/p>\nHowever, the top finding by Deloitte \u2014 that the board “had become large and unwieldy” and a new “structure is required to provide more effective governance and oversight” \u2014 has taken longer to come to a conclusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Deloitte offered five options in its report, from independently appointed board members with outside expertise \u2014 which has gotten minimal support from board members \u2014 to a tweaked model with relatively few changes, and the board\u2019s governance committee has been unable to come to a consensus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I think most of us agree that growing any larger is just not going to work,” said West Vancouver Mayor Mark Sager at this month’s meeting, a sentiment shared across the room.<\/p>\n
But whether to go down to one representative for each of Metro Vancouver\u2019s 21 municipalities \u2014 with the power of their individual vote weighted by population \u2014 or a hybrid option, divided members.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I believe [one representative per municipality] deserves further exploration,” said Pitt Meadows Mayor Nicole MacDonald. “You end up with a stronger, more collaborative group where everyone wears their ‘Metro hat’ rather than just a local one.”<\/p>\n
But Delta Coun. Dylan Kruger, the vice-chair of the governance committee, argued for a more diverse mix.<\/p>\n
“I think there’s always been value in having a conglomeration of elected officials, whether they be mayors or councillors or those coming from different perspectives at the table here,” he said.<\/p>\n
The discussion ended with most committee members preferring some option of 34 to 36 directors, a relatively minimal change from the status quo, but no resolution on a preferred option.<\/p>\n
Decision before election?<\/p>\n
New Westminster Coun. Daniel Fontaine, one of the fiercest critics of Metro Vancouver\u2019s governance in recent years, said he didn\u2019t trust the board to look objectively at how reducing its size could increase efficiency.<\/p>\n
“The recommendations made by Deloitte should have been managed and reviewed by people who are not sitting around the board, receiving compensation and benefiting from the very structure that’s there,” he said, adding that anything less than a 50 per cent reduction in board size would be a failure in his mind.<\/p>\n
He also criticized the length of time Metro Vancouver was taking with the changes, and accused them of trying to take it off the table as an issue for voters and candidates to consider in this October\u2019s local elections.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We have an election in six months. There should be some clarity, this should have been completed \u2026 I’m not even sure whether this will be completed in time for the voters to see what’s being proposed.”<\/p>\n
But Vancouver Coun. Lisa Dominato, who chairs the governance committee that has been taking the lead in working through the Deloitte report, said the process showed Metro Vancouver was attentive to concerns.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“This is exactly what a public sector organization should be doing,” she said.<\/p>\n
“When you identify gaps or challenges or things that aren’t working then you take a closer look and you look at how we can fix this \u2026 our goal is to bring recommendations to the board so we can endorse a path forward prior to the next civic election.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 5 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194298],"tags":[49,48,55],"class_list":["post-564471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-vancouver","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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