CIVIC PARTICIPATION

@ a glance

- Provide regular open tours and open house events at City Hall with explanations of its functions.

- Broadcast city-council meetings via local cable and/or the internet to TVs, home computers and portable devices.

- Provide clearly compiled and easily accessible voting records of all candidates outside of regular meeting minutes.

- Incorporate an electronic voting system for council members in the main council chambers for automatic processing of voting statistics and easy visibility of decisions

- Revamp the municipal website to improve transparency of issues currently circulating through city departments, council chambers, and being executed immediately by city staff.

- Establish the position of a public outreach coordinator to answer basic questions about City Hall, facilitate discussions with community members, increase participation at poles, elections and public consultation sessions, communicate directly with seniors and youth and record recent events at City Hall in articles designed specifically for non-academic public consumption.

- Post non-partisan information supplements on election candidates in 2011, and invest a larger sum in launching a general awareness campaign of municipal election dates, spaces, processes and issues.

- Periodically host council meetings in different environments such as open courtyards, parks, office centres, restaurants, universities, high schools and shelters in order to give new opportunities for citizens to see live meetings and witness the political system first hand.

- Offer meeting agendas and minutes in instant digital files via bluetooth or USB flash drives for use on laptops and PDAs.

- Advertise positions in community advisory committees and boards on a broader scale using flyers, posters and targeted internet postings.

- Broaden the geographic boundaries of community consultation requirements for developers in neighbourhood planning.

- Encourage a more structured approach to ensuring neighbourhood associations are representative of their regions and that their feedback is consistantly considered in civic decision making.

- Support larger community boards to represent more factions of the community for functions such as schools and the Victoria PD.

It is unacceptable that less than 27 percent of eligible Victorians voted in the last election, and the civic agenda should reflect the engaged populations' desire to be joined by a choir of citizens that do not currently contribute to the process. The ability for the current council to be re-elected time and time again on the basis that the currently-engaged demographics support their agendas makes council decisions related to civic engagement strategies bordering on conflict-of-interest. City Hall needs a shake up in the way it communicates with its neighbourhoods, and the resources required to boost the voting population and demystify the political process have to grow internally with the passion and support of a new council.