Simple engagement improvements for the City of North Van
The city is behind on basic council meeting management and citizen awareness suffers as a result. When asked to attend a workshop on community engagement, which I was unable to attend, I sent the following written feedback to the city.
Publish council meeting agendas with reports much earlier
FULL agenda packages should be published well in advance of council meetings. I suggest the Monday or Tuesday of the week prior to the following Monday’s council meeting.
The current system, where the package is available (effectively) on the Friday before the Monday meeting, means that citizens have, in essence, two days over the weekend to prepare any related communication. Example: I received the CityConnect email alerting me to the Council Agenda documents availability for the May 5th meeting at 2:07 p.m. on Friday, May 2, 2025.
Limiting citizen’s ability to respond or add to the item being discussed.
This very short time frame limits citizens' ability to digest and respond to important issues before council. Particularly in the case of citizen groups, the current timeframe does not adequately enable internal feedback among members of a group before the communication deadline. Often due to internal group protocols which require board-level approvals, three days is insufficient time to create a communication, circulate it to group members for feedback, rework it based on feedback, and send it to the board for approval. Not possible in two days.
What the other North Shore municipalities do
The District of North Vancouver publishes their complete agenda package on Tuesday before the council meeting on Monday of the next week. This timeline affords citizens seven days to identify items important to them and to then read any related reports and prepare a communication if required.
As I was writing this on Monday, May 5th at 4:03 p.m. I received an email alerting me to the availability of the full agenda package for the May 12th District of West Vancouver council meetings, seven days prior to the meeting.
Potential agenda package improvements
This is how West Vancouver publishes their staff presentations and reports inside their agenda packages. By publishing reports as separate documents on the website, citizens do not have to go through the entire agenda package to find the report related to the item they are interested in. This also facilitates sharing with others. It also makes the item “searchable” on your website.
Currently, to find a staff report related to a particular issue in the city, I have to look through a lot of agenda packages to locate the ‘right’ agenda package because the agendas are not “searchable”. Then to share that information, I have to send the entire package to whoever else would like that information, letting them know to look at pages X to Y. It’s awkward and can be improved by including links to the reports and presentations published as .pdfs on your site. There may be some other way to improve this as well. I am just drawing attention to the way that West Van has made information sharing and searching easier.
Council meeting highlights
I find the following communication from West Vancouver quite useful. https://westvancouver.ca/mayor-council/council-highlights After each council meeting, staff create a precis of what happened and post it to this page with links to each report. I receive an email alert (which I signed up for) letting me know that this page has been updated. Very useful.
Conclusion
Adopting a more proactive and transparent approach to publishing council meeting agendas and reports would significantly enhance citizen engagement and input.
