Special Council Meeting: Request For Deferral

Here is my request for deferral of the Special Council meeting this afternoon at 4 PM to the regular time of the Council meeting on Monday.

I am just so disgusted with what is going on in this City and with what I suspect will happen tomorrow at the MPPs meeting. We must not allow the people that we elect to "play" with us in this manner. It should never be tolerated.

I trust that there are at least 6 Councillors with guts today to stand up for Windsorites and to support the deferral request. Those are the leaders that we should respect!

REQUEST FOR DEFERRAL

I do not know whether I will be able to attend at the session at 4 p.m. today so please remove my name as a delegation to speak on the subject matter of the Interim Control By-law. However by means of this letter, I do wish to seek a deferral of the matter until the Council Meeting on Monday, January 28, 2008. I also wish it known that I am opposed to extending the Interim Control By-law

I would appreciate if you would circulate this e-mail to the Mayor and Councilllors and make this e-mail a matter in the record with respect to the deferral and the main Motion.

With respect to deferral, I am well aware of the provisions of section 38 of the Planning Act and in particular subsection (3):

• (3) No notice or hearing is required prior to the passing of a by-law under subsection (1) or (2) but the clerk of the municipality shall, in the manner and to the persons and public bodies and containing the information prescribed, give notice of a by-law passed under subsection (1) or (2) within thirty days of the passing thereof.

With respect, once Council decided to hold a Public meeting with respect to the Bylaws, the meeting should not have been set up in a manner that this Special Meeting has been so arranged. It is the grossest insult to the people of the City of Windsor and in particular to those people in Sandwich who hold jobs who would be completely unable to attend at this session between the hours of 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. to express their opinion. To hold it in addition on a Friday afternoon shows nothing but contempt for citizens. This matter affects people directly and to disenfranchise many of their right to speak to Council is disgraceful in my opinion.

This matter was not posted on the City website until late Tuesday afternoon /early evening. The Administration Report was not posted until sometime Wednesday and the bylaw itself was posted after that as well.

There is no excuse for this matter being posted so close to the date of the meeting. The Administration Report itself was dated January 10. There is no reason why the Mayor at the Council meeting on January 21 could not have announced at that time that there would be a Special Meeting. As an example he mentioned before Christmas that the first meeting of Council after the new year would deal with border matters. Why couldn't he have done the same thing with respect to the Special Council meeting.

There was no need for urgency as there was when the Bylaw was first introduced almost a year ago. The excuse at the time was that if notice had been given, certain people could take actions that could cause problems for the area that these Bylaws were designed to prevent. That is not the case now since the Interim Bylaw and the Demolition Bylaw prevent any negative actions from being taken.

There was no need, in other words, for such stealth actions that wound up depriving citizen of their rights to speak at Council.

Unlike the Mayor and Council, who have a staff of experts to assist them, ordinary citizens need time to digest all of this material so that they can understand what the consequences of it are. There is no reason why an extra weekend cannot be granted so it will give people enough time to make a decision whether they should attend or not on Monday and what they should say if they so choose to attend.

For those reasons I respectfully ask for a deferral until the next regular Council meeting on January 28, 2008.