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Nanaimo city council merges committees

NANAIMO – City council has called for changes to its committee structure after a review last week.

Nanaimo’s mayor wants to see a new red tape task force to handle everything from development process to community grants.

Nanaimo city council wrapped up a review of its 19 committees and commissions last week, with talk of new advisory bodies, mergers and eliminations.

It’s not the big restructuring pitched by Mayor Bill McKay, who wanted to reduce committees to eight under the City of Langford’s model, but he said council aimed to stay as close as possible to the original format and wait for the results of a core review.

During a special committee of the whole meeting, councillors called for the merger of its Transportation Advisory Committee with land-use and official community plan monitoring group and the Nanaimo Advisory Planning Committee, and formally combined the Nanaimo Community Heritage Commission and the Culture Committee.

Members of the two groups had already married their agendas and meetings to reflect the new culture and heritage department established during a city hall shuffle in 2013.

City officials also report that the Development Process Review Committee and Governance Steering Committee will be dissolved and there’s talk of creating a new inter-governmental committee and ‘red tape’ task force.

According to McKay, the Development Process Review Committee will be combined into a new red tape task force, which he’d like to see be “much more broad based than just development” and cover business efficiency issues and community grant programs like the Leisure Economic Access Pass. Council is still looking at the new group.

The governance committee handled the $75,000 governance review report and its recommendations but the review has now stopped, its committee chairman was not re-elected and no meetings have been scheduled, said Chris Jackson, the city’s manager of legislative services, of reasons why its expected to be nixed, or replaced.

Council appointments and work on the future make-up of committees will take place over the next three weeks.