
March 10, 2022 · 0 Comments
By Sam Odrowski
In-person Council meetings are set to resume in June.
Orangeville’s general manager of corporate services Andrea McKinney and manager of information technology Jason Hall delivered an update to Council last Monday (Feb. 28), during a regular meeting, about bringing people back into the chambers.
It has been two years since Council switched to a fully remote format for Council meetings, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re currently livestreamed on the Town’s YouTube page: youtube.com/c/OrangevilleCouncil
When the in-person meetings resume they will be in a hybrid format, so they’ll still be livestreamed for the public on YouTube and available to watch after they happen.
The reason the in-person meetings won’t begin until June is because Council Chambers have to be modified with special equipment for hybrid meetings, and some items are yet to arrive due to delays.
“We’ve been working on bringing in the equipment [for the hybrid model]. Most of the heavy lifting has been done. We have new cabling that’s been put in the chambers. There’s new equipment in the chambers. There was electrical paneling done, but there’s a key piece of equipment that’s still due to arrive in May,” said McKinney.
“If that were to arrive on time as hoped, recognizing we had continual supply chain difficulties throughout the pandemic, we would be looking to move to testing after that, and then enable the hybrid model.”
The testing will take a few weeks, so its expected the in-person meetings will resume in June.
Coun. Todd Taylor said moving forward, the hybrid model will be important for allowing people to have different work environments and be flexible.
“I struggled with this early on,” he said. “I mean, if you’ve got business commitments and you’re travelling and you can’t come to the meeting, and yet you’re very available to come to the meeting [virtually] – it was a frustrating process.”
Coun. Taylor added, “This absolutely fixes that and eliminates that, and it’ll be the exception, not the rule. I think all of us want to be together in Council. But even when we can’t, for whatever reason now moving forward, we will be able to conduct the business of the town in a timely fashion.”
Orangeville Council’s next meeting is on March 21.