By Yvette d'Entremont - The Weekly News
Members of HRM's district boundary review committee may have some differing views, but Dartmouth Coun. Gloria McCluskey and Waverley-Fall River-Beaver Bank Coun. Barry Dalrymple agree on one thing.
Cutting the number of councillors from 23 to 20 won't save taxpayers any money.
"Even if that number was cut to 15, it wouldn't be a cost saving measure. If you have fewer councillors, you have more assistants, private offices and so on," McCluskey said last week.
The district boundary review recommendation was on last week's regional council agenda, but was deferred until August 3. McCluskey expressed concerns about how districts will change if council votes in favour of the recommended cut from 23 to 20 municipal councillors.
McCluskey, a member of the committee, said the guidelines state there should be no more or less than 10 per cent difference in population numbers when comparing districts. She said councillors in more rural areas, like Hammonds Plains-St. Margarets, Fall River-Waverley, and Timberlea-Prospect, likely won't face boundary changes as each district exceeds 20,000 residents.
Her urban Dartmouth Centre constituency averaged about 15,000 residents in the 2006 census. But McCluskey believes significantly increasing those numbers would be a disservice to her urban residents.
"I think the urban areas have more work..there's more going on. They (rural councillors) don't have to deal with bars, they don't have to deal with the traffic," she said. "They don't have traffic through the streets like I have, general things like that."
McCluskey doesn't think a fair, equitable solution agreed on by all 23 councillors will happen easily. She worries that expanding urban boundaries will leave urban councillors with less time to have personal contact with the people they represent.
She said the majority of residents who attended the seven public meetings held throughout HRM earlier this year wanted to maintain the status quo to keep councillors more accessible.
"As an example, a gentleman called me the other night and said 'you're so accessible.' If I had more (residents), I'd be less accessible," she said.
Assertions about the urban workload being more onerous were called "ridiculous" by Coun. Dalrymple, a fellow member of the boundary review committee who represents the rural district of Waverley-Fall River-Beaver Bank. He said he openly disagrees with this view.
"Is it harder work and are they busier than other councillors? No. Not on your life. You might have busier streets, but you can get to everything in 10 minutes," Dalrymple said. "It takes me 30 minutes to drive one way from Wellington to a meeting in Beaver Bank, and we have very few of the services HRM provides. We have water and sewage issues and unpaved roads. This "We're city so we're busier" is a ridiculous statement, and I've already said that."
Regional council will ultimately decide to accept or reject the district boundary review committee's recommendations, but at the end of the day, McCluskey is not alone in questioning why councillors were responsible for deciding their own fates.
"I don't think council should be doing this, but we were told by the UARB that we had to," she said. "Let's face it, there will be some councillors worried about their jobs."
ydentremont@hfxnews.ca
