City Council Derails Important Lansdowne Meeting
No wonder the train doesn’t run on time. Ottawa City Council can’t even schedule a meeting correctly.
Most likely the city council committee of the whole meeting on Lansdowne has been moved up to after the city council meeting on Wednesday.
Your agent called Happy Town News and got two answers to two inquiries.
The first answer said the meeting had been moved up and the second answer said they were looking into it.
Media assignment editors must be scrambling around trying to pin down exactly when the much-anticipated meeting will occur. You know, re-scheduling hard-pressed journalists to cover it.
This will mean changing the Lansdowne Live Chat tentatively to Tuesday between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. but we will wait until we get a formal announcement … which apparently doesn’t mean much given the moving target that is this meeting.
So now tell me. After this, what do you think the chances are of a satisfactory conclusion? Sometimes it’s nice to be accurate now and then as a journalist and Ottawa City Hall is not helping in that quest. Mayor Mark Sutcliffe knows more than most that journalists try to be accurate. But then Sutcliffe looks less and less like a journalist these days.
We’ll get back to you and sorry for the inconvenience.
Ken Gray
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Are there no competent bureaucrats at city hall? If not, we’re in worse shape than I ever imagined.
Sisco my friend … I have a feeling Lansdowne will not turn out very well … when you can’t schedule a meeting correctly, well that’s trouble … and we’ve seen what happened with light rail … there are a few self-important little twits down there … I mean that in the nicest way.
cheers
kgray
30 some years ago I created my Ten basic management competencies list. The first management competency is Able to Call a Meeting. When i presented this to managers I was usually granted a snicker or maybe even a howl of laughter. But as an executive I’ve seen again and again that many managers and even organization leads fail the first competency. If they fail number one – imagine what they are doing to the other nine.
Maybe they heard about your intentions for Thursday night and thought that, if they moved the meeting to Wednesday, they would thwart your plans. So you have them on the run, it seems. Good on you!
If the meeting does happen to start on Wednesday, maybe you should keep the Thursday time free to do a midstream check-in in case they go to Friday. Sutcliffe has stated that the discussion/debate will go on as long as there are issues or motions left on the table so it may well be still ongoing on Friday.
This is highly possible since they won’t start early on Wednesday morning but only after the completion of the regular Council meeting.
Mr Jones. I’d love to see the other points on your “Ten basic management competencies list”. Someday maybe Ken will publish them for all to see. As a manager I always scheduled 30-minute rather than hour-long meetings. I found that most of the time as much could be accomplished in 30 minutes as in 60. People were expected to show up on time; if they didn’t there was not a recap of what they missed when they entered the room.
Could at some point publish the list ………. but for now I’ll blow up Competency I: Able to Call a Meeting. Here are the checkpoints. (1)State an appropriate time and place for the meeting. (2)Name a chair (not necessarily the boss). Only those briefed on proper meeting conduct are to be asked. (3) Circulate prepared agenda in advance indicating who is to attend. Copies to others with a need to know – for information. (4) Agenda to contain only items with definition, analysis and suggested action / resolution. (6) One person is designated as note taker. Notes to contain only attendance and decisions made. (7) Notes circulated to those with a need to know. (8) There is NEVER “business arising from previous notes or meetings.”(9) There is NEVER “new business.” (10) There is NEVER a “tour de table.”
I’d guess that no more than 10% of organizations have, and follow a defined meeting code.