The mayor of Windsor says the temporary take over of the Business Improvement Associations in the city was successful, and council will be looking to hand the responsibilities back over.
Drew Dilkens says city council will be looking to hand the BIAs back over to the members who were appointed following the approval of governance documents.
The take over was to allow for city administration to develop a set of basic uniform governance and procedural rules for all nine of the associations.
The rules looked at how membership is determined, how elections are conducted, the manner of selecting board members, the resignation of members, the determination of when a member's seat becomes vacant, the filling of vacancies, how verifications are undertaken, and how financial matters are handled.
Dilkens says the framework of the rules covered a range of items.
"It's all the baseline governance issues that we would expect from organizations that are taking tax dollars and helping to support members. This is the exact reason why we took the pause in implementing the new boards of directors so we could do this hard work. We've consulted all the way through the process with the BIA administrators."
He says they've received great feedback from BIA administrators.
"Many of whom have said to us 'this is long overdue, thanks for doing this, thanks for designing the structure for our elections, thanks for designing the finance structure on how we report, what we can do, what we can't do'. Dealing with a whole host of issues that have come up over the years that have just never really been dealt with. This was our chance to do it. We did it, now we intend on handing the BIAs back."
Dilkens says they ensured that the BIA operations were able to continue during the 60 days.
"We set up a process in the last 60 days to be able to keep things going, we delegated to our administration to do approvals of certain items so that there was no lag. The BIAs can't say they weren't able to hold an event because city council did this for 60 days. We had all of the processes set up, we've done all the work to help support them to keep their operations going."
The nine BIAs in Windsor consist of the Downtown Windsor BIA, Ford City BIA, Walkerville BIA, Olde Riverside BIA, Sandwich BIA, Ottawa Street BIA, Pillette Village BIA, Erie Street BIA, and the Wyandotte Town Centre BIA.
Council will meet on Monday, April 24 at 4 p.m.
-with files from AM800's Rob Hindi