Windsor's mayor is in favour of changing the start time of council meetings.
Speaking on AM800's The Morning Drive, mayor Drew Dilkens says he'll be voting in favour of the proposed 1 p.m. start time.
He says the city has looked at other municipalities in the province including London, Waterloo, Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa and they all have early start times.
"When you do a scan of what other municipalities do including the largest democracies in our land, municipal democracies in our land, they all start at 9:30 in the morning and there's never a doubt that the public can participate and it functions quite well," he says.
Dilkens says public participation is important and it won't end if the meetings are earlier.
He says during the COVID-19 pandemic, council met at 10 a.m. majority of the time and the public was still able to participate.
"The public zoom in participate, zoom out and we were able to conduct the business quite efficiently and so that has been the major change is that the public now doesn't actually have to come to city hall, they can just literally zoom in provide their submission and then leave," says Dilkens.
He says if the change is made, the public can still attend the meetings in-person, via Zoom or upload a submission.
"If someone can't be at city hall and they can't wait on Zoom to come into the meeting, we even have a format that allows them to upload a video to play at city council," he says.
As AM800 news reported on Wednesday, city administration is presenting a report to council next Monday, December 11, asking for council meetings to begin at 1 p.m. instead of 4 p.m. to address added costs and ongoing challenges posed by the current start time.
The report breaks down how meetings continue to take place in a hybrid format, requiring additional staff resources from Council Services, Information Technology and the Facilities Departments, resulting in increased resources both human and financial and budgetary dollars are limited.
The report also highlights that the change in start time provides a safety net in terms of additional resources being readily available during regular office hours to troubleshoot technical issues and allow for the meetings to continue seamlessly.
A similar proposal was debated in November 2021.
At that time, council rejected a proposed 1 p.m. start time but agreed to moving meetings to 4 p.m. from 6 p.m.