A committee established to recommend a communications strategy to the City of Powell River has been dissolved.
Councillor Maggie Hathaway presented the recommendations of the Communications Select Committee at a recent committee-of-the-whole meeting. The committee, which has been meeting since August 2010, included representatives from council, management staff, unions representing city workers and community members.
“Our job basically was to review communications, how effective they were and if we needed to change anything, add anything, take anything away,” Hathaway said. “To our surprise, we found the existing communications policy was actually quite effective. What was lacking was enforcement.”
The committee recommended some changes to the policy, including a time limit on announcements at the beginning of council meetings.
Other recommendations included creating an internal policy for staff communications and, for each city project or initiative, producing a communications plan or strategy and identifying a funding source to implement the plan.
Hathaway said the exciting part of the committee’s recommendations was looking at new media. The committee reviewed the city’s website and suggested a few changes, such as including RSS capability for notices and agendas, making agendas available for six months, creating an email subscription list, updating projects, with photos, on a weekly basis, providing more departmental detail and improving the visual appeal of the site.
“The exciting part for me is the committee would like to take a look at webcasting, webcasting our council meetings and perhaps even our committee-of-the-whole meetings,” Hathaway said.
The webcasts could be stored indefinitely, Hathaway added. “It’s actually a fairly small cost,” she said. “I think it’s like $7,500 a year or something like that.”
The committee’s report was referred to staff. Council passed a motion to dissolve the committee at a recent council meeting.
