GLENELG Shire Council has approved its new Governance Rules, with some changes after a strong response from the public, particularly around council meeting question time.
The updated document sets out how council meetings must run, along with rules for electing a mayor, the council election period, conflicts of interest, and councillors standing for higher office.
The previous set of rules had been in place since they were updated last in September 2022, with the new changes brought in following a review prompted by concerns from councillors about behaviour in council meetings, which have had a boost in public attendance in the past year or two.
The new rules include tighter restrictions on the half hour public question time during each meeting.
Another change is to the rules around motions to rescind a previous decision of council, which now must be endorsed by two other councillors to go to a vote in a meeting (previously a councillor could put them forward on their own), along with minor wording and layout changes throughout the rules.
The draft returned to council in Tuesday’s council meeting, and were supported unanimously by councillors, after being sent off for a month-long public consultation on the changes, 105 copies of the rules were downloaded and council received 29 submissions on its proposal.
Many of these submission had issues particularly with the changes to question time.
Mayor Karen Stephens said it was a “great response” to the public consultation.
“It was timely for us to review our governance rules,” she said.
“A number of us councillors did a lot of research, and staff too, to see what the standards are.
“But we also took on board a number of items across the consultation as well.
“We also need to ensure that we protect all ratepayers from any litigation, that a community individual can come to a meeting and ask questions, so it's really important that we make sure that we maintain a really high level of governance around our meeting processes.”
Now, questions must be submitted in writing to the chief executive officer by midday on the day before the meeting, with the name and details of the person submitting the question.
Two questions allowed per person must have a 100-word limit, be asked by a resident, ratepayer, worker or student within the Glenelg Shire, who is present at the meeting (at the CEO’s discretion) and will be read out by the CEO in the meeting.
Questions can now be rejected if they include confidential information, are defamatory, indecent, abusive, or objectionable in language or substance, repetitive of a question already answered whether at the same meeting or at any of the three most recent council meetings, are asked to embarrass a councillor or member of council staff.
They can also be rejected if they relate to a matter in respect of which the Council has no power, to any other matter which the Council considers would prejudice the Council or any person, or to the personal hardship of any resident or ratepayer.
The CEO can request that the question be reworded, and if they reject a question must tell the meeting why it has been rejected and who submitted it.
While there were some suggestions in the meeting that members of the public could take their issues to councillors or staff in private, Cr Stephens said she understood that there was a need to have a place to put questions on the public record but changes were prompted by unacceptable behaviour from some members of the public in the last 18 months.
“We encourage that, but there are going to be some rules,” she said.
“We genuinely want our community to come to us and ask those questions, but we must put rules around how that happens.
“But there also seems to be the idea that you can only come to a council meeting to ask a question, we also want to encourage people that can ring council at any time, we've got three customer service centres across the Shire, you can email us, you can ring councillors, you can email councillors, there’s so many ways to reach us if you need to.”
