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Wyatt back on powerful city EPC

Kicked off 2 years ago

By: Bartley Kives

Posted: 10/29/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Coun. Russ Wyatt

Mayor Sam Katz has chosen a familiar face to fill a vacancy on city council's most powerful committee -- the man he fired from the job two years ago.

Transcona Coun. Russ Wyatt will return to council's executive policy committee next week, 26 months after Katz ran out of patience with the outspoken populist from the city's easternmost ward.

First elected in 2002, Wyatt sat on EPC from November 2006 to September 2009, when he was removed from the committee due to repeated conflicts with the mayor.

Wyatt questioned Katz's ethics in the Riverside Park Management affair in 2008, lambasted the mayor on the floor of council in 2009 over the Parker land swap and then voted against a Katz-supported plan -- long since abandoned -- to replace Winnipeg's water and waste department with a corporate utility.

Katz said at the time he was more concerned with disparaging comments Wyatt made about city lawyers. Now, the mayor says the Transcona councillor's experience makes him the best candidate to fill the vacancy created in August, when Gord Steeves resigned his St. Vital seat to make an unsuccessful run for provincial office.

"I'm looking for experience and I'm looking for someone who's very committed and devoted to the city. There's no doubt in my mind Wyatt is that individual. I don't need people agreeing with me on a regular basis," Katz told reporters Friday.

"That's always been the media viewpoint: When someone agrees with me, they're a bunch of yes-people, (but) when they disagree with me, you can't get any consensus and everybody's going in many directions."

Wyatt suggested the divisions between him and Katz have been exaggerated by the media and said he and the mayor tend to agree on policy "more than 95 per cent of the time."

But Wyatt did acknowledge his rhetoric was different as a member of council's unofficial opposition.

"When you're off EPC, the role you have is to pound the table and to raise concerns. When you're on, you have the opportunity to do it at the table. I'm still the same in terms of my convictions and my ideas," he said.

"Now, I have the opportunity to do it from the inside instead of the outside."

While Katz said "nothing has changed" about Wyatt since 2009, St. Norbert Coun. Justin Swandel said the Transcona councillor has "matured as a leader" over the past two years.

Unlike other members of EPC, Wyatt will not chair a committee. His duties will be specified on Wednesday, when council holds its annual organizational meeting.

As an NDP-affiliated councillor, Wyatt's appointment has changed the ideological composition of EPC. For the first time since 2004, council's most powerful committee has two NDP-affiliated councillors -- Wyatt and St. Boniface's Dan Vandal -- among its ranks.

EPC also has one Liberal in Swandel and three Progressive Conservatives: Jeff Browaty (North Kildonan), Paula Havixbeck (Charleswood) and Scott Fielding (St. James).

The small-c conservative Katz has no party affiliation, though he counts several Tories among his office advisers.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 29, 2011 B3

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