Councillor tossed from EPC wants committee reviewed

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This article was published 16/02/2013 (4904 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A city councillor who was recently turfed from council’s most powerful committee is calling for a review of how the mayor’s inner circle is structured.

Coun. Paula Havixbeck (Charleswood-Tuxedo) said a large proportion of Winnipeg city councillors is appointed to executive policy committee (EPC) and the current structure leaves other elected officials without a say in key policy decisions.

Right now, six out of 15 members of city council have been appointed by Mayor Sam Katz to executive policy committee, including Couns. Russ Wyatt (Transcona), Jeff Browaty (North Kildonan), Scott Fielding (St. James-Brooklands), Brian Mayes (St. Vital), Mike Pagtakhan (Point Douglas) and Dan Vandal (St. Boniface).

Havixbeck said Winnipeg’s EPC model creates two tiers of councillors, whereas every elected official should have an equal voice. She said non-EPC councillors recently had a limited opportunity to participate in the budget process and only had a few hours to review the capital and operating budgets before the documents were made public.

By comparison, she said cities such as Edmonton rotate membership on their executive committee while others cities do not have an EPC.

“We (need to) at least take a look at this and see what might be some better models, even a rotational system or doing away with it,” Havixbeck said Friday. “There seems to be a definite movement away from having an EPC.”

Havixbeck said she was unable to get council’s governance committee to consider the idea at its meeting earlier this week and hopes the committee will review the proposal at its next meeting in March.

Last month, Katz removed Havixbeck from EPC after she allegedly flip-flopped over the operational review of the Winnipeg Police Service and an increase to councillors’ ward budgets.

The move came after Havixbeck became a vocal critic of the city’s budget process and opposed the property-tax hike and a plan to increase councillors’ discretionary ward budgets. She denied Katz’s characterization as a flip-flopper.

Havixbeck is the second councillor to leave EPC in the last few months.

In November, St. Norbert Coun. Justin Swandel quit EPC and called it “dysfunctional, broken and divided.”

jen.skerritt@freepress.mb.ca

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