Email on daycare unavailability refused as correspondence by Holmes

closed session

by Tristan Turner

Council has received an email penned by Kelly Harding, a parent with children who attends a daycare program run by the McCauley After School Care Association that is run out of the Morinville Public School. The letter expressed concern over the day care program being shut down as a result of a lack of space to allocate to the daycare on the part of the school. Since its founding, MPS has grown rapidly, and that growth has lead to a lack of space to provide for the daycare program.

Harding was concerned that with the closing of the program, there would no longer be affordable daycare space in town for her family. As a result, Harding encouraged Council to offer support to the McCauley After School Care Association, potentially by partnering to fund a new portable to be added to the school for the day care.

Mayor Lisa Holmes refused to accept it as official correspondence as it was sent in via email.

“If I accept this as correspondence, then every single time we get emailed, it will have to be correspondence,” Holmes said, going on to comment that Council received “quite a few” similar emails.”

Council did not comment on the correspondence; however, residents can read Harding’s full email in Council’s May 24 agenda package available at morinville.ca.

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2 Comments

  1. Given that email is an accepted medium of doing business in this day and age, such as the transmission of invoices, submission of income tax returns, etc, I fail to see why using emails to identify concerns to a municipal town council is such a big problem. Maybe if it is too easy – everyone uses email – the volume of complaints and questions will go up? This is 2016, not 1986 or 1996. If needed, I recommend an amendment to our town’s current policies to make email an accepted means of submitting issues to the Morinville Town Council for the agenda. But I won’t email it to them! Just saying…

  2. Brent – email correspondence is completely acceptable and encouraged by Council. We receive dozens of emails a week on a variety of topics that come to our allcouncil@morinville.ca email or through the form on the town’s website. This particular email was added to the agenda package in error as we don’t add in every email that we receive to the agenda package as official correspondence. My concern was that accepting this email as official correspondence at a Council meeting sets a precedent that every email will need to be treated in the same way. It is not efficient for any Council to fill an agenda with email correspondence. I would rather us spend the time answering the emails that we receive. Making our Council meetings more efficient and effective was one of the focus points of the Governance portion of the Organizational Effectiveness and Efficiency review that we undertook in 2014 (a project that I know you supported).

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