Council communication
Council works publicly, the city has communication channels to use to push and receive information. But there’s a disconnect between what’s put out, and what reaches residents.
Where I stand
There are two kinds of residents the city has to communicate with. The handful who want to follow council. And everyone else, who just want to know when something is about to affect them.
The harder problem is the second one. Most residents don’t want to follow politics. But they do want to know when politics is about to land on them: the water main on their street being replaced, the bylaw that governs their neighbourhood being amended, a zoning change next door, construction that will close their road for a month. The city already shares this information. What’s missing is an easy way for residents to ask “tell me when something affects me” and have the city deliver. Property-based, neighbourhood-based, and severity-based notifications are off-the-shelf technology in 2026. Saint John hasn’t applied them yet.
For the residents who do want to follow, the gap is format. Council meeting videos run three hours with no chapters, so finding the discussion of your street means scrubbing through all of it. Minutes are published as long PDFs, hard to read on a phone, hard to search. Voting records are buried in the next meeting’s minutes, two weeks later. Motions refer to properties by PID, to bylaws by number, to past decisions by date, none of it clickable. The documents themselves test at a graduate-school reading level. Five small fixes (chapters on the videos, HTML minutes, voting records on the same page as the motion, clickable cross-references, plain-language summaries at the top of each motion) would close most of that gap. None requires new spending or new staff.
The city also has a significant offline population we will need to reach on their own terms. We can post signs and knock on doors when it’s about elections. Let’s use those tools when real work needs to be shared too.
What I will push for on council
- Physical signs on lots that will be subjects of a decision
- Neighbourhood-based and severity-based subscriptions for residents who stopped reading the bi-weekly switchover emails
- Chapters on every council meeting video posted to the city’s YouTube channel.
- Minutes published as web pages, not PDFs: searchable, mobile-friendly, indexed by search engines.
- Voting records published with the motion they decided, on the same page, the moment the meeting ends.
- Clickable references in motions: PIDs to the property database, bylaws to the bylaw text, past decisions to those decisions.
- A one-paragraph, plain-language summary at the top of every motion.