By Mark Squibb/March 31, 2023
After over three years of tuning in by phone due initially to pandemic restrictions, residents of Witless Bay will finally be able to attend in-person council meetings again next month, as council has committed to re-open the chamber.
Witless Bay is one of the few municipalities in the province whose council continues to meet out of public view since the Covid-19 pandemic was declared in March of 2020.
“I wanted to let people know that meetings will be open again to the public in April,” said Deputy Mayor Lorna Yard following a short council meeting held via teleconference on March 23.
Yard added that Mayor Trevor Croft will be back from the west coast to chair the meeting.
For the last number of months, Croft has been helping with the Clean Harbours Initiative on the island’s west coast, and the duty of chairing the meeting has fallen to a handful of councilors who took turns chairing the sessions.
During last week’s meeting, from which councilors Alex Troake, Jacob Hayden, and Ralph Carey were absent, council voted to hire a temporary office assistant through Advantage Personnel, a national staffing agency. The Town Hall is down to one staff person following a couple of years of hirings, firings and resignations among staff. The Town Hall has been frequently closed for business since the new council was elected in September 2021 and council has yet to say whether it will extend deadlines for permits and other matters that are set to expire as residents and developers have been unable to complete their business because of the unpredictability of operations at the Town Hall. With 1,640 residents, according to the 2021 census, Witless Bay is the largest populated town on the Southern Shore.
While people living in larger municipalities such as Mount Pearl, Conception Bay South, or Paradise rarely attend council meetings in person, unless to give a presentation, Witless Bay and neighbouring Bay Bulls often attracted full houses before the pandemic closed chambers across the province. Bay Bulls too is continuing to meet via teleconference. No date has been set for its return to full public meetings.
The official date for Witless Bay’s return to regular in-person meetings has not yet been announced other than it is said to be in April.
