Motion to revote on adoption of Kelowna council pay increase fails

A revote on the increase to council remuneration failed this week and the original vote made on April 15 to adopt the bylaw amendments will remain in effect.

The bylaw was adopted with an unanimous vote last week, however, during the “mayor and councillor items” portion of that meeting, one city councillor indicated that he wanted his vote changed on the record.

During the April 15 meeting, coun. Ron Cannan said he didn’t “recall” if he was recorded as opposing the motion to formally adopting the amendments to the council remuneration bylaw.

“I didn’t hear you read that into the record, so I just want to make sure that through the clerk, that it was recorded that way,” Cannan said.

Mayor Tom Dyas said it was not recorded that way because everyone had their hands up, indicating support of adopting the bylaw and no one’s hands were up in opposition.

During this week’s meeting, four city councillors indicated that they were unaware they voted in favour of that item due to confusion about an item being withdrawn at the last minute.

Coun. Gord Lovegrove also said that was not the way he intended to vote on item 4.1 on last week’s meeting agenda.

Coun. Cannan said he wanted the matter reconsidered at the May 6 meeting (council will be at the SILGA convention all next week) to have the opposing votes shown in the permanent meeting record and minutes.

He indicated that he requested this to be reconsidered at the end of the April 15 meeting, however, the mayor and city clerk told him it could not be done then and should be dealt with at the next regular meeting.

“I voted against it. Four of us voted against the previous motion, so obviously we were going to vote against it again,” Canan said to Dyas.

Councilors Mohini Singh and Gord Lovegrove, who indicated they also voted erroneously, supported Cannan’s motion to have the matter reconsidered.

Coun. Rick Webber, who was against the raise and also reportedly voted in error, did not support the reconsideration motion.

“Speaking for myself, when that vote happened last time, I think it's similar to what councillor Cannan said, I made a mistake. I thought we were voting on item 3.2 (...) that had sort of been taken off the agenda on the fly but I didn’t catch that,” coun. Webber said, adding he was distracted.

“That was my mistake, I missed what was going on. I voted thinking I was voting on a different motion (...) but I don't feel we have any need to go back and redo it next week.”

Coun. Wooldridge thought a revote would set a very “strange” and a very “dangerous” precedent to start going back and changing votes on agenda items.

“It's incumbent on us to be paying attention to the agenda and the clerk does a great job of ensuring where we’re at in our agenda,” he said, adding that he did not support the revote.

Coun. Mohini Singh reiterated what she has been saying for the past couple of months that she was not against a raise, she was against how much the raise was and that she’s been voting against it since the beginning.

“I would personally like to see my vote documented as me being against it, but I don’t have a big problem because at the end of the day, as one of my colleagues said, it's not going to change the outcome,” she said.

Coun. Gord Lovegrove said that it reflected badly, he admitted he made an error, but pointed to the fact that those who were against the adoption of the remuneration bylaw just wanted the minutes amended.

However, that was not moved forward because the minutes were already adopted.

Neither did the proposed motion to reconsider the vote on adopting the remuneration.