Regular business slowed significantly at city hall while municipal staffers focused on transit strike issues, city councillors say.
The city’s website does not provide an explanation for the 23 meetings cancelled over the past two months. But the cancelled meetings coincide with the transit strike, which crippled the city’s movement of people and piled work on for city employees trying to help citizens through the disruption.
The cancellations appear in capital block letters as ‘meeting cancelled’ notes that litter the city’s online schedule from Dec. 2 through the end of January. The transit strike began on Dec. 10 and ended when both sides reached a tentative agreement in the early evening of Jan. 29.
Transit service remains disrupted while OC Transpo tries to get its bus fleet back on city roads.
The cancellations are obvious at a glance in December; there were fewer cancellations on January’s schedule, but still many more than a usual January meeting lineup.
“We are having a heck of a time getting meetings scheduled with city staff,” says Lori Mellor, executive director of the Preston Street Business Improvement Association. “All the focus has been switched to, how do you cope with the strike? It is going to create a huge backlog of things that have to be caught up.”
Mellor says the association is in the midst of planning its annual Italian festival on Preston Street and that city staff do not have time to meet with them, because they are tied up working on transit-related tasks. These tasks included watching traffic cameras and trying to ease congestion.
“To some degree things have ground slower,” said Somerset Ward Coun. Diane Holmes. “The strike is a disaster in many ways. We are certainly going to do the best we can for Italian week.”
Mellor believes the city’s employees are stretched to their limits and that the city will now experience “a slingshot of demand,” because the strike is resolved and regular business that was put off becomes urgent.
Coun. Peter Hume said he was uncertain whether the transit strike was to blame for the meeting cancellations. He said meetings are often cancelled in December for administrative reasons and that advisory committee meetings are cancelled by the advisory committees themselves.
Other business improvement associations in Centretown do not seem as concerned by the high number of meeting cancellations.
“The meeting cancellations do not impact me because I never go to the meetings anyway,” says Grace Xin, executive director of the Somerset Street Chinatown BIA.
Coun. Steve Desroches said he believes there is a current focus on the labour disruption at city hall.
“I hope that we return to normal here at city hall and that we return to normal for the entire city,” he said.
Despite the tentative agreement reached by the City of Ottawa and the Amalgamated Transit Union, it was widely expected that transit service would remain disrupted for weeks.