Evidently you can fight city hall.
The regular meeting of Stratford City Council came to an abrupt end Tuesday night even before it officially began when Mayor Martin Ritsma announced the meeting was being postponed roughly 20 minutes past its scheduled start time in chambers. And the likely reason for the postponement was sitting in the public gallery in defiance of the city-issued ban on his presence. Ritsma announced the postponement without a motion from or vote by council.
Mike Sullivan had come to the May 28 meeting prepared to speak but never got the chance. He was approached by Ritsma in the gallery after the scheduled start of the meeting and was asked by the mayor if he was going to leave prior to the start of the scheduled proceedings. Following that conversation, Ritsma exited chambers and conferred with two Stratford Police Service officers before appearing before council and announcing the postponement.
“Martin didn’t give me a reason why he asked me to leave - he simply came over and asked if I was going to leave,” Sullivan said. “I said I had things I wanted to say and that it’s my democratic right to speak here. The issue of my ‘ban’ was not brought up during that conversation.”
Sullivan indicated that his lawyer had contacted both the city and police about the municipality’s ban against him and Barb Shaughnessy for alleged actions and comments during the February 26 council meeting. Being asked to leave is one thing, but what followed wasn’t something Sullivan expected.
“I expected the boys in blue to call me out, but they got a letter from our lawyer today saying if they did anything there would be penalties for them because it’s not legal if they do,” he said on a potential enforcement of the ban. “I guess (the police) checked with their lawyers and realized they couldn’t do that.”
When asked if the meeting had been postponed until a later date because of Sullivan’s presence, Ritsma would only say that there is a process in place and that he and the municipality were going to allow that process to continue. He also said that no date for a new meeting had been decided on as of yet.
Councillor Mark Hunter said he thinks that there’s only been one side of the story put out into the public domain and he’s worried about the tenor of things growing any hotter.
“The tenor in the room, we need to get this settled down because when people are at each other we’re not going to accomplish anything,” he said. “We want to hear from the public, and this meeting will happen again.”
It wasn’t only the issue surrounding Sullivan that was drawing interest in the meeting, as a condominium development on Trinity Street/King Street was also on the agenda and a number of people had come with questions about that. Hunter acknowledged that he felt public notice for that project was lacking.
“I would like to see everybody get more notice, council included, of meetings with the agenda package because some of them are quite large and they often come out on a Friday before a Monday meeting,” he said. “As a lawyer I can read fairly quickly but I know what I’m looking for. For a non-trained person, to get through a thousand pages and an agenda, I would say that’s tough. People need to be able to let those ideas germinate and then they’ll make their comments known to the council, and we’d get better decisions.”
Hunter said he felt it was reasonable to say the meeting was halted because of Sullivan’s presence and that he didn’t know of any contingency plan for this situation.
“We expected that whether (Sullivan) agrees with the ruling or not that he would honour it - it’s like that’s part of getting along with people,” Hunter said. “There is a process. I think it would’ve been a better way to handle it, and it's easy to second-guess in hindsight. Mr. Sullivan contends that he’s not breaking the law by being here, but that would have to be adjudicated by a judge first. And if a judge said he’s allowed here, despite what our policies say, then we would accept him.”
