New bylaws to be set in place by new adjudication process
By Nelson Daily Editor
By Timothy Schafer, The Nelson Daily
A whole slate of new bylaws and a process to dispute them will be forthcoming this year after City council approved $20,000 in its recent budget to implement the program.
Bylaw adjudication is expected to be the lynch pin for bylaws that will be updated and created this year, said Coun. Kim Charlesworth.
Council had instructed staff to carry on with the process of setting up bylaw adjudication during the budget deliberations last month, but the new $20,000 included in the budget will ensure other non-priority bylaws will also be created (the money pays for staff time to research and prepare the new bylaws).
“That is why we have been holding off on work with respect to all of the other bylaws is because we have been waiting for the adjudication process to get into place,” she said, “otherwise we can do all of the bylaws we want but they will be very hard to enforce.”
The new bylaws will link to policies that council would like to see implemented, said Coun. Charlesworth.
That would include an anti-idling bylaw, a bylaw for the keeping of chickens in Nelson, revamping the animal control bylaw and creating the traffic bylaw.
Those bylaws aren’t high operational priority bylaws, said Coun. Charlesworth, but council would like to see work done on them.
“These are policy driven based on some of our sustainability initiatives,” she said.
Approval of an adjudication process and selection of judges has yet to come back to council for final approval — something that could happen by midsummer.
City manager Kevin Cormack said there are several bylaws waiting to get done. Policies dealing with city operations get priority but ones like smoking or keeping hens are shuffled if the workload grows too big.
The money for the new bylaws comes from the planned surplus.
Adjudication means what?
The adjudication system would replace the provincial court as the venue for resolving disputes of minor municipal bylaw violations in areas such as animal control, business licence, zoning, signs, parking, building code, noise and fire prevention.
The Local Government Act provides City council with the authority to institute an adjudication system.
The City will have to develop specific bylaws and their infractions to be enforced under the system, the amount of the fines and fees, guides for people charged with tickets, tracking and payment process for tickets and an adjudication process.
The cost and the staffing necessary for the new process will also have to be determined.
They’ve got the power
Legislation for the adjudication system was developed by the Province in response to concerns and issues raised over the previous 15 years by municipal groups calling for reforms to bylaw enforcement.
The legislation addressed concerns relating to the costly, time-consuming and complex nature of previously available enforcement tools.
After a successful pilot project in 2004, the Attorney General decided to expand the authority for use of the adjudication system to interested governments across the province.
The pilot project found the number of parking tickets disputed dropped by 94 per cent, the length of time for a ticket dispute to be heard and decided went down by 10 per cent, and there was an 81 per cent increase in collection of outstanding fines.
Relate story
• For a story on City-appointed judges, click here.
