Council Time - Oct 15 to Nov 15, 2007

One of the questions that I get asked about city council pretty frequently is: "How much time does it take to serve on council?"

It's a tough question to answer because it depends on how much the individual council member chooses to put in. You can attend information sessions or conferences to learn about new ideas that you can bring back to the council table or you can choose not to. You can attend at community events, either as the official council rep who brings greetings or just to talk to different groups of people to see what is happening with different sectors of the community .... or you can choose not to.

One thing you can't choose to ignore is reading. There is a lot of reading; background information and agendas are a part of practically every city meeting but this is still difficult to capture. For example "Did I spend a couple hours reading those agendas for the up coming week or was it only 15 minutes this time around?"

Well, with all these variations it's tough to accurately measure the amount of time it takes to serve on council ... but I'm not going to let that stop me from trying! I'm going to start regularly posting the amount of time I've spent on council business in the past month. I'll do a posting somewhere after the 16th of each month detailing what I went to and approximately how long it took, in minutes.

Now, as I've said it's tough to measure everything so please; take this only as a rough estimate of things that I have physically attended at. Some things may have taken slightly less or slightly more time. Also, I'm not including; time spent reading agendas, travelling to and from meetings or answering resident's phone calls or emails. Those add up too but again they are really tough to measure. So, if you think I might be overstating how much time something took please keep these "unmeasureables" in mind.

Obviously I have some catching up to do from the start of this term so I'll do a couple of these posts this week until I'm up to date. So, with out further ado, here's an accounting of how much time being on council takes...

March 15th to November 15th, 2007

So there you go, council took just under 56 hours in the first month after the election.

You'll be able to find posts like this under the label "Council Time"