October 8, 2024, at 1:00 PM

Original link

The meeting is called to order at 1:00 PM; it being noted that Councillors S. Trosow, P. Van Meerbergen and S. Hillier were in remote attendance.

1.   Disclosures of Pecuniary Interest

That it BE NOTED that no pecuniary interests were disclosed.

2.   Consent

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by C. Rahman

That Consent items 2.1 and 2.2 BE APPROVED.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

2.1   8th Report of the Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Oppression Community Advisory Committee

2024-10-08 Submission - DIACAC Report

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by C. Rahman

That the 8th Report of the Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Oppression Community Advisory Committee from its meeting held on September 12, 2024, BE RECEIVED.

Motion Passed

2.2   13th Report of the Governance Working Group

2024-10-08 Submission - GWG Report 13

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by C. Rahman

That the following actions be taken with respect to the 13th Report of the Governance Working Group from its meeting held on September 23, 2024:

a)  the report dated September 23, 2024 with respect to the updated General Policy for Community Advisory Committees BE DEFERRED to the November 25, 2024 meeting of the Governance Working Group for consideration; and

b)  clauses 1.1, 3.2 and 4.1 BE RECEIVED.

Motion Passed

3.   Scheduled Items

3.1   Delegation - Kapil Lakhotia, President and Chief Executive Officer - London Economic Development Corporation

2024-10-08 Submission - LEDC Presentation

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by H. McAlister

That it BE NOTED that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received the Annual Update from K. Lakhotia, President and Chief Executive Officer, London Economic Development Corporation.

Motion Passed (14 to 1)

3.2   Delegation - Steve Pellarin, Executive Director - Small Business Centre

2024-10-08 Submission - Small Business Centre Presentation

Moved by D. Ferreira

Seconded by S. Franke

That it BE NOTED that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received the Annual Update from S. Pellarin, Executive Director, Small Business Centre, London.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.3   Delegation - Christina Fox, Chief Executive Officer - TechAlliance

2024-10-08 Submission - TechAlliance Presentation

Moved by S. Hillier

Seconded by A. Hopkins

That it BE NOTED that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received the Annual Update from C. Fox, Chief Executive Officer, TechAlliance;

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication, dated October 8, 2024 from TechAlliance with respect to funding to support and grow the innovation and entrepreneurship sector through the London Innovation Challenge program.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.4   Not to be heard before 1:05 PM - Public Participation Meeting - 2025 Amendments to Consolidated Fees and Charges By-law

2024-10-08 Staff Report - 2025 Amendments to Consolidated Fees and Charges By-law

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by S. Lehman

That, on the recommendation of the City Clerk, with the concurrence of the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports, the proposed by-law as appended to the staff report dated October 8, 2024 as Appendix “B”, BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on October 15, 2024, for the purpose of repealing By-law No. A-59, as amended, being “A by-law to provide for Various Fees and Charges” and replacing it with a new 2025-2027 Consolidated Fees and Charges By-law that lists various fees and charges for services or activities provided by the City of London;

it being further noted that no individuals spoke at the public participation meeting associated with this matter.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

ADDITIONAL VOTES:

Moved by A. Hopkins

Seconded by E. Peloza

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

Moved by S. Lehman

Seconded by S. Franke

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.5   Not to be heard before 1:30 PM - Public Participation Meeting - Phase One Options Report, London Ward Boundary Review Project

2024-10-08 Staff Report - (3.5) Phase One Options Report, London Ward Boundary Review

Moved by J. Pribil

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That on the recommendation of the City Clerk, with respect to the London Ward Boundary Review project, the revised attached, Watson & Associates Economists Ltd. Ward Boundary Review Phase One Report, dated September 27, 2024, BE RECEIVED for information; it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received the revised attached presentation from Watson & Associates Economist Ltd. with respect to this matter;

it being noted that at the public participation meeting associated with this matter, the following individuals made oral submissions regarding this matter:

  • G. Warren

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

ADDITIONAL VOTES:

Moved by D. Ferreira

Seconded by H. McAlister

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by D. Ferreira

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.6   Not to be heard before 1:45 PM - Public Participation Meeting - 2025 Water and Wastewater Rates

2024-10-08 Staff Report - 2025 Water and Wastewater Rates

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by E. Peloza

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Environment & Infrastructure and the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports, the following actions be taken with respect to the 2025 Water and Wastewater rates and charges:

a)    the proposed by-law as appended to the staff report dated October 8, 2024 as Appendix “A” to amend By-law WM-28 being “A by-law for regulation of wastewater and stormwater drainage systems in the City of London” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on October 15, 2024, to effect rates and charges increases of 5.4 percent effective January 1, 2025; and

b)    the proposed by-law as appended to the staff report as Appendix “B” to amend By-law W-8 being “A by-law to provide for the Regulation of Water Supply in the City of London” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on October 15, 2024, to effect rates and charges increases of 1.5 percent effective January 1, 2025;

it being further noted that no individuals spoke at the public participation meeting associated with this matter.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

ADDITIONAL VOTES:

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by P. Cuddy

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

Moved by S. Lehman

Seconded by A. Hopkins

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.7   Delegation - Chief T. Truong, Chief of Police

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That it BE NOTED that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received the attached presentation, attached community policing statistics, and heard a verbal delegation from Chief T. Truong, Chief of Police.

ADDITIONAL VOTES:

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That pursuant to section 36.3 of the Council Procedure By-law, Chief T. Truong, Chief of Police, London Police Services BE PERMITTED to speak an additional five (5) minutes with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That the motion BE AMENDED to include “attached community policing statistics”.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That the motion, as amended, BE APPROVED.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee recess at this time, for 15 minutes.

Motion Passed

The Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee recesses at 5:24 PM and reconvenes at 5:42 PM.

Moved by A. Hopkins

Seconded by C. Rahman

That pursuant to section 33.8 of the Council Procedure By-law, the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee BE PERMITTED to proceed beyond 6:00 PM.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

4.   Items for Direction

4.1   Whole of Community System Response - Evaluation Framework Reporting Template

2024-10-08 Staff Report - Whole of Community System Response

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Social and Health Development, the Whole of Community System Response – Evaluation Framework Reporting Template BE RECEIVED for information; it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a presentation from M. Kunze, Manager, Forensic and Supportive Housing Programs - St. Leonard’s Community Services with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

ADDITIONAL VOTES:

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by A. Hopkins

That pursuant to section 36.3 of the Council Procedure By-law, M. Kunze, Manager, Forensic and Supportive Housing Programs - St. Leonard’s Community Services BE PERMITTED to speak an additional five (5) minutes with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed

4.2   Consideration of Appointment to the Greater London International Airport Authority Board

2024-10-08 Submission - (4.2) GLIAA

Moved by D. Ferreira

Seconded by S. Lehman

That Larry Weir BE APPOINTED to the Greater London International Airport Authority Board of Directors for the term ending July 31, 2027; it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated September 10, 2024 from G. Kotsiomitis, Chair and M. Campbell, Chair – Governance Committee, Board of Directors, London International Airport with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

4.3   RBC Place London Board Appointment Recommendations

2024-10-08 Submission - RBC Place London

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by A. Hopkins

That the request from the Board of Directors RBC Place London BE REFERRED to Civic Administration to draft a revised London Convention Centre Corporation by-law and report back to the November 19, 2024 meeting of Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee.

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated September 27, 2024 from D. Pollard, CEO, RBC Place London with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

4.4   Consideration of Appointment to the Animal Welfare Community Advisory Committee (Requires up to 5 New Members)

2024-10-08 Submission - AWAC Application - N. Lippay

Moved by S. Stevenson

Seconded by A. Hopkins

That N. Lippay and L. Heffernan BE APPOINTED to the Animal Welfare Community Advisory Committee for the term ending March 31, 2025.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

5.   Deferred Matters/Additional Business

5.1   (ADDED) Standing Committees and Realignment to Committee Mandates

2024-10-08 Submission - (5.1) Standing Committees

Moved by J. Morgan

Seconded by S. Lewis

That it BE NOTED that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated October 3, 2024 from Mayor J. Morgan, Deputy Mayor S. Lewis and Councillor C. Rahman with respect to the Standing Committees and realignment of committee mandates.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

6.   Confidential (Enclosed for Members only.)

Moved by A. Hopkins

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee convenes In Closed session to consider the following:

6.1    Personal Matter/Identifiable Individual  

A personal matter pertaining to identifiable individuals, including municipal employees, with respect to the 2025 Mayor’s New Year’s Honour List.

6.2    Personal Matter/Identifiable Individual  

A personal matter pertaining to identifiable individuals, including municipal employees, with respect to the 2025 Mayor’s New Year’s Honour List.

Motion Passed (11 to 0)

The Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee convenes In Closed Session from 6:29 PM to 6:34 PM.

7.   Adjournment

Moved by S. Stevenson

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That the meeting BE ADJOURNED.

Motion Passed

The meeting adjourned at 6:37 PM.

Full Transcript

Transcript provided by Lillian Skinner’s London Council Archive. Note: This is an automated speech-to-text transcript and may contain errors. Speaker names are not identified.

View full transcript (5 hours, 47 minutes)

it’s 1 p.m. so I’m going to call the 15th meeting of the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee to order. If we can just have some order, please. I want to start by acknowledging that the city of London is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabic, the Haudenosaunee, Lenny Paywalk, and Adiranda and Peoples.

And we honor and respect the history, languages, and culture of the diverse indigenous people who call this territory home. As representatives of the people of the city of London, we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and live in this territory. I also want to acknowledge that the city of London is committed to making every effort to provide alternate formats and communication supports for meetings upon request and to make a request specific to this meeting, please contact sppclondon.ca or phone 519-661-2489 extension 2425. And I’m going to look for any disclosures of pecanary interest.

Seeing none and I see none online, I will let colleagues know that Councillors Van Mirberg and Trussell are with us remotely and at the moment we do not have Councillor Hill here with us. So moving on item two on our agenda is the consent agenda. There are two items, the eighth report of the diversity inclusion and anti-oppression committee and the 13th report of the governance working group looking to see if there is a mover and seconder for the consent items moved by Councillor Cudi and seconded by Councillor ramen and will open the floor to any discussion. Seeing none, I will ask clerk to open the vote on the consent agenda.

So votes yes. Voting the vote motion carries 14-0. Thank you colleagues. Moving on item three on our agenda is our scheduled items.

We have a number of delegations appearing before us today. So we are going to start with item 3.1. This is the delegation from Mr. Lakocha, the president and CEO of London Economic Development Corporation.

Welcome as you’re getting your presentation loaded there. I will just remind you as I did before the meeting but for the public record that you have five minutes. So when you’re ready go ahead with your presentation. Thank you Mr.

Chair. Good afternoon and I’m delighted to share some highlights of LEDC’s work this year. As you know, LEDC contributes to the growth of our economy through new investment attraction, retention and growth of local companies, workforce development and business engagement. These functions are guided by detailed strategies such as providing access to space, capital, training, talent and measured by key performance indicators.

Our work focuses on developing industry clusters that generate the highest economic activity in the region. These clusters not only create direct jobs and investments but also drive spinoff economic activity through supply chains, construction, retail, hospitality and more. So far this year LEDC has facilitated close to $228 million in new expansions and attractions and companies making these investments have reported over 800 jobs being added to the local economy. These are direct jobs only as reported by the companies.

Hundreds of indirect jobs are also created throughout the economy and region through the multiplier effect. Companies we have attracted over the years continue to increase their employment and contributions to the local economy. Our investment attraction portfolio seeks to attract new investments while accelerate portfolio helps establish companies scale up and grow. We do this by connecting companies to infrastructure, funding sources, regulatory and permitting processes, R&D and assistance with talent recruitment.

We also keep a pulse on companies that may be at risk due to trade issues, loss contracts or changes in their industry. Our pipeline of active attraction and expansion files was healthy as companies continued to invest in industrial lands, automation, upskilling and diversification. This year we saw significant activity with electric vehicle suppliers related to powerco and stellantis as well as with automation, advanced manufacturing and food companies. These are some of the examples of companies that are new to London or growing significantly throughout 2024.

We’re fortunate to have worked with global giants as well as scaling SMEs for various different parts of the world. New investments and jobs in food processing, life sciences and advanced manufacturing have helped further diversify our region’s economy and helped us withstand the economic slowdown and rising interest rates. Access to talent continues to be a major constraint as our region is projecting a need for over 40,000 workers over the next seven years in 20 key occupations alone. We continue to assist employers with their hiring needs and connect talent to growing companies through major job fairs, newcomer attraction and post-secondary partnerships.

In our pursuit of constant improvement we work with local companies Bamboo Innovations and Knighthunter.com on job portals automation and advanced AI modeling using machine learning algorithms to scan for new job postings, add them to the LED seal job board every 24 hours and market them in Toronto and other external markets. In order to raise London’s profile for both investment and talent attraction we ran major marketing campaigns such as Don’t Tell Toronto and Choose London which has resulted in thousands of new inquiries over the last few months. We’ve also collaborated with local partners on initiatives such as Four City Landing Pad, The Grove, Founders Network, Food Pranor and more. We also held several large industry-specific conferences and events that helped foster stronger economic clusters and raised London’s profile as a business powerhouse.

And while we have seen great success in manufacturing, food processing and other sectors it is also important to keep diversifying our economy which is why film London was created to build a strong foundation for developing the creative industries cluster. We’ve been able to attract some high profile projects putting London on the map for film, television and digital media production. And with that thank you very much and the same time next year I’ll be back. Thank you Mr.

Lakocha and thank you for sticking to your word and being under four minutes as you told me you were going to be so that’s fantastic. I’m going to look now to see if there is a motion to receive and then once we have that on the floor we can go to any questions or comments. So moved by Councillor Cady and seconded by Councillor McAllister. Now we’ll open the floor to a speaker’s list for any questions for Mr.

Lakocha and the LEDC. Councillor Pribble. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the presentation.

I have few questions regarding the slides. First one year today, matrix since inception investments were this year three and a half billion last year. They were three billion and when we look at currently its addition of two 28 million so I was just wondering what’s the difference between the three three and a half and two 28. Thank you through the chair.

So in addition to corporate investments that are being reported on the earlier slide we also show leadership in helping attract government investments in the form of grants and subsidies and incentives to companies to help them grow as well as to other institutional partners such as Fanshawe, Western Fair with the Grove initiatives and others to help create economic conditions. So the balance of that is through a combination of grants, incentives as well as other contributions from various levels of government. Thank you for all the growth from 145 to 228 kudos to you and your team. In 22 expansion and traction, 280 million creating 1400 jobs.

24 to 28 million 800 jobs. Last year, 145, 1600 jobs. So we are going kind of the opposite way and I know our strategy. We are selling with creating the jobs and more reasoning behind it.

Thank you through the chair. It’s a fair question and a couple of clarification points. First of all, these figures may evolve by the end of the year because they are as of year to date right now. So we have several projects that are in the pipeline and as they continue to move forward and come to fruition those data points might change.

Having said that, there’s also no real correlation between dollars invested and jobs created. These are figures that are directly reported by the companies themselves and based on their level of automation, technology and nature of the business, dollars invested in jobs can fluctuate. Over the last year with geopolitical conditions, rising interest rates, we have seen an overall decline in investment climate from overseas markets. That’s not unique to London.

We have a lot of increase but they’re in various stages of development and haven’t all landed just yet. We do track that level of activity throughout the province as well and we know most of our peers in that group haven’t seen that level of activity either. Council approval. Thank you, inverse of traction and FDI proposals have been on decline.

Any reasoning behind it? Mr. Coachea. Thank you through the chair.

So these also fluctuate based on investment activity that is being seen in Ontario and Canada. To my earlier point, global business conditions, rising interest rates and geopolitical environments are some of the external factors that are sort of beyond our control and help impact the pipeline of FDI inquiries. We take our lead from invest Ontario, invest Canada in terms of the markets there developing and the inquiries that are being funneled through to municipalities and overall there is a decline in that segment as well. So to offset that decline, there’s a higher level of activity in local retention and growth portfolios, entrepreneurship development and other business development streams.

Councilor. Thank you, last two, employer and job seeker consultation. Just over three and a half thousand will be the ratio in terms of the employer and job seeker. Councilor, I’m just going to ask for efficiency.

If you have two questions, can you ask them together so that we can get a single answer? The second one is different. Okay, Mr. Coachea.

Through the chair, a vast majority of those consultations are with job seekers. I would say the number is so large because of job fairs and newcomer attraction campaigns that result in hundreds and hundreds of inquiries. To give you an example, we recently ran a job fair at White Oak Small called London and Area Works, which attracted well over a thousand job seekers. Many of them require one-on-one follow-ups afterwards.

So the vast majority of that 3600 number is job seekers. Councilor Preble, thank you. And last question, does your organization have annual specific goals and specific targets and if you do eye on track to reach them, exceed them? Thank you, Mr.

Coachea. Through the chair, yes, and that is a multifaceted response. First of all, we have metrics that are provided through the city’s strategic plan process as well. There’s a growing our economy section that LEDC helps contribute metrics too.

We are also required to report on various metrics as per the purchase agreement with the city. We also have internal metrics that we report to the board of LEDC and the mayor and the city manager attend LEDC meetings and are aware of some of those goals through their participation. And finally, there are a number of different areas such as the industrial land development strategy, workforce strategy with the city that LEDC also helps contribute metrics and goals towards. In a nutshell, though, we are very much on track to achieve the goals on our level of activity and the initiatives that we plan to undertake this year.

In terms of outcomes at the macro level, we have goals around the economic performance for a region as it relates to labor force development, unemployment rates, investment and fraction, and we’re very much on track to achieve those as well. Thank you very much. No more questions? Councilor Stevenson.

Okay. Thank you and through the chair. Thank you for the presentation. I did have a couple of questions.

Is the city of London the only funder for LEDC? Mr. O’Kocha. Thank you through the chair.

Yes, that is correct. Sorry. Let me elaborate on that. The city of London is the vast majority of where our funding comes from.

We receive some very small contributions from time to time from the federal government. For example, recently, we attracted $200,000 to run an FDI campaign for electric vehicle supply chain called the EV triangle. That’s very specific to the powerful investment and limited to only two or three-year term. Outside of that, it’s all city of London and we don’t receive any provincial investment.

Councilor. Thank you. And is it just the mayor is council representation on the board? So is there just the one one council voting member?

Mr. O’Kocha. Through the chair. Yes, that’s correct.

Only the mayor and the city manager is invited to attend our meetings as an ex-officio member. Thank you. As you know, I’m always looking at the finances and there’s nothing to look at. I asked for financial statements for the last couple of years and I was told that the purchase agreement doesn’t allow us to see them.

So the city receives them, but we don’t get to see them. And I think I struggle with that when we’re facing like large property tax increases and people are asking us to be responsible for the money that we are saying notice. So we approved a two to two and a half million dollars a year contract for the next four years. And I just wondered if there was maybe I understand it’s not part of the contract and I you likely cannot speak for the board.

But I wondered if there might be an opportunity to release financial statements to have a no in terms of salaries, which is the public is looking at what’s happening with LHC and TVDSB. We have no idea what salaries are being paid. How many? Do you have any comment there?

Any suggestions that you can make to help me answer to the electorate? Mr. O’Kocha. Through the chair, we submit annual audited financial statements to the city as required by our purchase of services agreement.

Thank you for that. I wonder and I don’t want to put staff on the spot, but I wonder if either Mr. O’Kocha or Ms. Pollot might want to speak as well to confidentiality requirements that may be involved in some of the work that you do with attracting new business and why in fact those would not be publicly released.

I think that may be helpful to all members of council to understand. Thank you through the chair. And apologies in advance if I’m not answering the question directly. As per the purchase agreement, the responsibility on LDCs to submit the annual audited financial statements, I’m not sure what it’s received by the city.

I’m not sure within the city what protocol is established. And Ms. Pollot, can you provide maybe just a brief bit of information for us on that? Thank you.

And through the chair, the purchase of service agreement does contain a confidentiality clause that prohibits the corporation from disclosing because it’s commercially sensitive material. It also provides that upon written request, LDC shall provide information available. So I think that potentially council could request that the information be provided in closed session but it could not disclose it publicly given the confidentiality clause. Thank you, Ms.

Pollot. Councillor Stevenson. It’s really difficult for the people that I speak with to understand why there would be such a cone of silence over the financial statements of an organization that we’re funding at 100%, even just a high level financial in terms of how much of it is going to wages, how much of it is going to rent, these other things, what are the salaries of the people who are there, even just at the high level that a charity is required to state, you know, how many between 100,000 and 119, how many here? I wish I’d known more this when we approved the contracts last year and it’s not to question the work that you do but I have a hard time understanding why we aren’t like displaying it and showing the amazing things that we do with this $2 million.

We get this report which is great but given a scrutiny and the shock that a lot of London residents are feeling in terms of what some of the boards are now facing as a council here, I think it behooves me anyway to start asking more questions about the financials, I get told with the social service contracts that it’s private as well between a charity and a municipal government. So when our solicitor says that the corporation is not allowed to release them, I’m assuming that means the city of London corporation, correct, and not LEDC. Ms. Paul, thank you and through the chair, that’s the wording of the agreement that is the corporation of London cannot disclose it publicly.

Thank you. So I understand that that we can’t but I guess I’m asking LEDC, is there or is there a willingness to even entertain that with your board to come back and say we’re willing to release them, we’re willing to share how many at certain salaries just to provide transparency to the city of London and to Londoners who at a really tough time when they’re having trouble paying their bills, do you have a right I think to know especially in the climate that we’re in right now where LHSC and TVSB are under scrutiny for us not to apply the same scrutiny here. I get to justify this to the people in Ward 4 and the people across the city who reach out to me asking me to do the best that I can to relieve the pressure on the property tax rate and we have budget committees and we’re looking for nickels and we’ve got two million two and a half million dollars a year here that we don’t even have a high level not even the most high level financial statements for so I can don’t know if I can get an answer from LEDC on that as to or I think at this point Councillor that would be comments. I don’t think Mr.

Lococha can speak on behalf of the board in terms of what they may or may not entertain so he wouldn’t be able to make a commitment either way so I think it’s just comment. I understand no commitment personally but I wondered if there was a willingness to take it back to the board and offer a level of transparency that Londoners are expecting. So Councillor I with respect I think council would have to communicate that to the board not Mr. Lococha so that’s that’s something that you know as was mentioned the mayor is on the board so that’s perhaps a discussion to have with the mayor okay it’s not something that we can ask Mr.

Lococha to do. Okay fair enough. So my other question was in terms of the 100 percent or almost 100 percent from London my understanding was that previously there was big industries were contributing revenue maybe in a 60/40 split or a 70/30 split with London was and maybe not I’m seeing some shaken of the head so I just wondered if there was a change what was happening. I also wondered in the reports when we talk about number of jobs I did have a few residents reach out to me a little bit concerned about the marketing campaigns that were bringing people from Toronto and from other areas here at a time when we’re in a housing crisis and they’re struggling to find jobs and they’re struggling to find housing for them or their kids are why their taxpayer money would be going to a marketing campaign to bring people here versus creating bringing industry here so that Londoners have jobs so I just wondered if you had a response to those concerns and council I’ll just advise you that hit your five minutes but I’m going to go to Mr.

Lococha if you want to speak to the purpose behind the don’t tell Toronto campaign. Thank you through the chair. The demand and supply variables in the labor market are almost never an equilibrium. Companies that are growing and expanding even when they’re participating in local job fairs they are not often able to find the skills that talent the the type of requirements that they have are not being met in the local catchment area.

Those are the skills that are being marketed in Toronto and external areas so we are trying to be very targeted in the occupations that are in high demand and low supply in the local area. By no means is it to say we’re not focusing on trying to maximize the potential of the local labor market as well. That’s where the Londonan area job works job fairs come in very handy but most of the external activities are focused on filling the high demand areas that are not seeing enough activity in the local area and I’m going to go next to Councillor ramen. Thank you and through you.

I just wanted to inquire I heard the Councillor’s line of questioning and I thought that a sufficient answer was given to the question around how to access the information and that it was available to council and camera. Do you need a motion to get to have that received by council at a further date? Confirm with the clerk. Yes so we would need an additional direction Councillor so we’ve got a motion on the floor to receive.

If you want to amend I would suggest something to the effect of and that civic administration be directed to work with the ledc to bring back a financial reporting to council in closed session at a future council or a future SPPC meeting date. If you so choose to move that way that would be what the clerks would need. Thank you. I’m not requiring that at this time.

What I’m saying is there’s a pathway for council and councillors to receive that information so that motion can be made. I think that if that’s the desire in order to pass some level of scrutiny to be able to go back to residence and say that we’re confident in the information that we’ve received then that may be needed. I’m not hearing the same thing but I just want to make sure that people understand there’s a pathway to receive that information if needed. I appreciate the level of detail that is given in the report.

I do think there’s opportunity for our community to better understand some of the work that ledc does and the rest of those that are delegating today but I think that comes from getting to know these organizations better in the work they do and I think they’re quite open and transparent in their communication about how to engage with them. So I personally don’t need that information but I wanted to make sure it was available. Thank you councillor. Mayor Morgan.

Yes I just want to add a couple of comments. So first I’ll let council know that I think my first term or second term of council. I was probably one of the biggest scrutinizers of ledc. I remember even delaying the purchase of service contracts to add additional provisions into it working with council and ledc at the time and I would say I think we strengthened the purchase of service agreement at that time and we provided an additional layer of expected reporting and metrics which I think ledc is now bringing before us and making available on their website.

I can say now I have the opportunity to sit as a member of the board and I can say my previous scrutiny of this organization has evaporated completely based on the new purchase of service contract and the performance that I see out of the ledc not just in ensuring that they’re aggressive in supporting council’s industrial land development strategy but also in the other things we’ve tasked them with over the years like putting the film office and other council priorities under their umbrella and then delivering on them in a highly effective way in a very cost effective way. It’s an organization that continues to align its priorities with both the purchase of service agreement and the demands that council has on it and take on additional duties and responsibilities as we’ve asked them throughout the course of amendments to that contract and I would say too I think a key player in the diversification of our economic strategy. The ledc has gotten very clearly that you know 30 to 40 years ago when we were completely dependent upon mainly automobile and other traditional manufacturing that ended very badly during economic downturns for London and the way that we have diversified our strategy ledc and other partners within the economic development sector means we now have these really robust agri-food strategies. We have an emerging tech strategy, we have a film industry developing, we have dwelled into leveraging our medical sciences expertise into pharmaceutical production and medical nitrile-gloved production.

We are actively participating in even partnerships with Volkswagen on workforce development and supporting what our economic drivers to the region that have spin-off benefits for Londoners and even direct benefits for Londoners from a jobs perspective. So I appreciate the the information I always appreciate when the Councillors would desire more information. I just my own opinion having watched this over the years is I’m very happy with the progression of this organization and where they’ve got to and I think where they’re headed to in the future is very is very beneficial as well and I’m always open to as purchase of service agreements come to an expiry. Remember you know this is a little bit different from other organizations.

This is a separate corporation that we are purchasing a service with under a contract. We purchase services from many organizations and and they are separate independent entities and bodies. So I think we can partner with them and ask for information in a number of different ways and there are pathways to doing that but but I’m very happy with the evolution of the way that the ledc has progressed over the years and the responsiveness that they’ve given to councils requests and and and expectations in the past. So I just wanted to add that context Mr.

Chair. Thank you Your Worship. I have no one else on the speakers list at this time and I will let colleagues know that Councillor Hillyer has joined us remotely so he is with us as well. So with no other speakers I will ask the clerk to open the vote.

So votes yes closing the vote motion carries 14 to 1. Thank you colleagues and thank you Mr. Lococha and your team for the presentation and the annual update to us and the next presenter on our list for item 3.2. The next of our economic development partners is the Small Business Center and Mr.

Pelerin. So Mr. Pelerin welcome and just as I said to Mr. Lococha there you have five minutes and when you are ready to begin please proceed.

Good afternoon and through your chair thank you for this opportunity. I’d like to begin by highlighting our recently updated mission and vision statement. For 37 years our mission statement has clearly identified our purpose as economic development. The social and cultural well-being of the community has been the byproduct.

Its importance has been understated. Our revised mission and vision emphasize that small business is the means to make our community better, to create opportunities for people and to showcase our diversity, rich culture and inclusiveness. That said job creation remains the most important measurement to our funders. Last year we directly contributed to the creation of 416 jobs.

We delivered 170 training sessions with almost 3,000 people participating making us one of the busiest small business enterprise centers in the province. Those sessions aren’t just valuable skills development opportunities they are a necessary triage tool. Not everyone who requests a consultation can receive one. So when it makes sense we can direct them to a group session.

Last year we saw notable increase in the number of newcomers accessing our service. This reflects our population growth as well as our efforts to better reach and serve various ethnic communities. Activity by sector this is influenced by where we can secure additional funding for programs. So not surprisingly food related is number one.

Retail at 10% is also a result of targeted programming. However last year represented the tail end of some covid recovery initiatives so this may decrease next year. Business stage is captured at the first point of contact. If we work with someone through the investigating stage to the business start and continue to serve them as an existing business they will only ever be captured here as investigating.

It’s an important step because it indicates trends. As an example we saw a large spike in the number of existing businesses contacting us during covid and now that has returned to pre-covid levels. We see a substantial increase in the investigatory stage and that’s because of our efforts to introduce our services to new audiences specifically the newcomer population. What these stats and those on the previous slides tell us is that they can easily be influenced by where we direct our limited resources.

There is a constant need and opportunity to do more. Slide seven highlights our services but I want to continue on to highlight some of our high impact programs. Last year we dispersed $147,000 in provincial microgrants. With the grants comes extensive training and mentorship support.

We look for ventures that have a high leverage investment ratio and ability to create jobs almost immediately. Within six months of receiving the grant the total reported new jobs were 58. The food printer advantage program designed for new food manufacturers has been our flagship program for the past three years. It is a four-year project launched in 2021 with seed funding from Libra Credit Union and Fed Dev.

It has two key components. The startup series of webinars is taken out of a cart and is self-paced. With hundreds of businesses participating it’s an effective prospecting tool. In each year 20 to 25 businesses are selected to receive intensive business coaching and mentorship in the scale-up program.

With the funding for this project coming to an end we have opened the startup training to other municipalities entered into MOUs under a membership model. We now have 13 municipal partners promoting the startup series in their respective communities and contributing financially to the project. We are still seeking funding to keep the scale of program active. New START guidance for newcomer led businesses is delivered in partnership with LEDC.

Only six months in we have worked seven organizations to deliver workshops across the city. Twenty businesses were invited to receive comprehensive training and coaching and as the project progresses we’ll be able to report back on job creation. I’d like to conclude by bringing the attention back to the real champions of small business. It may go without saying that behind every business there is a person but it deserves emphasis.

It is people not businesses who put all in the line to pursue their passion and it is people who share their talent creativity and culture. Business is the means and our community is the beneficiary. Please don’t stop here visit the inspiration page of our website. Check out some of our videos.

I guarantee you will be inspired. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Pelerin and we’ll get you to stay at the podium there.

There may be some questions. First I’m going to look for a motion to receive the presentation moved by Councillor Ferrer and seconded by Councillor Frank and now we will open the floor to discussions looking for speakers. Councillor Stevenson. Thank you for the presentation and for all the support you give to our small businesses.

I know it’s really appreciated in fairness to everybody. I’ll ask a similar question. Are your financial statements publicly available? Yes.

As a non-for-profit organization I mean we would require some information as to who’s receiving it but for the most part we have shared those in front that we’ve shared them with other parties and I don’t see why we wouldn’t in this situation. Councillor. Oh Mr. Pelerin can you just turn your mic off?

Councillor go ahead. Thank you. I appreciate that and I also appreciate the willingness to have the open transparency for the Londoners and taxpayers who are putting money towards this good work. Thank you.

Thank you for other speakers. Councillor Frank. Thank you. I just wanted to say that the beat burgers by New Leaf are exceptional so if you look at slide eight it just highlights those.

If you haven’t had one you’re missing out and thank you for the presentation. Thank you Councillor. Councillor Pribble. Thank you Mr.

Chair I have a few questions. First one is who we serve business stage. If I look at the graph we are the 45% staying flat in terms of the startups and investigating an existing year on year actually complete lift lift. Is this kind of what’s out there in the throughout the industries or is it something potentially that some are reaching out more than the others?

Mr. Pelerin. It’s actually driven in two ways so there is a natural demand that comes to the front door and we do our best to serve those people that come from the front door but a lot of it is also driven by our programming. As I’ve said if we can get additional funding for projects that’s going to drive those numbers.

So in this situation we are seeing less COVID recovery money than we were maybe years definitely more than two years ago so that’s why the number of existing businesses down and as far as the investigating that is directly related to our efforts to spread ourselves across the city and to do these outreach presentations to newcomer and ethnic groups. Councillor. Full up in the footprint we are growing in a positive way together with the this our concept the other municipalities. There is one that we are not that I was just curious what is a unique participant and why we are undergoing this the concept.

Thank you Mr. Pelerin. Okay so the program is taken all the cart meaning that we will run the workshops the seminars repetitively throughout the year. People can enter and they can take it at their own pace which means that individuals may cross into two different reporting periods.

Okay so when we say unique participant we mean that as somebody brand you that we’ve entered now into our CRM into our database that is accessing our services in that portfolio of services for the first time that’s what a unique participant is. They can come back and they will count as an attendance attendance but they will not come back in a town as a new unique participant. As far as the the the the the comparables the data set you referred to that’s because we’re growing the number of we’re growing the number of municipal partners. So last year we had eight other municipalities partnering with us.

This year we have 13. So the total is going to start rising disproportionately to London’s share. Councilor Preble thank you. Our number for HR the 30 has increased from 15 to 17 percent.

Many talk to the post-secondary students regularly doesn’t matter if it’s Fanshawe Western. Many of them are saying that they would like to explore staying in London instead of going back home and to do for example entrepreneurship and startups from their parents basement but they would like to receive kind of more information what municipal it is small business center and other organizations can do and of course they would love to have thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars at them but they say even without the money what is there how can we reach out to them it’s positive from 15 to 17 percent but again if you look at under 30 entrepreneurship and the two great post-secondary institutions we have here how can we target them more Mr. Pelerin. That is a great question and admittedly we are doing less with youth than maybe we were 15 years ago but that is a result of both of our post-secondary institutions Fanshawe and Western are now considering are now investing considerable amounts of money into entrepreneurship.

Okay. So we are we’re needed less in that area to be to be blunt but the students are finding a lot of what they need on campus that doesn’t mean that we aren’t still reaching out to those students but our role has been diminished and quite frankly the students we’ve had some challenges matter in fact just just recently you know I’ve met with folks at Fanshawe to try and get their student consulting team to work on how we can get some of those kids off of campus and back into some of our resources. So we’re making efforts but if I’m being you know but I want to make it very clear too I mean we put our resources where the demand is and right now the youth are being well served in my opinion through the post-secondary institutions and there’s we’re feeling the strain and the pressure from other areas so it doesn’t mean that we can’t find incremental ways to improve what we do with youth but it’s also a well-known fact that a youth is much more likely to launch a business if their parents own businesses they’re like 60 percent more likely so I think we have to look at it the entire community and what we want to do is build the culture of entrepreneurship and business ownership across all ages across all demographics if we can get kids parents to run businesses it’s going to be more likely that the kids are going to run a business. So it’s got to be a long game and you know that’s the way we’re directing our resources.

Councilor thank you one comment and then one more question in terms of the comment I agree that both post-secondary institutions are offering great support during their years but then afterwards I do think that we should be and I’m not just talking small business center as a municipality trying to make our city more attractive and opportunities for these young people and hold them in our city. Last question is does the organization have specific annual goals targets and if they if you do are you on the track to come to fulfill your annual targets? Mr. Pelerin.

Yes we do. It’s important to understand how we use the city’s funds in this. So the city’s funds are really the most discretionary dollars that we have as an organization so we will use those dollars to leverage other opportunities other funders other programs. So our target setting often comes from how what other projects we can get.

So every project that we do all these projects that identified food printer or the the the micro loan programs all come with their unique set of targets and goals and those of course get wrapped into an aggregate goal setting and we are with one exception we are achieving all of those goals the one that we aren’t achieving is youth but it’s only about one or two percent below our below our target so I’m confident that we will exceed that target on youth for next year. Thank you no more questions and I have no more speakers on the speakers list so final call and seeing none I will ask the clerk to open the vote. Councillor votes yes. Opposing the vote motion carries 15 to 0.

Thank you colleagues and thank you Mr. Pelerin and to your team for your presentation. We appreciate having all three organizations come before us every year and the third organization 3.3 is our delegation from Tech Alliance and Ms. Fox is with us so if you’d like to come to the podium and then once you’re ready just as the other two speakers you’ll have five minutes and you can begin when you’re ready to go.

I’ll start good afternoon everybody Tech Alliance empowers world-class ventures and fuels growth in Canada’s innovation economy while propelling ambitious entrepreneurs and tech talent right here. Today we’re looking back at the incredible results of their our most recent fiscal which ended March 31st 2024. As the lead voice and centralized resource for London’s tech sector Tech Alliance radically reduces obstacle and increases speed to success for the most promising startups and highest potential scale-ups generating prosperity right now. We champion and coach entrepreneurs amplifying impact businesses while fostering an equitable and vibrant community of innovators.

The greater London area has what it takes to be among Canada’s top tech ecosystems and it has a population that’s educated technical professional and has investable wealth. Here you’ll see our three strategic priorities guiding us toward our moonshot. London was ranked number four in CBRE’s top emerging tech markets in North America now three times consecutively and that is not by accident. Built by founders Tech Alliance is the place for dreamers innovators and world-changing ideas continuing our pace as a vital partner to the city of London I’d like to thank you on behalf of our board of directors some of whom are up in the gallery go ahead and wave gang fostering an entrepreneurial culture and with nearly 5,000 advisory and education hours combined of that 1900 were one-to-one advisory hours this is a combined metric is down from the prior year because we had educational hours that were smaller because when our beher project started and ended in that in that particular year demonstrating the value of our mandate as the place for entrepreneurs who are innovating we facilitated 4,000 connections across 61 different events we bring together people and we publish and amplify compelling stories locally and across the nation our city boasts a high-tech talent employment rate closing in at 17,000 tech jobs here prioritizing widening pathways to critical resources like talent for late stage startups and hyper growth ventures we had strong student and professional newcomer interactions and made significant ecosystem referrals for jobs created posted and promoted we saw 3,100 up 500 from last year we saw in excess of 100 million dollars in capital raised by tech companies in the forest city and making good on our promise we’ve made remarkable connections to policymakers and politicians at all ranks of government who have been so bold as to call out london’s undeniable swagger on main stages of Canadian technology conferences we’re happy to boast about tech lines as impact here significantly outpacing many other often talked about cities we cultivate and foster a thriving community of founders and their teams industry leaders capacity builders ecosystem partners investors and tech talent committed to a regional culture of diversity and equity 75 percent of startups fail and in the next six slides these are a fraction of the 25 percent that took risks and continue to soar our Polaris is to be among the top tech ecosystems in Canada activated through venture growth advisory industry tech talent and community with significant advocacy with the government of Canada and the province of Ontario to ensure london continues to be a north star in Canada’s economic value creators next comes our highlight reel of collaboration among 5,000 innovators entrepreneurs and industries in the tech industry in the last fiscal found on spotify apple podcast and other platforms idea to investment podcast is where you can listen to our beloved host ken eastwood talk about groundbreaking innovation of founders and their investors activating funding for ventures led by equity deserving founders tech lines flowed 630,000 dollars to companies focused on green economy resulting in 109 fte’s 6.2 million in combined revenue and 1.8 million in capital raised with here on infansha we delivered 550 liberal arts and stem work integrated learning experiences that impacted 160 industry partners add to that we hosted tech talent exchange with 785 student registrants and 133 employers there are glass ceiling still to shatter for women founders women investors and women CEOs so in person we called more than 55 women in action through a new series designed to continue conversations with real systems change taking our place among the very best we launched a genius economic development innovation to solve some of the most pressing city priorities this past fiscal thirty seconds I’m sorry sorry just to let you know you got about 30 seconds left yes I’ll wrap up um this past fiscal london innovation challenge awarded 40,000 each to two companies who bolstered london creative industries the final challenge and the state and in a statement of multi-year series since its inception we’ve had we’ve awarded 10 companies across four challenges with non dilute of seed funding uh bespoke advisory services with an additional 6 million total capital raised by those companies resulting in 5.1 total revenue 65 jobs so when closing you’ll see that these outcomes are published in the business case in your added agenda for the next potential innovation challenge phase maxming our collective momentum we ask you to consider a one-time funding over multiple years to tackle your highest priority municipal challenges in line with council strategic plan tech lines and unmatched spirit to solve global challenges with you and that’s past time so thank you for that presentation uh we’re going to look for a mover and a seconder to receive and that’s moved by councilor hillier and seconded by councilor hopkins uh and we’ll open the floor now for questions and comments councilor layman thank you miss fox i just want to ask how um uh the workplace has changed with uh remote work how is that impacting um your members my attack industry here locally as an impacting in terms of local jobs because i i can understand it would maybe a two-way street one is that uh companies locally here can access talent globally um and vice versa though um people here would work for companies not located uh in london so how is uh remote work affecting jobs and and also how is it affecting investment in new initiatives miss fox thank you through the chair this is the question that’s always a double edged sword because we have some tech talent that work in london for technology companies remote or in person we have tech talent that that live in london and work for companies outside of london and we have um companies in london that employ people outside of london so there’s an awful lot of trifecta involved in there um we continue to see a rise in tech jobs in this community it’s one of the reasons why we land on cbre’s uh tech tech top tech emerging tech markets it’s also one of the reasons why we landed on a report last year we’re waiting on this year’s report through tech now that showed that london was number eight in in-city migration so the future looks bright as far as talent migrating to the city as it relates to remote work companies are choosing to find talent in a lot of different places and they find sometimes efficiencies in remote work opportunities and sometimes greater efficiencies for people in work i think the jury’s still out uh we see a lot of different trends happening where uh employees are even if they’re remote they’re still in the workplace a couple of days a week to build efficiencies have operational excellence and build culture answer layman and one one further question is just on the um the availability of finding um funding um private uh are your members finding it um how are they finding the local investment community as far as raising funds for you know new startups etc or are they having to increasingly seek outside funding mr fox thank you through the chair that’s a really great question um one of the things that london has lauded for is investible wealth and there are a couple of uh vc firms in town that will fund early-stage startups uh that are focused on technology in really meaningful ways and that was absent i would say uh beyond swo angels which has been an angel investment group that’s been around for a long long time this is a new behavior that’s happening in london and it’s welcome behavior um having that kind of concentration of wealth invested in technology companies that are operating here uh in this region is is a really good sign when we work with companies typically when they come in the door they’re looking for access to capital access talent access to customers they start with the money so we typically look at companies where they have total adjustable market and adjacencies to um funders who are looking to fund companies that are doing the things that they’re doing and so we are not opposed to working with companies and making introductions to investors that are outside of london inside of ontario even outside of canada where it makes sense the more often the london company can receive investments so they can accelerate great jobs the better it is for everybody so again it’s a a duality of it’s awesome that we have invest investment firms now in london but it’s also awesome for us to make sure that we have founders who are getting access to cash in lots of different places counselor you’re good looking for other speakers counselor purple thank you sir the chair under the fostering and to parental culture uh you are showing 1900 hours for as advisory and last year it was almost 9000 for advisory and educational and uh you are not continuing with the educational or the reason behind it and then also what was the split of the 800 8900 last year thank you miss fox thank you through the chair yes that’s a great color thank you counsel uh purple what we saw last year um was an increased number of education hours related to our be here so business higher education round table it’s a project that we did at that time with western university and have now continued that project with vanchion here on um what we did see though was 1900 advisory hours this year and what that means is actual you know the staff on our team who are venture growth advisors they amount of time they spend one-to-one with companies advancing their opportunities so the split between last year and this year we’re very slightly less on advisory hours like less than 100 and really that’s related to where we have time of a staff turn our venture growth advisors are former founders and so when they join our team that we sometimes see that departure because they start the next big thing on the education advisor it’s really just a timing of a project that we had with an engineering class um that was a large-sized class that began in q4 the prior fiscal and ended in q1 this particular fiscal and we measured it because when it started we measured it in the last report to spbc counselor thank you follow up under the harness world class talent employer student registrants for uh for tech talent exchange we grew it or sorry you grew it for almost 100 percent year-on-year what was the success behind this miss fox thank you through the chair um tech talent exchange is something we’re quite proud of it’s making that connection between technology companies that are operating in london and two students who are interested in joining technology companies either because they’re technical or other business operations i would say two of the major reasons why we saw an increase this year is we had significant executive leadership endorsement through fancia through two deans at fancia that did um quite a bit of work in uh supporting the marketing efforts to students at fancia i would say in the case of western we had a a shift in a staff member there and with any kind of a change comes increased enthusiasm for marketing so i think it was a combination of the work that we do in partnership with our post-secondary education and um depending on the the types of companies that participate in tech talent exchange there could be a more or less interest by students and it just happened in last fiscal year that there was probably more students interested in the types of companies that we had and they were well marketed through our partnership with the with the schools councilor thank you uh putting business first uh we had currently new startups 48 last year it stated we had 10 percent increase what was it then last year thank you this box thank you through the chair in the last fiscal year sppc report it’s at up 10 percent we were in at 70 this year reported 48 the decline is is primarily related to exits a reduced number of exits and a reduced number of acquisition for growth you know it’s approval thank you and the last question does your organization have annual goals specific targets and are you on the track to reach them or overachieve them miss fox thank you through the chair yes we do um we have while we’re not for profit organization we operate like a private sector corporation we have uh company scorecards and departmental scorecards that we review on a weekly basis those roll up to a quarterly board report to our board of directors and of course with multiple funders we have a lot of different reporting requirements for each of those funders so we track those as well um as we look at sort of our lead indicators for this year we’re halfway through this current fiscal and we don’t have i’m not forecasting that we have major headwinds as it relates to our targets and i expect that across the board will meet targets or exceed those targets thank you and last comment thank you for including the business case study on the agenda which was very helpful and the financial impact and matrix is helpful as well for us so thank you for that no more questions no more comments thank you counselor and i’ll go back to counselor layman thank you i want one further question this box you know we’ve heard presentations from ladc small business center and yourselves both trying to um foster economic growth in london i see that tech is one of the four key sectors ledc is identified can you tell me how um the tech alliance works in partnership with ledc or are you working with ledc i’m concerned about pillars being established in our community that might be not working with each other or worse cross purposes miss fox thank you through the chair i would say the the greatest opportunity that we have between ledc uh tech lines and even small business center is the type of advocacy that we do combined and even separate um to call attention to london and the incredible changes that we are seeing in the city uh whether it’s related to talent whether it’s related to startups scaling companies and i think that’s one of the key drivers for um the work that we do and why when when i meet with all different ranks of government they often refer to conversations that they’ve had with capill and capill’s team and steve and steve’s team and so i think the the best part of the work that we do is we have the opportunity to share through our quarterly economic development meetings with the city on some of the things that we’ve sort of look back on and look forward to and one of those is talking about major milestones that we’ve achieved in our organization so that we can continue to amplify and tell that story to folks who are looking at london as um as a best case scenario counselor thank you and i have counselor stevenson next thank you thank you for the presentation and the work that you do it’s exciting to see the growth of the tech sector in london um given my questions to the other two and i know that we only contribute two hundred thousand and i think it’s less than a quarter of your budget but are your statements available publicly just fox thank you through the chair we actually have um less than a quarter from the city of london and we actually have a number of multiple uh funding partners and for each of those funding partners we are required through our purchase service agreement to submit our financial statements um additionally we’re expected to report for ontarius sunshine list so we have a great deal of transparency as it relates to our financial statements if there was um a conversation that any member of council would like to have a better audited financial statements i’m very much open to it counselor thank you very much i appreciate it hey i have no other speakers on the list so last call and checking online and seeing none i will ask the clerk to open the vote trust those votes yes closing the vote motion carries 15 to 0 thank you colleagues and thank you miss fox to you and your team uh for your presentation as always uh moving along our next item on the agenda colleagues is 3.4 this is a public participation meeting on the 2025 amendments to the consolidated fees and charges by law um because this is listed as a public participation meeting i do need a motion to open the public participation meeting moved by counselor hopkins and seconded by counselor plowsa and we will open the vote on that answer tressa yes sorry closing the vote motion carries 15 to 0 hey the public participation meeting is open so if there’s anyone in the gallery here to speak to the consolidated fees and charges by law uh you could make your way to a microphone i will check online see if there’s anyone on the zoom uh meeting as well and i have no one online and i have no one making their way to the mic as i see our tech alliance folks are making their way back to the office uh but we’ll look to see uh one last call anyone to speak on the consolidated fees and charges by law seeing none i’ll look for motion to close the public participation meeting moved by counselor layman and seconded by counselor frank and i will ask the clerk to open the vote that’s the votes yes counselor stevenson closing the vote motion carries 15 to 0 thank you colleagues so i’m looking to see if uh there’s anyone who wants to put the staff recommendation on the floor moved by counselor cuddy seconded by counselor layman so the staff recommendation hit on the fees and charges by law is on the floor and looking for any discussion sir stevenson thank you yeah i just had a question on page 65 for the hall rentals it’s for centennial hall the percent change from 2024 to 2025 is like 160 to 300 to 400 percent increases i just wondered if there was um an explanation miss parborn thank you through the chair as explained in the report um they had raised their rates but had neglected to provide that information to update the fees and charges by law so that correction is being made and the fees and charges that are currently being charged are now included that’s why it’s a number of years catch up that uh the fees are representing counselor stevenson any other speakers on this seeing none then i lost the clerk to open the vote yes losing the vote motion carries 15 to zero thank you colleagues so our next item uh is a public participation meeting this is phase one options report the london board boundary review i’m just going to preface this uh so i can look for a motion to open the ppm and then afterwards we can move into our own uh dialogue as well um but i did speak to the clerks team just for clarity uh from some questions that were raised by council members last week on this uh and i know our folks from watson and associates will be joining us on the line momentarily um but just for colleagues information today is a a touch point uh for our consultants to update us on where they are after today there is a second round of public consultation as well as opportunities for individual counselors to follow up meetings as well uh so today we are not uh looking for direction to make changes to uh what the work the consultants are doing as per the rfp uh it is an opportunity to ask questions to get some more information uh for members of the public to provide us feedback through the the public participation meeting um but it is not a change to the scope of the work uh that our consultants uh will be doing for phase two so i just wanted to uh preface that for colleagues information and i’m going to look now for a motion to open the ppm moved by council freira and seconded by councilor mccallister and colleagues are so votes yes closing the vote motion carries 15 to 0 okay so just as we did with the last item if any members of the public are here to speak to uh the item with respect to the ward boundary uh changes proposal now is the time to make your way to a microphone to provide us your feedback and comments and i will also look for any participants online we have none online so i’m going to look for a motion to close the public participation meeting moved by councilor frank and seconded by councilor lame oh sorry oh i’m up here saw you up there sorry about that okay uh if you can uh give us your name and then you’ll have five minutes uh and when you’re ready to go ahead and i will give you a 30 second warning as you’re approaching your your five-minute mark uh yes hello um thank you for um first of all this process that you’ve established the city and um the public consultation part of it my name is gill warren and i live in woodfield uh in the area of atlaid and central six to four william street and i’m uh not speaking on behalf of the woodfield community association but i have been a member of that board and very active in downtown politics for many years i read over the presentation uh that the consultants are going to make and just a few quick comments you’ve given me how much time five minutes sorry um in terms of the issue of population growth and i can see in the plan that it’s looking at where will the city’s growth be in ten years and then trying to develop a word system to deal with that just the word of caution on that i’ve lived in this city since the 70s and i’ve seen periods of growth for the city and then periods of stagnation and uh i’ve seen situations where we um suddenly get a recession and we end up with empty holes in the ground where they were supposed to be big buildings anyway i would say in designing the word boundary changes population growth 10 years from now should not be the number one priority the number one priority is a system to be adjusted now that will deal with the actual population we have um my big issue in concern is the communities of interest and that’s talking about neighborhoods and um different community groups in the city and i think that is the most important thing and it also has to be whatever is created it should be a simple system um i don’t think there should be really why we have to adjust for current population growth there shouldn’t be any big changes where we uh completely change a word around or we change the name of the word or um because people are used to the system we have now in terms of i live in word 13 i know the rough boundaries and and i can relate to that if we just changed all the numbers we’re just confused everybody um i also proposed a long time ago that the words not just have numbers like word 13 but also include a name like in the case of our word woodfield Oxford park okay they do this in other cities and it allows people in their head to know okay i guess i’m in that ward when they’re trying to figure it out um i just want to highlight three communities of interest that i think are divided by the proposals that have been put forward put forward by the consultants one is my own neighborhood of woodfield and what i call london east which other people called oldies village i know people think that Adelaide is some kind of wall and a no one in woodfield ever goes on the other side of the wall but actually we do all the time we live in those two neighborhoods but we move back and forth we shop in one neighborhood we live in another people go to school in the other neighborhood things like that so um and i notice in the proposals that um london east is being sort of moved around in these proposals to go into word two or to go into another word and i would suggest that maybe woodfield and london east could um be in the current word 13 the other neighborhood that’s really split up is the word two only includes half of glen karen and none of ponmills and i think there the northern glen karen is also connected to the southern glen karen and your proposals should try and keep glen karen and ponmills in one word word the other is lambith um lambith is an old town that used to be an independent place in in the countryside and we swallowed it up and whatever proposal comes forward lambith is unique and i think it should be represented by one counselor there’s a problem when a community is divided in half and it ends up with two counselors who have different political opinions it’s better to have one counselor who can speak for that um just a couple of other things like how much time we got left down there mr chair so you’ve got about 35 seconds left mr.

Warren and and just before you go on um to hopefully help the consultants as well as as the counselors uh the comments that you’ve made so far were you referring to a specific map option number or in general because if there’s a specific map i think it’d be good to highlight that for the consultant so i’m not counting this answer against your time okay but was there a map in their package that you were referring to in particular i was referring to a number of the maps with a number of instances i’m going to attend the meetings in next week and uh we can get into all the details i just wanted to give kind of an overview from a community activist point of view okay so we’ll resume your time now all right the other big thing is class the lower class you are the less likely you are to vote the more educated the more higher class you you will vote and i think that should be taken into consideration new londoners doesn’t matter where they’re from takes them a long time to get involved in city politics our turnout is atrocious and one of the problems is the system’s too complicated got to keep it simple last comment london is really not one city but three cities there’s my downtown part of the city where i can walk and by you can take a bus and the age is mixed and there are other words downtown like that as well then is the old suburbs from the 1950s to the 1980s and then the new suburbs from the 1990s until now if you’re drawing maps it would be useful if you put the old suburbs from the 60s together if you can because they have older populations they have a long history i would also note that that’s and that’s your time mr one that’s my time okay i’ll do the rest at the meetings in the coffee yep and we would welcome you at any of the meetings that we’re having on this topic i’m looking for any further speakers and i’ll just give folks a moment both in the gallery and online to see if there’s anyone checking with the clerk there’s no one online either so i will look now for a motion to close the public participation meeting moved by council frank and seconded by council for error and we’ll ask the clerk to open the vote on that and then we will move on to our consultant’s presentation trust the votes yes close in the vote motion carries 15 to 0 thank you colleagues and mr spicer and mr williams i see you are both with us online and ready to give us your presentation i know the last time you were with us we needed more time and you had asked for a ten minute presentation this time so that’s what we’ve allotted in the schedule for you and then questions and comments from councilors after that so when you’re ready if you would like to begin with your presentation to us thank you mr deputy mayor i’m prepared to get us started here with this presentation the point of today’s workshop is to simply bring council and the community up to date with the status of the word boundary review by talking a little bit about the process the information provided in the preliminary options report in the next steps now this is an independent review based on parameters provided by the city so we’re working with staff to collect data and consult with the community and we are developing preliminary options to enhance effective representation in london the next slide will point out uh some basic facts about the uh composition of municipal councils in ontario the the basic size is five london is well above that of course and so uh the relevant point here is that the composition is essentially a local determination but as the next slide shows this is essentially something that varies uh by municipality the the context the size the whatever there’s history involved london in our view is not uh out of line with the other comparable municipalities and this chart is basically those who are in the general neighborhood if i could say that west of hamilton so there’s nothing really about the composition that we felt we needed to circle back around and talk about so we will work basically with a 14 ward option as you currently have and uh we will start that review and we have started that review by looking at a set of guiding principles which we are outlined on the next slide and those those principles were applied initially to the current configuration uh every configuration has its strengths and shortcomings and on the whole we assess london’s present ward configuration as sound uh but the major shortcoming is that the population growth will result in an unacceptable population variation by 2035 in other words three elections out so there there were minor issues related to certain features used as boundaries and the grouping of some of the communities of interest in the current system and those are outlined in more detail in our uh a report that goes along with this presentation so in our experience uh having a number of options to consider at this point helps to stimulate public discussion and that’s the point that we are at now we want public discussion we’ve already had one example of that today so the proposed changes uh begin with fairly modest ones and preliminary option one is one that essentially keeps uh things as they are and then we move on to something more if you will uh dramatic and and perhaps uh less uh familiar i would just say that that for some people any change to the status quo may be seen as as drastic or unacceptable but in our view the approach has been to develop plausible adjustments not wholesale change so i’m going to ask uh Zach gospice here to take over here talk a little bit about these preliminary options that we’re putting forward and the key board here is preliminary Zach thank you so much Bob and again we’re we’re not looking for the for the public to necessarily endorse sort of vote for any of these options in particular as as Bob mentioned these are intended to generate discussion and the first option provides for some modest adjustment um coming mostly in some of the wards and in northern part of the city as we will see uh this provides for better population parity as we move towards the 2030 and 2034 election cycles however there are still four four wards that are outside the acceptable range of variation the committee’s of interest are largely contained within single wards including much of rural London overall we argue that that this provides an option that is largely successful in offering effective representation we’ve gone to the second option um where uh the focus has been has been placed on population parity um we can see that that this this option provides for for population parity today and it’s something parity is largely achieved as we move towards the 2030 election cycle however certain communities of interest are bisected by by certain ward ward boundaries and markers that are used as boundaries um don’t are aren’t necessarily straightforward we we argue though that that this provides for a partially successful effective representation we went on to the third option third option builds from the first uh it’s um it provides for a very good uh population parity um today and well into the future moving towards the 2034 election cycle there are no wards that that are outside the 15 variation range uh most of the the committee’s of interest are completely contained within single wards and uh the markers that that are used as boundaries are for the most part straightforward with perhaps a normal exception between wards nine and ten next slide the final option carries along some of the same logic provided provided in option two where population parity is for the most part achieved today and largely achieved by the 2030 election cycle this however um uh these these ward configurations however do uh do not necessarily completely contain each community of each community of interest we argue however that this that this model is partially successful in providing for effective representation next slide overall we’ve reviewed numerous options um most uh we’re we’re deemed as less successful than for potential options that we’ve provided um some may refer to these as drastic changes others may see them as necessary change the next task for us is to allow for the public to evaluate each of these options it’s not necessarily a popularity contest but rather an invitation to explain why various options either in part or as a whole are acceptable or not what emerges uh will be a final recommendation that might be one of these options might be a hybrid or something entirely new we begin this process next week with a virtual engagement session on october sixteenth and then three in-person engagement sessions on october 17th from five until seven p.m. we would certainly encourage anyone within the city who is interested curious about the process to join us and and to provide us with feedback thank you very much thank you mr. Spicer um and I know that uh you had asked for ten minutes but you came in well under that uh at seven uh and a half so um we appreciate the efficiency of that um so we’re going to look now uh to colleagues for a motion to receive the report and then we can move into questions and comments and so that’s moved by Councillor Pribble and seconded by Councillor Cuddy and Councillor Hopkins but I looked to the right before I looked to the left so we’ll go with Councillor Cuddy and we’ll open the vote on that we won’t open the vote on that we’re going to move to discussion and questions uh and looking for a speaker’s list Councillor Frank thank you yes and I appreciate the presentation the work that’s gone in so far um I do have a couple general comments and I’m just wondering like based on some of the map options if I can just add them to the floor I don’t have a motion but I want to share yeah okay um so I did want to highlight in uh both options on the map 1 and 3 um for ward 11 which I’m gonna be biased and speak from that vantage point I think we probably all know our wards quite well um there are about 10 houses on spring bank drive that get cut out and then put over to ward 13 and not that I don’t think that the Councillor is great over there um there is no natural connection there’s actually a train berm that runs right through and so I just wanted to highlight for that for the consultants that those 10 houses would feel absolutely no sense of connection to the River Forks neighborhood um I also wanted to highlight for option 4 for old south residents and I’ve already heard a bit of it on my social media um that the option of 4 cuts old south and half along right out and that residents don’t like that because um they feel very connected to old south and mortley village and to have their um area cut in half they wouldn’t really appreciate that so I just wanted to pass it along um I did also want to highlight and the speaker highlighted it well regarding the the names and numbers I believe that governance working group we had a brief discussion but I do think people um might remember their ward a bit better if there was a name associated with it for example mine right now if you look at it it would be south crest and old south would be the two largest kind of overarching names and people know that they live in those areas when I talk to the general population they do not know that they live in ward 11 unless I tell them um and I don’t know if they’re it’s the same with other folks but um generally the number is not a super big signifier um but the names of their neighborhoods are so I’m wondering perhaps maybe moving forward we could look at when we land on a final map composition discussing having names associated with the numbers and the only other question perhaps that I got that I would like to ask through the chair to the consultants um was regarding um school boundaries so when people vote in municipal elections they vote for both their counselor and then trustees but there are some people whose ward they would vote for their counselor but if their kid goes to another school um because it’s across the street that’s another ward so they’re not able to vote for the trustees on the same ballot so there was a question regarding is there any ability to try and align school trustee boundaries with council boundaries and I don’t really know because I’m not familiar with that um with the the rules for that so did the chair I don’t know if that’s something that can be commented on or thought about but I just want to share that as a comment as well. Well I’m actually going to go to our consultants there and see if mr.

Williams or mr. Spicer are able to offer any comment on ward boundaries and alignment with school board trustee I know you do this work in in multiple municipalities and I know you do it for school boards as well so I wonder if you might offer a comment to the counselor on either the viability or the challenges to the viability of trying to align ward lines with school trustee lines. I’ll pick that up if I may uh mr. Chair uh other members of our team do spend a lot of their time working with school boards on such things as as school boundaries catchment areas whatever the right term is the actual alignment of trustees uh is not uh something that is part of this review I’m sure we’re aware of school boundaries and and issues of that sort in drawing the lines that would have been part of what went into these uh whether any of these cases apply right now I can’t say uh and if there are glaring examples of that uh we would certainly want to hear that and to determine whether that can be done I also would suggest that the allocation of trustee seats uh what’s called the determination and distribution I believe it actually takes place before every election so it’s possible that some of those issues may even change after our review is completed so uh it may be that the that the school board boundaries might be re-aligned to conform to ward boundaries rather than the other way around but I can’t claim to be the great expert on that but it’s certainly a point that I know the team uh will take into account uh thank you mr.

Williams and our clerk actually is able to provide a brief uh follow up to that as well so i’ll go to mr. Korman thank you through the chair yes that is correct the school boards separately uh london district catholic school board the tems valley district school board will uh take these new boundaries and evaluate them in accordance with legislation for the determination of their new um uh new representation on the school boards uh for the two french school boards it actually encompasses the whole city so it won’t be affected thank you for that mr. Korman and uh there was a second question there I think for our consultants from council frank uh with regard to any uh and I think you may have this in your phase two evaluation anyway but with respect to names as well as numbers for wards is that something um that you’ve heard from the public on or that you would be considering in the next phase through you mr mr mr. chair um we we haven’t heard that from the public aside from the earlier speaker today um I think it’s something that we can keep in mind as we as we move forward um but um council could could provide names to the wards if they would like at the end of the process as well thank you and i’m sorry add to that mr.

chair I suggest that that is a an exercise that would come it when new wards are established and in a sense i’ll leave that fight to you folks to sort of rather than for us to come in and pick those names uh for you I think that is probably a community based uh exercise that that would better capture what the wards reflect thank you and our clerk has some comment to share on that one as well uh mr. Korman go ahead thank you through the chair as part of the terms of reference naming conventions were asked to be considered and as part of the round two of consultation we do have a question in the survey that um speaks to numbers and the naming conventions and any suggestions that may be had so we will be collecting that information during this phase but um in the official uh bylaw that you will pass numbers will remain and then the and then the naming will come later so i’m going to go back to Councillor Frank first to see if she’s got any follow up to those comments and then i’ve got Councillor Ferrera and then Councillor Hopkins no thank you then Councillor Ferrera you’re next thank you chair thanks for recognizing me um similar comments of Councillor Frank so i won’t go into them but for me it’s a big um guess big weight on how i would start seeing things would be for the community of interest and just that proper representation piece but i did want to ask a separate from that i’m not going to make the comments now really um for how i see the options but i wanted to ask i do know that we’re kind of on a time crunch here as well and we need to have something um resolved at this council before the end of this year i believe and we have to have something in place i guess by January 1st of 2025 so i just wanted to ask no okay so let me i guess i’ll start with clarifications of those questions um but what what time frame do we have here because i know that as soon as um we receive this report and the consultants go out and they start engaging with the community mid this month so they’re going to start very quickly how much time do we have when that final report comes back in December um to how much time do we have to just basically approve something and then with potential appeals uh where could that take us so i’m just trying to ask um yeah what we’ll we’ll get our clerks to give you the the timeline on that uh miss quarman thank you through the chair uh the timeline we actually have to have uh the bylaw passed by the end of this year so uh consultation will be open with the online survey going live tomorrow plus the additional uh hybrid meetings that we’re hosting the survey and everything will be open until November 11th we are then going to report back to the december sppc meeting and hopefully that report then we’ll go to the last meeting of council in december then we will pass a bylaw at which time there is an appeal period and if the in appeal is received then we also have to provide for six months to allow for the process to go through the olt and once that is complete the bylaw must be passed by january 1st 2026 or the appeal period and everything must be closed by january 1st 2026. Councilor Ferrera thank you chair thanks for clarifying that so from what my understanding we have to have something uh here decided upon a council by the end of the year then we’ll have um I guess a full year but not the full year for an appeal process and we after everything um that we can’t really foresee that may happen we need to have um that I guess the final decision by the end of following year 2026 okay thanks thank you councilor ferrer councilor propkins yeah thank you mr chair and uh thank you to the consultants for the update here and the upcoming public participation meetings I think it’s always an interesting conversation and in the community when we look at boundaries and everyone um and changes to our boundaries and everyone has a certain perspective and it is a great opportunity to create community engagement so I really appreciate the work that’s being done in our city on our review of our ward boundaries I do want to follow up with a question that was uh sort of given from the public uh around uh lambeth and lambeth is in uh ward nine and ward nine is uh the ward that I represent and and the importance uh of um what I’ve heard through the engagement to date of the rural divide and ward nine is rural and urban and it’s coming together and a number of these options really look at changing that uh greater rural community um and I want to speak in particular to lambeth and one of the options you are dividing lambeth um I wanted to know why that was part of an option when communities are important um but I just wanted to give uh um as I could ask you a little bit more uh as to your process of coming up with these options with a rural lens to to the I think there’s three options that we’re looking at uh changing that rural divide so if you could just add could be a little bit more of your perspective there and just before I go to the consultants um I’m just gonna ask all colleagues uh because counselor how can you mention there’s a couple maps there if there are particular preliminary option numbers that you can identify for the consultants if you’re raising a question around a specific map I think that will help uh with the answers so counselor can you reference the map numbers one two and three uh so we’ll go to our consultants now mr. Spicer and mr.

Williams if you can uh provide some comments sure certainly uh happy to mr. Chair um I think that’s a fantastic question and uh the issue of rural one that has um has emerged in some of our of our initial consultations um we have explored various options in which it would provide for uh for putting most of rural rural we’re a London into a single ward with that said it is not always uh is always possible to afford for that um as as Bob mentioned earlier um we’re working with with the with the guiding with the guiding principles which is sometimes in tension with each other so as we are creating the maps we’re also thinking about population parity today and over time as along with along with community’s of interest and and natural boundaries so it is a bit of a balancing act as we as we proceed I’m not sure if I a colleague would like to add to that at all counselor Hopkins yeah I appreciate oh sure go ahead mr. Williams yeah uh part of the point here is that these are options that try out different combinations if you will it was interesting to me that you’re citizen commentary early did not mention rural London which on the map is a huge territory not very many people but part of our scenario what cannot be integrated into a map that otherwise deals with an unurbanized community and and what we’re looking at are possible ways to do that not definitive but that’s why we try it in different ways each change or each each scenario involves ripple effects if you will so to create a large rural word as sack just suggested what might take up one of 14 words the other 13 are treated differently if we try to take that area and put place it in two or three then it’s a little less room to maneuver elsewhere so there’s no one right answer and that’s part of what the community is going to be asked to respond to what council will need to take into account when it finally comes to making a choice counselor Hopkins yeah I really appreciate your comments there and really looking forward to what the public thinks about these four options that you have given us so thank you very much thank you counselor Hopkins looking for counselor mccallister next thank you through the chair i’m just hoping to use this opportunity to to speak a bit more about the east like i know obviously we had to do shuffling for the the northwest but recognizing that that resulted in i would say dramatic changes to the eastern words and i’m hoping them some of my colleagues who are on the east side will want to speak to this as well for me i’m referencing specifically options one and three so what i find interesting and maybe the consultants can speak to this but um i i it was kind of new to me in terms of the incorporation of old east into my area it’s not something i previously heard about i’m not sure what kind of feedback we got from the public or if this was purely just based on a population incorporation but i’m just if the consultants can speak to that a bit more recognizing to that one of the mr. Warren also spoke about the composition of glen karen and pond mills and that that is actually still divided and in no option does it really combine and then also just recognizing that i have that stretch between wellington and adley which is always a community of interest that’s felt a bit out of place some of them often refer to themselves as old south adjacent and they think are always trying to figure out where they fit and so in each option i’m surprised that that one remained because i often hear that they feel more aligned to some of the more western wards and not that as as was said adley is kind of often considered the boundary but yeah it is strange to that one still there and then there is a little triangle between hamilton and gore that has a neighborhood of interest that’s always kind of being in ward one where east park is there’s a little subdivision over there and a lot of them kind of associate themselves more with hamilton road and the fairmont area and that is also put into the rural areas and all the scenarios so just a few comments there i’m curious to hear from the consultants but also my colleagues from you know two three and four because uh there are some dramatic changes in the east as well thank you counselor mccallister uh and i’m going to look for other speakers but i do have myself on the list so since i don’t have anyone else yet i’m going to ask counselor ramen to take the chair and i’ll offer some comments thank you i have the chair go ahead thank you counselor uh for taking the chair for me here and to our consultants for the work that’s been done so far i will say that when i look at these preliminary options i i will be honest i would prefer us to have the option to narrow the scope at this point but i know that that’s not a recommended process i think that a couple of the options before us um really create a bit of background noise that that is going to be uh that we may spend a lot of time uh suggesting that um these are not great options rather than focusing on how to make a couple of the viable options maybe a little bit better um but that’s just sort of comments um in general i don’t think that having options where there are clear nose to meeting one of the five criteria um really helps us garner good public feedback and i would argue actually that particularly on option two um from an east end perspective um communities of interest is actually a fail um i look at that map uh for option two and uh to draw a line uh down wave l street which is not a natural boundary uh and divide the argyle neighborhood in half right along there where their community center which is really the heart of the community there um i i think that’s very divisive to a community of interest um and i would say similarly in uh map for uh the divide in the east really chops up communities of interest uh particularly uh the the fair amount in the argyle neighborhoods um even in in that map too uh you know there’s a suggestion that uh a portion of um uh the here on heights area would become part of the argyle area and the same in option four and quite honestly when you’re up at high berry and here on that neighborhood has no connection uh to the argyle neighborhood really it’s two separate communities of interest and and it’s really dividing one and putting another one that doesn’t match up in together um i will say also i i want to echo what councilor mccallister said i think in the new proposed ward ones in option uh one and option three i think that that stretch along wellington road uh probably is a better fit as part of ward 14 with the general wellington road corridor so that um those folks are are sort of together along what is going to be an area of heavy development with the rapid transit urban corridor uh there and i i would concur um actually having lived in that neighborhood um in the the classic drive east park area um that certainly the the tweed smear public school and the fairmont neighborhood um they are much more closely aligned with the uh rest of hamilton road than they are with uh the summer side neighborhood um so i think that that’s uh you know certainly on the south side of hamilton road i can see a little bit more connection across the river with the folks from summer side but on the north side i think they very much align with the sort of tweed smear fairmont neighborhood so i i really am concerned particularly in options two and four um how we’re carving up uh the east end and actually diluting the voices there um i do have a question uh through you madam presiding officer as well uh because i note in all of these uh the total population includes an undercount of approximately three percent and includes 24 000 student population not captured in the census um this for me is is a question of so where are we allocating those students because they’re not all western students they are spread across multiple wards uh we hear consistently that more and more post-secondary students are not living on campus they’re living further and further away from campus uh and so if we’re allocating the bulk of them to campus uh either western or fansha i actually have concerns about that because i don’t think it’s reflective of the population where students are living today so i’d like to know how the the 24 000 student population is being allocated across multiple wards because they are not a single ward population and it seems to me based on the numbers the bulk of them are allocated towards six thank you um i’ll go to our consultants on that and you have just under a minute after thank you very much for that uh that question um i think we we definitely take this take this feedback uh back with us um it is valuable to us and we and we definitely appreciate it we are uh joined here today as well by uh josh bill nd from from uh watson’s um who can respond to the question about student population thank you Zach yeah so we actually take that 24 000 and we have divided it both into on campus off campus um for for students both at fansha and at western across the across the city and we do look at a process of and our methodology utilizes census data but also looks at census data um where we have um unoccupied dwelling units during that census period and have affiliated a number of those uh residents with student population and then multiplied that by a a student yield of what we expect in each of those student residents across the um across the city and yes a majority of those are found around the western and fansha campuses but there is a number of students that are attending both western and fansha that are residents of the city of London and are also captured within the census so we are just looking at 24 000 outside of that number thank you go back to the deputy mayor uh thank you madam presiding officer so i appreciate that i i feel like we’re we’re perhaps over allocating the student population to the western campus and and not enough deluded across the rest of the city but um i i’m not an expert in statistics so i i appreciate the response there um i also wonder if there can be some comment on how um we came up with what to me is an entirely new ward uh in ward four and kind of broke the existing ward four up and and spread it out part of it goes to ward three part of it goes to ward one part of it goes to ward two so how did we reach the creation of what is seems to be an entirely new ward in the north end thank you i’ll go back to your consultant’s not sure who wants to take that clarify which option you’re talking about please oh yes in one and three there’s a brand new ward four and and what used to be ward four has been divided up my assumption at the moment is that this is part of the arithmetic of distributing that that heavy population and the growth that’s expected along that northern fringe of the city if you will that that trying to do the calculations and create equitable distribution of those uh residents across uh the various wards ended up requiring the creation of an additional uh ward in that area to deal with that population uh and using the boundaries that were there are they the major arterials that were there that’s how that scenario came about Zach i don’t know if you could add to that or judge uh no that’s um pretty much i was going to say as well it’s it’s really an effort to to try and balance some of the population growth up in that area thank you deputy mayor thank you and i know i got about 12 seconds less left so really briefly um on that piece it it doesn’t feel like the growth that i’m seeing at planning committee kind of matches up with that area of the city so i’m just wondering through you madam presiding officer if we know what the most recent sort of planning data from mr mather’s team has been provided to the consultants in terms of informing where the growth is happening i certainly know the 8400 units we just approved in what map two and or one and three would propose as being part of ward two will help with the population balance there but i’m wondering about the that new ward four piece and i don’t know if the consultants or mr mathers or both can provide a comment on that uh thank you i’ll go to uh mr mather and then to the consultants if they have anything to add go ahead i’m through the chair so my understanding and the consultant can correct me if i’m if i’m wrong is that the the projection that’s being used to be able to provide the data the growth data within this model is the 2022 um Watson projection that was approved by council believe it the end of 20 it started 2023 so that doesn’t reflect any of the most recent planning changes and or any of the changes that have come out um as far as the the recent rezoning or uh in the last year thank you final comment yes just a very quick final question um and i’m going to ask her of maybe a 30 second lenience here um some of us have shared these on social media already many of us are getting comments back by email uh on social media um from our folks and and so well i appreciate the public engagement that the consultants are doing a lot of the feedback is going to come through us so i wonder if the clerks can indicate how we can provide emails comments we’re getting to them to synthesize into this process thank you that’s your time and i’ll go to the clerk thank you through the chair any of that any of the comments that you receive via social media or email could be sent to um any of the project leads lira adana rafuna or gini raycroft and we will synthesize everything and provide that to the to the consultants thank you uh i will look to return the chair to you deputy mayor and i’ve got mare morgan counselor hillyard counselor hopkins and counselor stevenson on the list and then myself uh thank you madam presiding officer and i’m just going to get you to repeat that list for me so i can’t capture everyone thank you mare morgan counselor hillyard counselor hopkins counselor stevenson then myself okay and we will go to mare morgan next um thanks uh i’ll just provide some initial comments at the start of the process at first i i find it very interesting because i know um previously when i was the ward seven counselor um i had lots of opinions on this in fact i i pushed for a comprehensive ward boundary review that the rest of council resisted last term but we’ve made some small adjustments to some of the wards um and then my main push on that was a desire for uh a level of effective representation you know at the time um representing a ward in the city that was almost double the smallest ward in the city seemed like a a very significant challenge for you know forty some odd thousand people having to push their opinions through one elected representative whereas in another part of the city twenty some odd thousand individuals get to push their view um through one elected representative and and and and i would say with that previous hat on although i know that the the new ward counselor or the current ward counselor can provide her own comments i would i would have thought the naming of the ward would have been exceptionally difficult in ward seven because it probably have like an eight-part name to it given there’s about eight or nine maybe ten communities of interest depending on how you want to divide it within that part of the city which makes me think about like the the fact that having a city-wide perspective now um there’s a whole lot of ways that we can do this and there’s a whole lot of ways that we can really grind it down to a street-by-street level but for the most part there isn’t really a good way to balance all of these different pieces so you’ve got to kind of work our way through a public process to land on a relatively acceptable structure that can be tweaked over time the the big concern that i would have at the start of the process is ensuring that we plan for the future and that there are modifications that can be made to the wards to accommodate possible rapid population growth particularly under the context of the the recent upzoning we did in certain parts of the city which would concentrate population density in certain areas and you certainly want to be in a position ten years from now to to be where the current map kind of heads to where you’re you’ve got these grossly unbalanced wards that being said you know community communities of interest are important and i i know that there’s there’s always balanced that too i actually was thinking when we talked about lambith maybe if i lived in lambith i’d want to ward counselors because if i didn’t like what one said i might go to the other one or maybe i’d have them both advocating for me but then there’s other parts of your ward that maybe draw you to that at the end of the day the responsibility of ward counselors to try to provide representation to everybody whether they vote or not um but if they live in that area try to do the best you possibly can and over the years i would have partnered with different ward counselors on different ward meetings because you know on this issue maybe ward seven ward eight really were similar we do a joint meeting on another one around universities it would be a ward seven ward six ward five maybe combination and you know some issues with trail systems and development and then the very north of the city would be a ward seven and five issue together so you know no matter what you land on it’ll be a good process there will be wards in the future and there’ll be tweaks that you can make to it but you know if we try to struggle to balance all these things perfectly i think it will be an endless an endless process so i would encourage people to do the best you can consult and listen carefully try to land it with relative balance but recognize that if something isn’t quite working as long as the wards are structured relatively coherently and can be adjusted that there’s adjustments that can be made by subsequent councils and the last piece that i think we should all enter this context with including myself is these on our wards it’s not my city it’s not your wards it’s the wards that the next elected representatives will represent and people will choose under whatever ward boundaries we decide who those people will be and they’ll represent those wards well i’m sure because they will have gone through an electoral process under the confines of those new wards so you know hopefully it’ll be lots of the same people i you know i like all of you i’d like to come back one day but but at the end of the day we’re making a decision for future iteration of council and and for londoners to be represented by whatever that composition of council is and so you know our job to get it right and thoughtful is is pretty important but also you know we’re not going to be able to balance all these things perfectly so i think we’re at a great spot in the process it’s going to be very interesting to be a part of and and of course listen to the public on and uh you know i appreciate the work that our council our consultants are doing and again my only concern at this point is how the few the current decisions we’ve already made from a planning perspective and a zoning perspective layer into the population projections that are being used in these particular maps thank you mayor morgan next on my speaker’s list i have counselor hillier thank you for recognizing me just listening to my colleagues speak and acknowledging what a problem it is when we start moving these lines around and trying to explain to people where they live in the state in their words and i’m looking at the redraw on ward 14 on preliminary auctions one and three and i do appreciate the inclusion of the rural areas because it makes it a lot easier for one council to handle the rural problems but i’m looking at the northern boundary and it’s on Hamilton road and it’s cutting a lot of neighborhoods in half and i’m wondering if the consultant Watson’s could could consider using the river for the northern boundary of ward 14 thank you thank you counselor hillier um mr williams did you want to comment on that i saw your hand go up there yes thank you mr charia we’ve happy to consider any of those ideas that’s the point of this next round of discussion hearing from members of council and the community to help us determine whether something like moving the line you just talked about uh can be helpful to pre to preserving community of interest and how it ripples through everything else and that’s one of the dilemmas we have here this is a very complicated geographic area if i can put it that way finding the right lines to use moving them to adjust to population means other things have to move so i appreciate that those suggestions are there and and comment earlier about how we hear about that is going to be an important part of the next phase thank you thank you mr williams counselor hillier did you want to continue or did you have anything else thank you thank you very much that’s perfect and i have counselor hopkins uh again next um sir sure i am uh on round two with my question so happy to give the floor to other counselors that have not spoken before i ask a question i appreciate that very much counselor hopkins so i will go to counselor stevenson and counselor ramen and but i will keep you on the list once we’ve gone through everybody the first time counselor stevenson thank you um yes when i when i looked here the word for as i know it and love it is pretty much obliterated in both option one and two and i did sort of intuitively know my word might be more affected than others given that we’ve got to move somewhere right um i am a little concerned about that carlin heights is chopped in half along oxford um that is just something to know so a lot of those streets continue north and south of oxford and it is a neighborhood community of carlin heights there other than that um you know as the deputy mayor said a brand new word for so it’s going to be an interesting sell and and hearing what the public has to say but i’m open to hearing that thank you counselor stevenson uh just for colleagues information i’ve counselor ramen counselor pribble and counselor truss out who haven’t spoken next and then i have counselor hopkins for a second round uh so counselor ramen you are next thank you and through you so i’ll first start some of my questions and uh the deputy deputy mayor hinted on some of these um around the treatment of students and i know that the consultants shared that they did the count based on resident spaces um as well as looking at uh where natural settlement patterns happen um i did the same and i came to very different conclusions around numbers um so i’m wondering if we can dive deeper into that uh student count number um because i think it would be helpful for us to understand that treatment even looking at polling exit data from 2022 at western and looking at the breakdown of how many students resided in ward six or voted for candidates in ward six versus others also shows some uh differences in terms of uh settlement and i think that that would be helpful to look at um as well as at fancia and the changing demographics at fancia across two campuses within the city um so i’m not sure if they can comment any further on that but i would find that helpful well we can go back to them and uh see if they can provide a little bit more uh detailed information on that uh and in particular i think counselor ramen you highlighted the fact that fancia is now spread across multiple campuses so how that’s been accounted for thanks and through the chair um just to kind of follow up on that one we did have conversations with both western and fancia admissions um we did have some conversations on those new campuses especially the ones in the south on on the fancia the numbers there um from uh a population point of view are quite low in moments about i didn’t think they were referred to it as about two thousand on campus um and much of those students are um and may be located within that general vicinity but are captured within the census data as as well for that particular campus um so that’s maybe where our numbers are in addition is those students that we are capturing at fancia and at western that live across the city there are a number of them that are captured within the census and within those base numbers we are layering on an additional 24 000 of non-census captured numbers as well and those are typically the students that are are there on a shorter term basis um or or fewer months throughout the year that would not be residing there during those summer census enumeration years um but happy to further these conversations if there are some numbers um that the members here feel that may represent we can compare those to ours and and have those conversations um furthermore as well council rovin yes thank you i where i really struggle is that the june uh report that we received here to begin this process uh showed ward six at about 23 000 uh showing at the lowest uh in terms of uh ward size and then in this report now shows it at 43 000 in 2021 um so that is quite a tremendous jump and in that jump it also then centralizes some of the changes so that that took place in what is ward seven so um where ward seven part of ward seven’s population could have been absorbed partially by ward six it is now uh restructured to be a ward seven ward five composition um i would have liked to have seen an option that contained some of the the sharing of of redivision of wards seven into more of ward eight in ward six um because i do think there was some natural alignment in terms of residents and and uh communities of interest between six and seven more than five and seven so i’m just wondering from the feedback you received uh being right now that ward seven has 49 000 residents which is double our smallest ward almost at this point um i’m wondering how proportionally we went out for that uh that information from a ward that has less representation right now at this table thank you counselor ramen and we’ll go back to our consultants for that through you mr chair um i’m i’m a little unsure about the question but i think you were you were sort of asking about this sort of feedback that we’ve received uh at the date of on that um we’ve uh we have heard from from some of the public about uh the population figures but with that said where are our goals with this with this next round is to get feedback about proposed changes so we hope that we will we expect to hear about that ward and others um but we’ll have to see what what we hear next week well and i think counselor ramen um and i’ll seek some clarification for her on that but um how the number changed so radically from the june report to this report for one ward and that allocation of students because we’ve been told it’s actually being factored across the city but the june report in this report don’t align counselor ramen i i won’t count this as your time but do you want to clarify if that was sure yeah so if you look at the june report you look at the current report population in ward uh six changes dramatically as it relates to what i assume is mostly student count and at around fan shots only five thousand uh less than five thousand student change um through you mr mr mr chair uh my apologies to the counselor for misunderstanding the question um all the first my colleague josh josh plenty from uh watson’s to respond yep and and thanks second and through you mr chair we do have about um incorporate about eighty five hundred students or populations on the western campus so a big chunk of that is actually found within the western campus um for students and then there is an additional fourteen thousand of off-campus western students and based on her analysis majority are those um as noted falling within ward six um but not all of them per se have been there but those are some of the scalable numbers that we are working with of that twenty four thousand about i think it was twenty two thousand and change of those are are found within the western um realm of that uh off-campus and on-campus number so quite a significant jump in in population there.

Councillor ramen. Thank you um so again i’m i know i’m limited on time i will say i did review auto as ward boundary change in guelphs ward boundary change as well to see and look at exactly how excuse me they treated their student populations as well um and i see this as a unique treatment and i do see that in my opinion looking at it it’s it’s uh it’s significantly significantly impacts the way that ward seven is split in this new uh proposal so i have great concerns about community of interest staying together i have concerns that the part of the city that is also going to face a federal change in boundary is now also facing a significant change in boundary in uh in this part of the city which does not in the tune align with the change federally either so now again from a voting perspective in 2025 when when if they have the federal election as so intended uh then there is the possibility that again um they’re voting in an all-new ward and then again they’ll be voting in a ward that is very off the mark from that federal ward um and a different provincial ward because the provincial ward states the same so we talked about school boards uh keeping in in line with the changes at the municipal level but yet in terms of representation we’ve also not looked to align um with our federal and our provincial partners where there’s possibility especially when it comes to community of interest so i do find that interesting as well i have shared my concerns that ward seven in the proposed map one and three puts a lot of new uh residents all in one area um with very little connection to older established neighborhoods which from an advocacy perspective makes advocacy challenging especially when they have things like new community centers new libraries and other new resources that are need needed directly and before we’re able to pool their advocacy together with some of the older established neighborhoods which were also seeking these types of uh benefits but now would be separated so those are my concerns i hope to hear from residents and uh look forward to to the feedback one more thing on development i will say um looking at the approvals that we made i made a map marking off all of the approvals that have happened since 2022 to now in ward five in ward seven which are significant we’ve got a number of new subdivisions coming in we have a number of approvals that have happened and i do not see that same in the new allocated ward four but the population shows that it would uh see sustained growth so i’m not sure where those projections are coming from and i know that they don’t align with our 2022 to 2024 projections so i hope that there’s a way that we can actually work in some of the development applications and changes that we’ve made through planning into the restructuring this as we move forward thank you counselor ramen and moving on counselor preble you are next thank you i might as well just follow up on one my fellow counselor ramen just said i have majority of the proposed four now and i would tend to agree that again those numbers seem to me quite high in terms of what we have and currently five and seven north of sunny dale upcoming huge uh quite large developments but uh i just want to go kind of to the beginning so we started to look at this because what we said is that it’s kind of the effective representation and have each ward to have a very similar number of residents it certainly is not the one that we are going to look at only and again if you look at what the residents already said that communities of interest is actually their number one priority but i just want to let you know if we end the consultants if you want to make any comments and i do i do realize that our population is growth so the difference is potentially will be larger but option one so we currently we have 18 000 the biggest difference which we kind of decided we need to address it option one if we go with your projections 25 30 35 option one 18 000 difference 16 000 difference 21 000 difference option two 10 12 15 option three is the closest one seven seven ten option four nine five ten which will be close in terms of the representation but again even the consultants are saying communities of interest is a big no so i’m just trying to figure out here what brought us to this to realign and then the proposal coming out from the consultants is not much far off what we are actually we wanted to address so if i can have any comments from the consultants please and mr spicer mr williams did you have any comment to that let’s start off on that if i made mr chair we did not come in with the idea that your current system is completely broken there are a number of features of it that still apply that are still valid so we’re not talking about a complete rebuild we’re not talking about you know erasing everything and start over again there are some things that that we would want to keep and i think the first option is i think referred to as a kind of minimal change uh we’ve heard this before people get confused about what words they live in well this this would be a way to minimize those while still addressing uh some of those shortcomings that we identify not going to be perfect we’ve heard that several times trying to balance off the principles uh as best we can in each of those scenarios will have a slightly different mix of those things community of interest versus natural boundaries versus growth and so forth so in the end there’s no one obvious solution as far as i can see given that we’re hearing from some of you that it’s it’s the population parity and others that it’s community and that that’s the prerogative of council to decide which of those directions it would like to go uh in our hope is that not when we come to the final recommendation that both will be viable both will be an improvement uh but they’ll be different and and council will have to decide uh listening to fellow colleagues listening to the community which of those take precedence and we will do our best to address some of these kinds of concerns uh after we hear this consultation from the community councilor pribble or sorry mr spicer did you want to add to that before we go back to the councilor um thank you thank you mr i have nothing more to add councilor pribble thank you i just want to reiterate kind of the numbers and think about all of us counselors the reason why we started to address this issue and to look what’s in front of us but the the most important thing is whatever we are going to propose to go forward is going to be the feedback of the half and land of Londoners thank you thank you councilor pribble uh i also have a bit of a growing list here i have councilor trussow next and then councilor palosa and i still have councilor hopkins for a second round so councilor trussow i have you next sir thank you very much and um given the fact that any any elector in the city once we pass our bylaw can challenge that at at the board i’d like to ask the consultants do you feel as if any of the four options present more of a risk of being challenged and potentially overturned well let’s ask mr spicer mr williams about that uh councilor i would i would not suggest that any of them are more likely to reach that category our goal maybe it’s optimistic maybe it’s it’s uh by in the sky is that whatever we propose would be defensible again deciding determining which of those principles for example takes precedent we would not knowingly bring to council a plan that we believed would be invalid uh in front of the oa of the ontario land tribunal that’s part of what this next round is about and we’ve made this point before that these four options are there for discussion to help us work out some of these priorities and and to address some of these shortcomings that that members of council have identified today in the community so i can’t say unilaterally that one of them is going to create a bigger risk as you just said it only takes one person so we’re not going to be able to anticipate uh who might take umbrage at some particular part of this plan and our goal is to to make sure that that uh if indeed that happens what you have uh in your by-law is a defensible scenario uh in the light of the principles that we’re working with and we’ll go back to councilor trussell and councilor trussell can i ask you that you just turn your camera on while you’re speaking please yes i’m sorry um let me um thank you go go ahead now we have you on mute counselor so we can see you but now we can’t hear you don’t know sound counselor there we go don’t want to be dismissive of the really good work that you predominantly done but i have to say i i cannot understand how my neighborhood in broftale go through adelate go through highberry and goes all the way over to clark road and could you could you just try to explain to me what the rationale is kind of i’m going to call this spaghetti word to be to be uh and i say that with all respect that’s the term of art um how is that defensible sorry counselor can you just refer to the map number you’re talking about i think i know but i don’t want to presume that it’s map two it’s four or four sorry and and you’re talking about what would be numbered ward eight in that map correct correct so we’ll go to our consultants for that with respect to the the ward in option four that’s uh labeled as ward eight yes thank you very much mr chair through you um appreciate the comments um and this is precisely what what this uh report is intended to generate discussion um what we uh we’re trying to do with with option four is to provide for better population parity moving out towards 2030 and 2034 what we note in the reports uh and in our in our presentation today is that um that that creates less success with some of the other uh principles including in this case communities of interest but we appreciate that feedback that’s what this this part of this phase is intended to do um we’ll certainly take that back so thank you thank you very much counsel yes thank you and i think um for today i’m going to leave it at that because if i understand that we’re not going to be eliminating any of the options at this at this meeting and that will come later but i don’t think that option for sustainable and i will be advocating that it be removed at at some point or substantially changed thank you thank you counselor and counselor palosa i have you next uh just before i i go to counselor palosa i have been asked uh i did plan uh for a break at 430 for colleagues uh there will be some food in the counselor’s lounge if and an option for a biobrake uh at 430 so i just want to let folks know that is the plan on or around because if we’re in the middle of an item we’ll finish the item before we take our break uh counselor palosa thank you as that was the question i texted you privately so great that we all know the answer now um and we will diligently wrap things up to a acceptable point uh for 430 a couple comments and then a question just immigrants to option four um i know some community of interests are divided just this option really does split down upper queen street and through white oaks down a street uh neighborhood streets cutting everyone in half that’d be my concern i know as we discussed this last term a council on this term in regards to those of us who do have a rural area that we represent um having those concerns of are you better that someone will say specializes in rural area concerns and brings those forward or are we better that several of us shoulder residents in rural areas so we have different voices raising concerns and potentially advocating together um with different perspectives for those residents i would say that i would also apply to some of these map options for the downtown area are we better that one person specialize and raise that voice or multiple people come to the table with different perspectives representing different sections of the core uh so i’m along for the ride we’ll see where this goes with public feedback um encourage residents to get out as i know the public engagement session i attended in the past i had a great conversation which i appreciated um with the presenters but uh little public involvement in person so hoping this next round as we get closer to a decision point garners more public interest my question follows up on a point that i um was also wondering along with councilor ramen in regards to it’s on page 244 for anyone interested um and it was just saying that these forecasts of the pattern of population and balance present in 2025 and that they’re maintained or worsened by 2035 as we look at the population growth projection numbers realizing the plan before us should serve us for ideally multiple election cycles does our our partners simply grow the numbers that we have based on their alignments um as to i have extra road filling in as they were ball diamonds and it’s just concession after concession now filling in with homes does this plan taking consideration any of the planning applications that we have approved at council over the timeline realizing we don’t necessarily know when shovels are going to be in the ground we can’t force that though we request it do you have access to the information or have any of it been taking into consideration through these numbers and forecasting mr. Williams or mr. Spicer did did you want to speak to the or mr.

Valente if you want to speak to the planning uh approvals that are coming fast and furious and their inclusion or not in the plan here yes thank you mr. chair um i can start off by saying we have the municipal wide forecast numbers as provided through that 20-22 report um those numbers do look at where or the volume and number of units that are to be prepared or to be developed over x amount of years some assumptions yes are in place we do look out in five-year increments but we do take into account what level and what stages of these development applications are in and make some assumptions on where they may fall within those five-year buckets beyond that we also do have uh the lower level sub geographic level data prepared through the uh work that the city does and that has been utilized here in this regards and does have some account for those applications through the planning process um from an understanding of when they believe they are are going to be developed um give or take it’s not an exact science on when those plans may come to fruition um but uh our best estimate and best guesses are are included in these projections on location and timing and but i see you have something to add there as well it up by may in response to an earlier question about deadlines and times for approval clearly we have to have a sorry can we just finish with the topic at hand before we go back into a past question that was asked by somebody else if well i i think that it’s it may be germane to what you’re saying so i i just want to let if it’s germane yes just i just don’t want to i got other a question poll for staff after this mr. Williams yeah i was simply going to say that that clearly we have to have a a cutoff date to say these are the numbers we have based on what mr. Valentine’s just talked about as of i don’t know November 30th or what 2024 we’ll have to work with what we know or believe is is uh in place at that date and and move forward that should be obvious but if things start to come on in in 2025 i don’t believe that we would necessarily want to go back and redo all of this in the light of those decisions we have to work with the deadline.

mr. Palosa yes i would just do that was a given since this decision point would be made prior to those numbers um my question through you is having heard the concern for multiple counselors and um our partners comments through you to staff any staff is there any more relevant information or details that council might have excluded in direction that could be provided or numbers that could be released that we haven’t directed to be released just making sure that everyone at the tables dealing with the best information possible that council could have made a different decision to help inform decision-making so uh i’m not sure who might want to feel that if there’s anything at all but i’ll go to mr. Bier to start i’m happy to be the any other staff um thank you through the chair i think what you’re suggesting if i get this correct through the chair again is that you’re looking to see if there’s any other additional population information or anything else that we would have um that could influence this i think um off the top i would say anything that we have any additional information we’ll be sure the consultants get um but right now i don’t have anything to share but we’ll make sure that they have the most up-to-date information i i don’t want to interject on your behalf council proposal but i i think in addition to like because we’ve heard a lot about planning applications that we’ve been approved and of course to everyone and especially mr. mather’s team tremendous numbers this year um but i i think what council proposal might be asking about is things like the vacant land needs assessment what lands might be serviced or or potentially serviced with any adjustments to the urban growth boundary any sorts of things like that or perhaps even how the mmp might influence growth patterns but i i know that that might be a lot of crystal balling so i but council proposal was that sort of the the any other data you were thinking of it kind of uncapsulated both um just sometimes there’s things and works behind the scenes about servicing um just if this plan is the plan that’s gonna for consulting that’s gonna service for multiple years in elections just if we know that stuff is coming the pipeline that even the consultants be giving a heads up about it um just if the information’s available and i know sometimes that council’s the barrier that we didn’t say release it or engage so we don’t well let’s see if mr.

mathers can uh expand on his earlier answer for us uh through the chair so if uh a couple pieces i think that are kind of germane to this discussion um as i mentioned previously the the Watson projections were used as the basis of of this forecast which for the purposes uh we’ll be using this for some of the other work we’re doing um but i will flag that we have been asked by council to use the ministry of finance projections as far as our newest land needs assessment there’s also last week a new version of those forecasts came available they’re they will be coming likely every year so it will be a hard thing to try to keep up with if you’re doing a project like this um but i will highlight that if you’re looking for trying to incorporate our land needs studies results in this work that that will take uh several more months so we’re looking at coming back in december with some proposed um total land needs values but you’re not going to have a map to be able to use and allocate those lands to until well into 2020 uh five into the first quarter of 2025 so you won’t be able to meet your this deadline if you’re looking at using some of that the newest data sir palosa you’re good okay so i am uh coming back now to council hopkins for your second go thank you um my question was very similar to council palosa and thanks for everyone for giving more information back to us maybe just to add uh to that conversation um i was we’re looking at projections making assumptions that anticipated growth uh for 2035 would there be opportunities if we’ve got it wrong to make adjustments um before then to the ward boundaries so i’m gonna go to the clerks for that because um as the mayor alluded to there was actually minor adjustments made in the last term of council so perhaps we can get the clerks to respond through the chair yes that is a possibility we also do have a council approved policy that we regularly review our war boundary reviews to make our war boundaries to make sure that they are um still applicable and relevant to the city so we will be undertaking that work on a regular basis counselor hey i have no other speakers on the list seeing none with that uh pregnant pause uh to see if anybody else wanted to get back on i am going to ask the clerk to open the vote on this sir trussa losing the vote motion carries 15 to 0 thank you colleagues and thank you mr. Spicer and mr. Williams and mr. Valente for your time today i know we kept you a little while but uh providing those comments and and asking our questions i think was helpful to both council and i hope was helpful to you as well as you move on to the next phase and i know i look forward to seeing you next week at east lions community center when you’re in my ward i will be sure to come out and and listen as well uh colleagues moving on our next item on the agenda is another public participation meeting this is with respect to the 2025 water and wastewater rates and i am going to look for a motion to open the public participation meeting moved by council ramen and seconded by councilor cutty and we’ll ask the clerk to open the vote on that councilor trussa one more time marking councilor trussa was absent closing the vote motion carries 14 to 0 thank you colleagues uh so for those in the gallery if you’re here to speak to the water and wastewater rates for 2025 now is the time to make your way to a microphone i know that is probably the most exciting topic on our agenda today and why you’re all here but uh uh in all seriousness i don’t have anyone online and i don’t see anyone in the gallery moving to a microphone so i will look for a motion to close the ppm moved by councilor layman and seconded by councilor hopkins and i will ask the clerk to open the vote so votes yes closing the vote motion carries 15 to zero and now i look to colleagues to see if someone’s ready to put the staff recommendation on the floor councilor frank and councilor plosa seconds any discussion seeing none then i will ask the clerk to open the vote councilor trussa yes sorry closing the vote motion carries 15 to 0 thank you colleagues moving on we have the next item on our agenda is a delegation at our request from chief trong and members of his team so we’re going to invite them to come to the podium now and well they are just getting set up i will just i want to preface for colleagues again with respect on this item and going back to the original motion and communication from councilor plosa the chief is here today to provide us an update on policing so i just want to caution colleagues this is not a budget debate budget questions i will rule out of order we have a budget process that starts again in just a couple of weeks and that’s when and councilor plosas rubbing her temples with the thoughts of the budget process starting in a couple of weeks but that is the time and place for questions on the budget the purpose of the delegation today was to update us on policing matters and progress made by the chief since he was last before us and since the budget was approved so and i know that colleagues all received communication from police services board and their chair with some of the data that was provided to the board approximately a week ago with response times and and items like that listed and that is is really the context of what we’re here to hear from the chief today chief i know there was a request for a little bit of extra time so we’ve got 10 minutes set aside for you to do your presentation and then we’ll have some question and answer with you so when you’re ready to start please go ahead and if i can ask if you want to introduce your team that’s with you today as i know not everybody may know your deputies and i know some of the questions might go to them so if you’d like to introduce your team to start us off thank you sir and thank you to uh this committee members of council your worship morgan for having us here today um unfortunately deputy chief McSweeney is unavailable to attend today and deputy chief uh gilford who are who is also out of town but uh with me today is deputy chief paul bastion superintendent uh ryan scrivens and samatha santos my uh yay from time to time you may hear from uh either of those senior officers to uh to provide some answers should uh should i not be able to answer some of your questions i just want to remind this committee that the budget was approved uh seven months ago and from the moment we hire a police officer you’re looking at between eight to ten months from the moment we hire them before we can get them on the street for independent patrol and in that regard when they’re on the street finally after eight to ten weeks they’re still not experienced so i just want to reframe that and just to make sure that this committee understands that piece uh last year uh some of the big issues in this community that um we’ve heard and that we were trying to address is called response times the increase in specifically gun and gang violence in the city the um safety on our streets and our roads police visibility in our community open drug use and the um issues that are had arise that are affecting this community and our local businesses with uh our on-house populations so those are just some of the some of the big issues and the concerns that we have been trying to address and that came that came directly from this this community and uh i want to thank members of council and this committee for supporting the police budget because it very necessary for us to try and address these concerns for this community and um the only way we can address community safety and making sure that we do our part for community safety and well being is to first look at our organization from a different lens and look at what we need to change uh because what we did identify is that we had not modernized at the level we should have the city had grown rapidly in the police service did not grow with it and um it involved a lot of modernization and different ways of doing things our service delivery model was the same that we have been doing for the last 30 years which translates into the significant delays in call response times and is that has impacted this community one of the things that we really did um and put at the front of our organization was investing in our people and investing in our people to make sure that they put the community at the front of everything that we do we’ve changed our organization uh vision or values to put the community at the heart of everything we do and from a strategic lens and a leadership lens we’ve embedded everything that we do to ensure that we’re thinking about the community we’re going to draw your attention to uh your screens and i’m going to go through some highlights of the report that you already had and just highlight some areas uh for your understanding to give you an update on what has been happening um this past year and from year to date one of the things that we have been doing differently is we’ve divided our to meet our strategic plan where there’s three priorities for us organizational wellness and performance community trust and community safety the three priorities that we’ve refocused are very important to the success of community safety and achieving community safety and well-being in this community so we started using data to help support our decision making decision making and what we were never tracking before was hotspot categories with respect to the community hearing from yourselves um as um representatives of the communities as counselors listening to and hearing some of your complaints that um your constituents had we started tracking areas within your ward that are complaints specifically from a community lens so we started tracking hours of our police members being in certain areas where the community had identified as a complaint area so the mere fact that we’re tracking now community-based complaints and we’re also tracking uh police presence in areas where there’s high harm where there’s sudden surges in criminal activity that is occurring in addition to areas where uh we’re identifying property crimes occurring that’s allowing us to make informed decisions and adjusting what we need to do to deter and prevent crime and I can tell you the statistics in the metrics that we have is from the beginning of the year to the end of July for consistency purposes that’s where we had landed when I provided an update to our board from a community trust perspective one of the ways to increase our trust within the community uh is to make sure that we are in the community and with the community and learning from the community not only are we tracking community events that our members attend our officers attend and our leadership now you’ll see a sudden increase with um police engagement in the community uh we’re tracking how many interactions we have so if you’re attending an event where there’s five community members that is important but it’s also important to attend community events where there’s a thousand members there’s significant impact there and our conduct within the community is uh is very important from an organizational wellness perspective one of the things we looked at was the performance of our organization and one of the measures is uh police complaints these are specifically service complaints that we receive um as a police organization and in all of last year we had 65 service complaints that’s an increase from the previous year in 2022 with 44 service complaints the data that we have here to date we have 16 complaints versus 65 of all of last year that’s a 50 percent 57 percent decrease in service complaints that we have I’m sharing this information with you letting you know that we are progressing well there’s so much more work to do from an overall perspective the time severity index is not the only way you measure prime or determine safety within a community it is just one tool one way to assess and to measure the amount of crime that’s happening in the city and what I will highlight is for 10 years this community has never been below the national average or the provincial average of crime severity index across Canada we’ve never been below it in 2023 the statistics have just come out mid this year by statistics Canada and for the first time in 10 years we’ve actually dropped in crime severity index by 14 percent below the national average um that’s very good for our organization that’s very good for the people that live here that play here that pray here it’s showing that we are moving in the right direction and what’s what I will highlight is that this is the largest decrease in crime severity index in the country other most municipalities have increased across Canada while London has decreased our response times our response times have increased for the last four and five years in every category if we look at the trending response times for this year up until the end of July for the first time in four and five years we’re actually decreasing code one response times code two response times and code three response times and again I’ll highlight there is much much work to do here but this is the first time in four and five years where we’re actually reducing the call response times chief i’m going to get you to pause there for just a moment uh colleagues we’ve only got about 25 seconds left of the 10 minutes i’m looking to see if there’s a motion to extend an additional five minutes and I see Councillor Ferreira and Councillor Palosa both moving that so we will just quickly in e-scribe uh i’ve a vote to uh provide a five-minute extension thank you chair i’ll um also highlight um an issue we’ll just get you to pause we just actually have to vote on it so we’ll get you to just my apologies chief can you just turn off your mic for a second the clerk Councillor Trosseau Councillor Trosseau Councillor both yes closing the vote motion carries 15 to 0 okay chief if you want to resume and you’ve got about five and a half minutes so if you’re ready go ahead thank you sir and just a couple of uh some updates in some of our initiatives um violence against women and girls hate crimes and alternative responses to mental health calls are some not all of our initiatives that we’re working towards improving and increasing um we have a new gender based violence and femicide strategy that we will implement and that is ever evolving with hate crimes we want to make sure that there’s uh better pathways to report and of course increasing trust within uh this community and marginalized and diverse communities is very important to ensure that community members can come forward and report um alternative responses to mental health calls some of the areas that we’re researching and we’re looking to implement um in the next several months is um mental health workers and experts um embedding them into our 911 call dispatch center we’re looking at opportunities to partner up very similar to the coast team with nurse police teams um some great research and some pilot projects that came out of Windsor and are now being also looked at in Toronto we’ve had some really great discussions with uh David Muschay from LHSC and um um the president CO of um CMHA PAM and her last name is slipping me so my apologies there so there’s a lot of interest in um changing and adjusting and finding alternative uh models from a road safety perspective our enforcement has increased significantly year to date and it’s uh voting very well as from these statistics we’re trending to reduce the number of fatal motor vehicle collisions on our roads and um there’s a lot of great work being done we we intend to do a lot more work in this area with changing and adjusting our um road safety strategy we’re really utilizing data to help us in inform our decision making processes and then shootings last year we had in all of 23 we had 27 shootings previous year 24 shootings and 2021 was the deadliest year that we’ve seen in this community with 28 shootings so um significant concerns in this community this was a big priority for our organization in the last year and I can tell you’re from this data from the end of July we had reduced shootings by 85 percent and year to date from July that number was four so all in all these are some of the metrics that we have that I’m sharing with this committee committee I will say that we’re the biggest challenge with change is moving in the right direction that’s the biggest challenge and there’s been a lot of challenges that our organization has had to endure and face with change but we’re moving in the right direction because at this point I feel we have tremendous leadership I have a tremendous senior leadership team and really the hard work and the metrics that I’m reporting to you as a result of the hard work that the frontline members both civilian and police sworn police civilian police professionals and sworn members that they do each and every day so I am happy to report the direction removing I will say there was so much more work to do and subject to any questions chair thank you chief we appreciate that very much and so I’m going to look for a motion to receive and once that’s on the floor then we can open the floor to questions so moved by Councillor Frank and seconded by Councillor Layman so we have a motion to receive the chief’s update on the floor and now we can open the floor to questions from colleagues so I’ll look to start a speaker’s list.

Councillor Frank. Thank you and I appreciate the presentation I’ll hop right on to my crowdsourced questions since we get five minutes and I don’t want to use up too much with pleasantries although I want the record to show I can be quite pleasant usually so the first question is can you share the following stats given that LPS is tracking them the number of UCR code calls involving mental health issues relevant to police. Yes I can do that and I’d be happy to provide written correspondence in official manner to this committee for accuracy purposes but I can tell you on a daily basis our officers on average encounter 17 mental health related calls every day that’s on average it’s both 17. Councillor oh let me let me correct that sorry 14 14.

Councillor I’ll chief your mic. Thank you and then I won’t go I’ve got four other ones but they’re all stats so maybe I’ll email you afterwards and ask for those or I could keep asking I suppose number of people on the frequent caller list. Chief thank you for that question I can tell you in 2023 the number was 99 and I can tell you the year before was about 120 roughly so the frequent caller list and for by definition that is for us that is an individual contacting the police or police engagement with with at least three or more times in a single month so our co-host program is proving to be very beneficial here because last year we had 99 in the previous year we had a close to 120 120 individuals. Councillor thank you and I’m just confirming you’re tracking my speaking time right Chair yes excellent total hour spent by police on mental health calls.

Chief I can I will get you this accurate information but I will tell you on average I can tell you with an apprehension our officers are dealing with 14 on average 14 mental health related calls a day of the 14 roughly four or more on average our mental health act apprehensions on average a mental health act apprehension is a little over 10 hours so I’ll do the math and I’ll make sure our business analytics units gets you that information. Councillor Frank thank you and then oh no you already answered it it’s great perfect next question how will traffic enforcement continue to be improved and addressed what alternative strategies are being employed to reduce fatal mvas within the city and our police officers exempt from the falling the rules of the road for example pursuing somebody and then doing a legal u-turn. Chief so there’s a couple questions there so let me start with police officer exemptions there’s provisions under the highway traffic act for first responders and police officers who are exempt from certain rules of the road and that there’s requirements for the officers to be in the course of their duty and have their emergency lights activated upon doing so with respect to traffic enforcement can you just repeat that Councillor Councillor Frank yes so how you continue to improve traffic enforcement Chief thank you I can tell you right now from a strategic level we’re making decisions based on data and we’re making decisions also based on the community so I’ll give you a I’ll give you an example when you have a fatal motor vehicle collision typically what police do and what police officers do is shut down the roads as and shut it down for the shortest amount of time but trying to do a very thorough investigation should the investigation lead to criminal charges we want to make sure that we present the most compelling case to the crown that has always been the focus thorough proper investigation shutting down the road so that officers can conduct that investigation what we look at fatalities now or motor vehicle collisions now we look at it in the same lens we try to reduce the amount of time that it that the roads are closed because it’s impact in the community we try to ensure we leverage technology to assist us and support us in doing this we’re also looking at location and the data and the prevalence of motor vehicle collisions that are occurring at that intersection we’re looking at time of day we’re also looking at with collisions overall what is what is the predominant driver action and we know from 2023 most of the collisions that are occur is from the driver operating in a forward fashion that leads us to to to look at why are those collisions are occurring distracted driving speeding the environment from last year what we looked at the data it’s not necessarily from driving conditions or the environment it’s it’s driver error so when you look at data in that fashion we know it’s forward the driver is driving forward so that helps us make strategic decisions on enforcement to produce to prevent this from happening again so we’re looking at things differently from a enforcement from a traffic enforcement perspective we’re looking at it leveraging data to help inform our decisions and the other thing that we’re doing is as much as we there’s a need and a expectation for police to conduct enforcement we also look at a prevention piece so when we look at it for prevention piece what does that look like from communications what does that look like how to partner with the community to prevent we’re looking at it from a totally different lens than what we used to do from traditional policing and I can tell you our enforcement strategy is entails also our new service delivery model it’ll allow not just the traffic management officers to conduct traffic enforcement and prevention in that regard but once we implement the new service delivery model it’ll allow the officers on the road to actually do traffic enforcement you probably have already and I hope that you’ve already seen some increase in traffic enforcement invisibility but I can tell you the plan to change the service delivery model it will take two years and that was that was written into the four-year multi-year budget I appreciate that this community deserves excellent policing I did I appreciate that the community wants better policing we’re all there for you all I’m asking here is that the community know that our officers are really doing their best and we’re actually moving the needle quite a bit so our enforcement strategy will continue we’ll continue to evolve. Councillor Frank who I will confirm from my almost a year on planning committee is pleasant to deal with.

Perfect and thank you for answering these rapid fire questions so the next one how much of the annual budget is spent on officers who are in paid suspension because they’ve been charged with a crime. Chief thank you for the question to my recollection there are four officers suspended to are suspended without pay and to are suspended with pay. Councillor. Thank you and then another question you kind of mentioned in your presentation but I was interested in learning a bit more about your efforts to embed mental health care into some of the police response could you speak a little bit more about that and perhaps the street nurse program.

Chief thank you for the very interesting questions we know that we’re receiving calls for service there’s a good portion of those calls are mental health related calls we also know that our leadership our positioning as the police service in this community is really to restore the quality of life for the community here we are police officers we are not mental health experts we are not experts in social all the social pieces here we need for us to get back to law and order to make sure that people who live here play here work here pray here are safe and we cannot do it alone so we need expertise we need the community we are constantly looking at opportunities to partner with the community for community safety and well being one of these areas is in our communications centers our calm communications operators call takers dispatch they’re under a lot of stress there is significant stress when you get critical 911 calls that individual or that police professional receiving that the call take a receiving that call could go from a very stressful situation to a different situation where it’s a caller in need or a caller that’s in crisis that we can offload that call we can offload that volume to a mental health professional so next year we’re hoping to embed our operation center right now we we have plans for four for mental health experts and members of the community to work alongside with us as a pilot and so we can evaluate and look at embedding them in with us together so that’s one way there’s a few jurisdictions that have different variations that have been proven pretty good ultimately where I would like to see us go any calls that are not police related just completely divert so that our police officers can do what we need to do and let the experts deal with what they need to do the nurse police teams in Windsor has been really I would say a model that other police services are looking at and it’s large in part I’ll give credit to David Muschay and Chief Belair from Windsor what they have done there is full partnership where you’re we where it’s very similar to coast so our our opportunity would be to move resources and put resources pairing them up with an actual nurse from LHSC and that nurse in and of itself there’s data out there in Windsor where police a combined response actually reduced the number of emergency room visits and times that’ll also allow us allow us to when we make mental health apprehensions and when we’re making a mental health act apprehension I need to be very clear in those apprehensions and again on average we do four of them a day and on average it’s over 10 hours from start to finish on that call officers are typically waiting four to any four to eight hours at the hospital before the hospital can accept them the nurse police team will reduce that time that’ll allow us that’s part of the sorry counselor that’s part of the whole service delivery model change that we’re going to do because that’s an area where resources are being drawn and officers are being stuck at the hospital we we are very optimistic with David Muschay here and he is aligned with us and I’m very confident that we’re going to be able to have something very similar that Windsor has not all of it will work here but we’re going to look at refining it to make it work for this community that that team will also allow us to have the ability for when we have individuals in our care and our custody have the ability the flexibility for that team that nurse to come assess within our own police service something we don’t have right now anytime there’s anything of medical concern our officers have to trigger bringing that person into custody to the hospital so that’s one way we’re we’re going to be able to reduce call response times and actually provide better service to the community and I’ll go back to Councillor Frank and I will confess that I didn’t stop the timer while the chief was answering so I’ll be checking with the clerk on your time but you had some left so go ahead thank you I really look forward to all of that that sounds amazing so thank you for pursuing that and next question how is the LPS accountable to AODA and what complaint mechanisms exist for members of the public who experience a substandard delivery for with police services for people with disabilities thank you for that question so there’s a mechanism to report any service complaints that members of the community have endured or are facing there’s a process for for that through the law enforcement’s complaints agencies it’s also an opportunity for them to contact us directly and let us know of any concerns we actually want to know those concerns as far as my understanding I believe we’re in AODA compliance and if there’s an individual or a community member that has identified how we can do better I welcome their input and their address to they can send the office of the chief a message and they or they can go through the law enforcement complaints agency and we’ll address that Councillor Frank thank you I’ll pass that along and just so folks know I did a bit of crowdsourcing on my social media so these are not all my questions there questions from residents um a follow-up or non-related at all to that but for example if um Remembrance Day and other organizers of protest or large-scale events have to pay for policing why isn’t Western University paying for policing during homecoming so Councillor I’m gonna actually say that’s not a question I would expect the chief would be able to answer I think if you want a response to that that would need to be directed to the board chair it’s more related to how they allocate budget resources I certainly have heard that question asked for a decade or more in this city but I don’t think that we can actually ask the chief I think that’s more of a policy and budget question that you’d have to direct to the board chair however a member of the board has his hand up so we will go to Mayor Morgan to get a response there oh I’m not speaking on behalf of Westerners Board of Governors in any sort of way I’m speaking because I actually know the answer to the question um the University does contribute to the cost of homecoming I believe last year they contributed a hundred thousand dollars to um to offset the uh the response that uh that was required it might not offset the whole thing but uh the University has made a contribution for multiple years in a row. Councillor Frank. Thank you um and this was not one of my prescripted questions but I’m curious if the police chief knows how much home coming usually costs in police resources. Chief the costs are between uh 250 000 to uh 320 000 in the last several years.

Councillor Frank. Thank you uh only like two more for me and I think that’ll be within my five minute time. When small incidents happen for example small possessions are stolen or open drug use is used is there any way to report the incident without taking resources away from the police but more of a notice of activity. Chief.

Thank you Chair and through you that’s a um great question so we have online reporting abilities we are looking at um expanding the onlineing online capabilities and with that expansion we need to do um a better communication strategy to the public in this community so that they know when to report how to report and the other mechanisms to report. Councillor Frank. Thank you last question I know you’re all greatly relieved. Um why are there sometimes three to four police vehicles going to a call when it looks fairly small and benign and like one person maybe is the issue?

Chief. Thank you Chair and through you uh another great question it’s a question that we often get uh in the community and um I can tell you that when a 911 call is placed or a call for services placed most of the time people actually don’t know what the information is gathered by our call takers in our dispatch so we have um we have the ability to learn about um what risks our officers are facing so I can appreciate the community will not know what is being told. The community also is not aware of um history um of those individuals involved that the officers may be responding to so our officers um our dispatch are dispatching based on um urgency of the call the type of call and the inherent risks of the call. I’ll just sort of morph into another question that always comes with this one Councillor Frank um and the community typically um always is concerned that they see police officers door to door parked hidden in certain areas and you know I hear a lot of the times oh they’re sleeping they’re not doing anything or sometimes you have three or four police officers in a certain area.

What I can tell you is that when we hear those concerns we look at um the actual individual circumstances individually because um we actually don’t know what has happened and often what what’s happening is what the public doesn’t understand or perhaps I can communicate it a little better. The workspace and the office space of our frontline officers is actually their cars. They have workstations, they do their administrative work in in the vehicle. There’s times when they have to come to the station to conduct administrative work and follow through with investigations but we actually want them in their car doing that work because they’re ready should a 911 or a priority call comes into place.

Oftentimes we have a really young workforce right now in the front line so they’re mentored by supervisors who are sergeants on the road. They’re also mentored by their peers who are senior officers and you can’t mentor them without being next to them so the public may not see that may not understand that piece but that’s how you’re communicating. Sometimes they’re doing work in their car, oftentimes they’re doing work in the car. They could be debriefed, they could be um talking about the call um and also we actually don’t necessarily want officers by themselves with their head down doing work.

It’s an officer safety issue. We’ve seen a police officer in Ontario killed while he was doing work in his car. So those are some of the things we just I’d like to share that might provide some context. Thank you Chief.

Councilor Frank. I just want to say thank you very much. I appreciate you answering all of those and I appreciate your time and service. Councilor McAllister.

Great. Thank you and through the chair. I appreciate the presentation and thank you for being here today to answer questions. First question because you started off with this.

I know you’d mentioned it takes about eight to ten months if I recall in terms of training up the new officers. So in terms of the stats you presented what would you attribute the declines to in terms of those stats? Is that partly because of you know modernizing the force and bringing in those new technologies you talked about because obviously resourcing is still coming online. So what would you attribute those those declining numbers to?

Chief. Thank you Chair and through you another great question Councillor. I’ll say I will attribute it to Morale Morale in the organization. I came to this organization last year in June of 2023.

It’s no secret. The Morale in our organization was at an all-time low and I say that because we all hear that from our membership and the Morale is not only because our members did not feel supported within their day-to-day work. They didn’t feel support from the community. They didn’t feel support from previous council.

They didn’t feel support overall and you add in workload you add in the lack of investment in the police service and if you move forward now they are feeling supported by a board. They’re feeling supported by city council and they’re feeling supported by the community. The more they’re in the community the more they’re feeling that support in this position in this job we barely ever hear a thanks. You hear all the negative and as we implemented community trust as one of our biggest priorities our officers are getting the positive feedback when they’re in the community because I believe the large majority of this community is very supportive of the police although they may not be as loud as the ones that aren’t.

So Morale is a big piece to this. It’s the hard work of the membership both sworn and civilian police professionals and I would say that in the last little while we’ve made structural changes, organizational changes, leadership changes, we’ve moved pieces around and we’re really investing in our leadership. As I already stated we’re looking at everything different from a different lens. This organization has been I would say handcuffed from previous chiefs unable to make the changes that they needed simply because they didn’t feel the support didn’t have the support from a budget to affect the change.

We are seven months in what I really am optimistic and happy about is that remember our first new hire this year is going to hit the road a class of 15 for independent patrol next week or in November the first week of November. We haven’t even put in all the changes that we need. It’s a two-year process but we’re trending in the right direction for the first time. So the little changes is Morale is actually very big.

The other pieces is leadership. I have a fantastic deputy chiefs, superintendents, inspectors. We have incredible leadership in this organization that are all moving in the right direction and again we put community at the heart of everything we do. Those are may seem like small changes but they’re difficult to get there and we’re moving in the right direction.

Councillor McAllister. Thank you through the chair. Kind of a follow-up to that chief. So I know community policing you’re very passionate about it and one of the things I hear a lot it’s great that I’m seeing the police more at events for instance but one of the things and I perpetually hear this and I know my conversations with yourself and some of your deputies I brought this up for.

It’s visibility on the streets themselves. One of the things often and I’m sure some of the other East End Councillors hear this is it’s those boots on the ground. It’s the interactions with businesses, residents and I’m just wondering if you could speak to more in terms of getting some more foot patrols operational. My area often feels like well we’re putting a lot of resources into the core but like the court adjacent areas also would like to see more police officers.

It’s something I hear about all the time and I’m just hoping today you can maybe speak to that a bit more about trying to get some more officers walking in those neighborhoods. Thank you. Chief. Yes thank you Chair and through you again fantastic question.

I’ll first say that I sympathize and empathize with this community. We hear so many communities, businesses that are impacted by how they feel that we’re not there, the police aren’t there. There’s a lack of visibility, a lack of enforcement. I sympathize and all my members and my senior leadership team we don’t like that.

We need this community to feel that we’re here to support them. Part of the four-year plan for the multi-year budget we are understaffed, under resourced two years. It will take us two years to get a new service delivery model in place with that new change sir. You will see increased presence in all the affected areas.

You will see a marked even more clear reduction in metrics that I’m sharing with you now. So I appreciate the community deserves better. I believe they deserve better. We’re changing.

We’re moving as quickly as we can. We’re going to continue to move even quicker. We’re not waiting for the two years. I’m telling you the two years everything will be in place by the end of next year.

I promise this committee and this council you will see and feel the change. We need to get there. Remember we just got the budget seven months ago and the community is really they don’t care. They just need to see us and I want them to see us and our members want to be there.

But I have to put in the structural changes in the modernization before we can do that because if I just move resources right now our call times and cold one emergency response times are going to go through the roof again. And that’s not good for this community either. But I can assure you and I can promise you that this is a priority for us to make sure that we are in the community like this city has never seen. I will also tell you that we hired 20 new special constables.

These special constables are in the community now. They just got finished their training and they’re just on their own for independent patrol. Special constables not a police officer. They’re there.

They support our police officers. But we’re looking at ways how to leverage them for the community because the community want to see them. And there’s opportunities there. So I assure you we’re going to get there.

The community is going to feel it. And I invite the community to reach out to us to reach out to our office. I am myself. My deputies are senior leadership.

I can tell you any time we’re invited to a town hall or a community session for discussion and communication. We do our best to be there or a representative from our organization. Is there what I can’t when I can’t be there is when I don’t get invited or don’t know about it. But it’s important to us.

It’s important to this administration that we’re there. And I’m happy to be there to speak to the community. I hate saying hang on. But just trust us.

We’re going to be there. Councillor McAllister. Thank you to the chair. And I appreciate that answer as well.

And just as some constructive feedback, Councillor Frank and I held a joint town hall. And even if your officer had been able to present even just what you did today, I think that would have been helpful. What I see happening unfortunately is that your officers come to be representatives of LPS. But then everything’s just thrown at them right.

So I think maybe if they came with more of the plan and essentially the metrics you’ve presented, I think they’ll be helpful for them because I think unfortunately your officers just have to say please be patient. And I don’t think that’s landing well with the public to be honest with you. So even having a most basic presentation would be helpful for them to show if they’re going in the right direction at least just to save them some grief. Because I see it all the time and I appreciate you guys taking those evenings to come out.

But I think it’s hard when they just don’t have anything to present. And then I have another question. No, Councillor Frank had talked about traffic. It’s an issue that comes up a lot for me as well.

And I know you’ve done some work in terms of trying to automate and have cameras obviously because the resourcing is an issue. But I’m just wondering from the public point of view, if there’s something that could be done, whether it’s through like a request portal, just in areas where people are seeing a lot of traffic violations, to put it on your radar doesn’t necessarily have to be going through 911. It’s kind of like the non-emergency system. But I get that a lot.

And I feel like I filter sometimes from myself to LPS about areas where I’m getting a lot of those requests. Chief. Thank you, sir. That’s a great question.

And I can tell you this is where the lack of investment in the modernization in our organization is hurting us. This is an area that we need to modernize. There’s ways to modernize our business practices so that the community leaders, such as yourself, if there’s issues in certain neighborhoods or areas that need addressing and that you don’t want to keep calling us and calling us, we need to make sure that there’s a mechanism in place. We’ve had these discussions.

This is an infrastructure piece. It’s a modernization piece. This is something that we want to make sure we provide better service to the community about. So that they can easily have options, go online, make it a seamless transition of information, whether it’s anonymous or it’s identifiable of the concerns that are happening.

For instance, traffic concerns or misdemeanor concerns or minor criminal offenses or activity that they’re seeing. This is an area that, again, is falls part of our modernization of our police service. Councillor? Thank you, Chief, again, for all these answers.

I just want to wrap up who’s some food for thought. I know, for instance, some of us have our BIA’s and right now we are funding private security. So realizing, you know, in terms of the two years you’ve asked for, in terms of getting the resourcing up right now, I think the communities are kind of taking the brunt in terms of having to fund it through other sources, right? So there’s a bit of a fallback position we have right now where we’re funding security to kind of give you guys some leeway.

So for me, pretty much this year, going to next year, that’s going to be kind of a theme in terms of my questioning to you and the LPS is what are we doing to prepare for that? Because my worry is I don’t want to get to a situation when that’s gone and some of these neighborhoods no longer have that fallback that if LPS hasn’t got to that level, that that’s my worry. So a lot of my questions, I just want to, you know, prepare, prepare you if you get questions from me. A lot of that’s just anticipating when that goes away that LPS is in a much better place to accommodate that higher volume.

So thank you again for your presentation, your answers. Thank you, Councillor McAllister. I’m just going to advise colleagues, you know, we’re very close to 430 when I had tentatively scheduled a break. We are going to finish our delegation with the chief before we break.

We’re not going to stop in a mid-item. So I’ve just advised colleagues right now. I have Councillor Pribble, Palosa, and myself on the list. Then Councillor Ferrera and Councillor Hopkins.

And so I will go to Councillor Pribble next. Thank you, Councillor. Chair, to the chief. I’m a great believer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the bottom two steps are physiological water, shelter, food, and right above is the safety.

And I know first one, there’s not a lot that you can do about. It’s certainly more on our end. But the safety is a big issue. And for example, yesterday I was attending a meeting when there was there were residents from all these village.

And one person was saying we are virtually across the road, and we don’t feel safe walking here. People downtown, people in all these village all over London, they do understand in terms of the strategic vision, strategic plan, and that these changes are not done overnight. But on the other hand, there are those crucial issues of the safety. And again, it’s, I don’t want to say any other words because there could be sort of the entire city, but certainly in downtown and all these village, they don’t feel safe.

And the crime, it’s kind of the numbers in these areas, I believe, and thanks for the indicators, they’re improving. But the population, the residents, they do not feel. What is your message to these people that they have a concern of everyday walking in these areas doesn’t matter if it’s the daylight or if it’s the evening. What’s your message to them?

Because they do understand the strategic plan, the big picture, the one you have painted to us, and everyone is a believer in it. And we are behind you. We are. Well, what’s the immediate message?

Any plans 30, 60, 90 days to address these crucial issues that are happening on our streets in these areas on daily basis? Thank you. Chief, thank you, Chair, and through you, that’s a another great question, Councillor Proble. I’ll say this.

I’ll say if you’re looking for timelines, forget about the two-year mark. Our goal is by summer next year, there is a marked mark difference. I will also say that recognizing that members in the community, some members in the community in certain areas where they live and work may not feel safe, I would say two things. One, our organization is planning for some town halls, if you will, led by us inviting members of the community.

We want to hear that feedback. You don’t have to wait until those town halls start coming in November. We’re very accessible. We listen to complaints and concerns as often as we can.

And I’ll also say that although it’s a four-year plan for the budget and it’s a two-year rollout for the service delivery change, we’re changing inside in our organization our leadership. Our leadership, we’re moving, we’ve moved people around and restructured. We’re continuing to restructure and continuing to evolve as an organization. This, although it’s been seven months since the budget approved, we’ve only just made some of our changes and our changes from a leadership level.

So what I would say to those members in the community that you’re speaking to, know that, and I hope your worship doesn’t feel offended but that I’m saying this, but I’ve connected with his worship and I’ve talked to him about a different strategy, a strategy that we need to move forward with because we can’t wait. Something needs to change. And I’ve connected with his worship and had preliminary discussions about it. We’re talking about just the one piece of our part in this puzzle because there’s a bigger issue here that it’s not just police problem.

There’s some social issues that involve other organizations and government levels outside of the policing, but I would say the message to your constituents is that I hear them, we understand this, we thank them for their patience, hang on, we are doing something, we’re thinking about things, we are trying to make some big changes here. And the statistics that I share, if you look at the data, and again it’s just one way, our violent crime is actually reducing, our property related crimes are actually reducing. There’s different ways to look at that, but what’s really important to me, aside from that, is how people feel. And if people don’t feel safe, you can ask any one of my leadership team, we take that personally, I take that personally.

And I know that it’s not going to be perfect for everybody, but we strive for perfection, knowing that we’re not going to be perfect. So just hang on, it’s been seven months since we got this, we are dealing with deep-rooted issues in our organization that has been, quite honestly, have not been addressed for many, many years. And again, I can’t harp on this anymore, our service delivery model has not changed for the past 30 years. So changing a big organization like this that we have, it’s going to take a little bit of time, and we’re actually moving very quickly.

So I would say, stay with us, you’re going to see some progress, and you’re going to feel it, answer. Thank you, Chief, and I understand that it is not only police, that it’s other organizations, that we have to work on this together. But we do need to be more, someone needs to take the leadership and steer this vehicle in a fast speed so we can cut the time, and we really need to deliver the results for our community to progress, to have a safe community in these areas for businesses to prosper and grow. Because again, these areas are really what I call, it’s kind of all of us, even though it’s not our minor BR award, but downtown is to all of us.

And the faster we address it, the prosperous is going to be the healthier our entire city is going to be. I’m very glad that you had a conversation with the mayor. I hope there’s going to be a plan very soon, and I understand, please do involve with your experience and your direction which other organizations need to be involved. But let’s address this issue yesterday.

Thank you, Councillor Ploza. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m going to start with a thank you to the lone police.

We don’t direct them, we requested them to come before us, and they did an hour in counting. So thank you, your time is valuable, and we look forward to you appearing annually before us. I think this is a really important conversation to have with the community, knowing that some community members did provide questions to their Councillor ahead of time to ask those questions. As Councillor Pribbles talk about going fast and moving forward, my questions are about, for my residents, lots of concerns, but also, and you’ve heard it from me before, modified muffler blitzes, this noise, the street racing, realizing that could lead to fatal vehicle accidents.

So looking to see an update on that, I know we don’t get to know ahead of time when they happen, but just the frequency that they’re happening, can we see more of them? And I know some of that also relates back into unmarked police cars. I know some residents say, I just don’t see the police, and it’s like, but they have on marked cars. So just, where is that ratio of near fleet of marked versus unmarked cars as well?

Chief, thank you, Chair, and through you, I can tell you that our road safety strategy involves a heavy piece of enforcement. And again, the enforcement is directed based on data and complaints. So we need to hear the concerns, and we are modernizing our ability to accept and receive those types of complaints in those areas. If we don’t hear the concerns, and, you know, I rely a lot on City Council to inform us, and we don’t just ignore the concerns, we hear it, and we take action on it.

So I can assure you that enforcement will continue. It will continue in that regard as well, because we’ve heard from several residents that the mufflers, the speeding, the street racing is all important to them. And the other shift that we’re doing in this organization is grounding us back to, because we’ve been so short staffed, because morale has been so low for the last little while, we’ve been focusing, and I wouldn’t say make an excuses, but we’ve been not prioritizing those crimes and those concerns of the citizens unless it was life and death, or unless it was considered a serious crime. And we haven’t been paying attention as much as we should be to the whole community.

So I’ll give you an example of a fraud investigation. You know, fraud is quote unquote, we’ve heard this term used many times. It’s a victimless crime. No one’s getting hurt.

I’ve had a discussion with some of my frontline members, and hearing the frontline members talk about the impact of a fraud having on an elderly couple or an elderly family is deeply troubling. And it’s troubling that we’re unable to investigate it the way it should be investigated. So I share that with you because it’s a shift in the way we do things, and we need to start looking at everything. And when you say loud mufflers, there’s going to be some people that would argue that who cares.

But I’m telling you, it’s something that we do care about, and we have to take that into consideration. So to answer your question, 100% that will still be road safety in total. Community safety is our priority. So we have traffic that are marked, and we have officers that are unmarked that will conduct enforcement.

Sorry, Councilor, just through the chair. Sorry, just a number of rough ratio of unmarked versus marked. Is it 50/50, 25/75, 60/40? Thank you for that question and share through you.

I would respectfully just try not to get into operations about that. So we do have a fleet of unmarked vehicles. Councilor Palosa. Thank you.

I respect that as operations. My other question is, I’ll do a comment, and the next questions aren’t for you. So you get off on that one. Just thank you.

You did mention that your officers are available for community events. I’ve had them at ward meetings answering direct questions from residents. I’ve had them just up as a booth at a community meeting. Residents deeply appreciate both.

I know there’s been many community events that you, me, officers, other members of Council have been at. So your presence out there and that of your officers are being seen, and I deeply appreciate that just my residents. It’s an easy touch point to bring forward those concerns from the city as we get them, and residents do like knowing that there’s an open channel of like, “Hey, I flagged this when I saw the chief or his staff, and like the officers are out there and they’re aware of it,” as time permits. So I guess for you, are you still offering right along to city councilors with your staff?

And then my next question is actually for the city clerk. Chief, thank you, Chair, and through you. And yes, we are. Absolutely.

Thank you. It’s been a while since COVID, so I need to sign up again. And my question also, I can tell you, Surgeon Brown has already offered to organize one for me, so I’m sure he’d be happy to help you too. But if you want to share the question with the clerk too?

Yep. So my question with the motion that’s in ease scribed is that we received the attached presentation and the delegation that we’re receiving. Is the presentation simply the chief’s short slide deck or and/or, I don’t know if you need amendment, can it also include the public metrics that was issued and sent to us in advance? Just it’s a five page report, had a lot of the details in it, and knowing that it is public, it just might be of help to the public and us that it’s publicly part of the record as we move forward in conversations.

So just a quick chat with the clerk’s counselor and the clerks were not actually copied on the data that was circulated to the rest of council. That actually came from the mayor’s chief of staff. So could I move that motion then that as long as there’s no objection since it’s a public document, it was circulated that it could be attached to this document. It was the September 19th communication, and I can certainly forge the clerk so they know exactly what document.

Just so that, so yes, that amendment would, we’ll get some language drafted up in just a moment. We can get a seconder for that, Councillor Ferreira that seconded. Okay, so we’ll just get that lined up in ease scribed as an amendment. Yeah, and I’m fine to take care of that after the Q&A to the chief as it’s more administrative just to not interrupt this process.

So an amendment has to be made on your first time speaking procedurally. So we have to do with that now. Okay, sorry, everyone, just say yes. Okay, so the amendment would read that it be noted that strategic priorities and policy committee received the attached presentation, the attached community policing statistics, which reflects the attachment that was circulated and heard of verbal delegation from chief Aitron, chief of police.

Good. Okay, seeing thumbs up from everybody. So unless there’s any discussion on that I will ask the clerk to just open the vote on the amendment. That’s the vote.

Yes, colleagues, that’s open in ease scribed now and we’ve got your vote. Councillor Truss out. Thank you for that. Closing the vote motion carries 15 to 0.

Okay, and then Councillor Palosa and for our are you okay being the main motion as amended now, the movers and seconders. Okay, so we’ll note that for for when we get to that vote. However, we are not at that vote yet. Councillor Palosa, anything further?

Okay, I am going to just move myself to the bottom of the list all the way till the end. Councillor Palosa, you already asked one of my questions, so perhaps the other colleagues will cover off the other one that I have. Councillor Ferrer, you are next. Thank you, Chair.

And I guess I’ll start with thank you, Chief, for the visibility that you’ve brought to London Police Force since you’ve been on. I see you around a lot. I have a lot of comments on how you are present and you’re there to answer questions and it’s nice to have a face for people to be able to communicate to, especially at the very top level of the police board. So that is my extension of thanks from the people that I’m speaking to.

I also, you know, I should also mention thank you to sending officers to all my meetings. They’ve been very well populated. I’ve had no issues with that, so I extend my thanks to them as well. And coming here and presenting as well and bringing the metrics and we appreciate that.

So I have been obviously following things. I’ve seen, you know, traffic incidents have been decreasing. Collisions on the road, you know, especially with the amount of, I guess, road rage that we do talk about every once in a while, that’s a good metric to have. And seeing in the news too, you know, the amount of shootings have been significantly decreased from what we saw year over year on the past years, too.

And you did speak to that. I did want to talk about, I guess, one thing that’s kind of been touched on here in this conversation, but I just wanted to ask you, with the amount of, I guess, the toxic drug supply that we have in the city, we do have quite a good influx coming in from what I understand is coming in off of the 401. And I understand that this is not just 11 police issue. This is like an inter-policing effort, whether it’s the OPP or whether it’s the RCMP and you are, you know, you have to be having ongoing engagements with other police forces from other municipalities.

So I would understand if you can’t give me all the details. But I did want to know if I could get kind of your take or the London Police Services take on how we’re combating that issue and what we would foresee in the future when it comes to that. Chief, thank you, Chair, and through you, that’s a big concern for us. Organized crime in and of itself is often behind the drug trade and at varying levels.

And in this city, we see street crime, street level gangs that are within this city, as well as the threats that are outside of the city and coming in to make a profit. So that is part of, you know, why you see a reduction in gun violence because of the strategy that we’ve embarked on. So we look at the high-risk individuals or the individuals in this city that live here that are the most dangerous, that are committing the most crimes from an organization perspective, loosely lit, loosely knit definition of a street gang to my more organized fashion. So we look at, can, putting our efforts into how to combat them and as well as looking at the pressures from outside coming into London because, like you said, the 401 corridor and us being the largest city in the southwestern Ontario here.

So those operations almost always to be very effective is a multi-pronged approach. One of the approaches that we do is from a covert perspective. So what I can show you with is that we have investigators, we have specialized units that are focused solely on organized crime at the street level and at the higher level, which involve the drug trade and the gun trade. So that is something that, you know, we’re not out there preaching, but that work is occurring.

And at the same time, when we talk about enforcement, we always have to have a prevention lens to it and a perspective. And you’re very in tune of what our organization is doing. And the change is that we’ve been implementing from a leadership level, very focused on the marginalized youth, the at-rith’s use, the young people in this community, because as we focus enforcement, we have to make sure that there’s prevention. And from a prevention level for us involves our community partners and the community as a whole.

But it’s very important for us that we are presented and that we are in the community with these young people so that they can see us in a positive light. Because what happens is if you don’t see us in a positive light, we can’t help steer you into a good path if you’re going down a wrong path. But the other piece what other people fail to forget is that if the young people don’t see us and don’t see us in a positive light, when they become victim of a sexual assault, a violent crime, a hate crime, they won’t call us or they won’t come to us. So our enforcement strategy or strategy overall involves enforcement, involves collaboration with our community.

And again, we’ve said it all the time, we cannot make this community safe unless we all come together. We will do our part, we will continue to do our part. And we will continue to focus on those individuals trafficking and distributing drugs in this community. Thank you.

Councilor Ferrell. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for that answer. There’s, I don’t want to be too redundant because I know we’re getting short on time.

So that would be my only question. And and I also, I guess I’ll say I appreciate we’re having a lot of conversations. I know you and I met quite a bit in the last little while. So I appreciate that.

And until next time when we speak and we move forward and I know that we’re going to bring in some very good changes to come into the city. So I appreciate. Thank you, Councilor. Next on my list, I have Councilor Hopkins.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for reminding us that this is not a budget committee and that questions can be saved for the police budget through the budget process. So thank you for that reminder.

Chief, thank you so much for being in this chamber with us and for being here and addressing the many questions that we have here. Thank you very much for that. I want to just start off with a comment about your response to Councilor Frank’s questions around the mental health and your optimism. I’ve been on Council for this is my third term.

It’s been an ongoing conversation and to hear your optimism and opportunities looking at maybe Windsor, but really doing something on how we can divert those calls and get the expertise that is needed in our community to our residents. So that means so much to hear that optimism. Regarding your presentation, which I thank you for, I really noticed that we’re starting to get back to those pre-COVID levels. The numbers were pretty high and I think no matter where you were through COVID, the challenges existed in our community was great and I sort of want to go back to that presentation because I could see the graphs coming down and if not even going further down to pre-COVID.

But the question, it’s going to be a very broad question, relates more to your last comment, which was more needs to be done. And you answered so many of the questions presented to you here this afternoon already addressing the many, many issues that are in our community. But from sort of a broader, what are the priorities? What do you see the priorities that need to be done that we need to tackle right at the very top as we move forward.

Chief, thank you, Chair, and through you. I just want to make sure, Councillor, that I understand the question, right? I don’t want to answer wrongly. Can you specify in terms of what area you’re speaking about or you’re just talking about just in general from policing as a whole here in this community, Councillor?

Yeah, policing as a whole and where we’ve come and where we’ve been and where we’re going to, but really addressing it from a whole perspective because we can, there are many, many issues that you have to deal with without a doubt. But what are, what needs to be done? Just following up on your last comment that more needs to be done. What do you see as are those priorities?

I want to sort of be via champion there to understand where we have to go as a city. Chief, thank you, Chair, and through you. So I’ll say the, from a context perspective, the modernization of our organization is paramount. We have to modernize our organization, change all of our business practices and modernizing it.

When I say modernizing, it also means investing in our people, investing in the leadership in our organization. There’s been, a lot of people have been neglected in our organization simply because there hasn’t been the ability to invest back into our people. So for us to make impact in this community, we have to have our house in order first and there’s, you can’t fix and make things better unless you’re better. So I would say that, that is one piece to this puzzle for us and it’s no secret, the call queue or the calls for service or the calls that our officers face every day when they come in to work is nothing like I had ever seen before.

And I’ve been a police officer prior to coming here for 22 years with York Regional Police, 1.2 million residents, several mayors across the region. I have never seen a call queue like the one we have until I’ve come here. And I’ve never actually seen call response times to this level. So for me, there’s a big system in our organization that we need to fix.

Once we fix that and we’re going to do really well in another year with fixing the internal system, once we reduce that call queue, my officers will be able to do exactly what you want and that is respond to calls for service in a timely manner. That is to be in the community, to be with the community and to be there for the community. If I can, we can adjust that, then we can tackle everything else. And everything else allows us to truly put the community and partner with the community to deal with a lot of these social issues that become police issues.

So for far too long, we have been pointing the fingers, not just the police. It’s always been somebody else has to do something. We’re not pointing fingers. We’re looking after what we need to do, what we need to contribute with the lens of the police are involved in everything in all of community.

So how can we operate together? So there’s more to do. There’s more to do in our house right now so that we can do better with the community. And I feel and I truly feel at the heart of my heart that we are going to get there.

I’ve seen this community 20 years ago. Some of the people who are close to me know my ties here to this city 20 years ago. It is not the same. And I know we can get there.

I just want to thank you for your service. Thank you, Councillor Hopkins. So I still have a number of Councillors on the speakers list. I have Councillor Stevenson next and then Councillor Ramen.

I’m just going to ask colleagues to try and be tight with our questions and comments. We have had our friends from LPS here for over an hour. We are half an hour past our scheduled break and we have following this items for direction. We have other folks waiting to present to us on the whole of community response evaluation framework.

And in an hour we will need a motion to move past 6 p.m. So if we can stay tight, that would be greatly appreciated. Councillor Stevenson, you are next. Okay, thank you.

I just have a couple comments and although I appreciate my fellow colleague here at the town hall last night, I just wanted to be clear that the public safety concerns that were expressed quite full of emotion last night for an hour and a half were more related to the addicted addiction crisis in Old East Village and to the fact that this council continues to put social fund social services on that street who are so that we’ve got people who are addicted on the street, even the one currently funds a day space of 120 people with can only hold 40 indoors at a time. And when people are addicted and mentally ill, it causes a lot of public safety concerns from what’s about the street to the smoke to the fact that their O.W. and O.D.SP payments do not, for the most part, cover the cost of their addiction and they are stealing every night, cutting wires, property theft, all of that. So I just want to be really clear that what I hear is a lot, a lot of gratitude for the police and what the services that you offer that community, they are really looking forward to the illegal public drug use being dealt with and they would love to see more police and have more feet on the street, as Councillor McAllister said, but the true public safety issues are more about the addiction crisis.

So I just wanted to say, you say you don’t hear thank you a lot, huge, huge thank you. To you and to every member of your service, civilian and sworn, our city is not safe. People do not feel safe and two years from now can’t come soon enough and seeing some changes next summer is the hope that I keep spreading within my ward that change is coming. Thank you for your leadership.

Thank you, Councillor Roman. Thank you and through you. So I will try to be tight my time again. Thanks for coming today and being so open to answering questions as I found you to be all through this process so far.

The first question I had for you relates to judicial backlog and how that backlog is impacting service from London police. How is it impacting the way that we perhaps explore and use the hours and tools that we have available to us because of the known backlog? Chief, thank you for that question, Councillor. I’ll say the backlog in the judicial process that involves the Ministry of Attorney General were governed under the solicitor general and although I don’t have a really a say in how the ministry runs the courthouses and in the backlog, I can tell you that the Ministry and the Ministry Attorney General is addressing that backlog very aggressively.

I can tell you from our side of the house, the modernization of our police service with digital evidence management system that we are trying to get into place as quickly as possible will assist with streamlining disclosure and information sharing to the crown’s office which falls under the ministry which ultimately will assist and support reduce time for the crown attorneys. So that is one piece, that’s one important piece of digital evidence management that our police service is one of the last few to even embark on in this province, Councillor. Thank you, building off of some of the comments from the Councillor for Warren board for Councillor Stevenson, she talked about the illegal drug open drug use and this is what I hear quite often from residents about the fact that they feel unsafe and that these issues are not being addressed by London police and I’m told that, you know, there’s strategies coming. I’m hopeful for those strategies.

I’m wondering if you can comment on that at all. Chief, thank you, Chair and through you. Yes, this is a very important topic and the constant feedback that we hear is that the police are doing nothing when our officers see open drug use. I’ll tell you some of the context and some challenges that is important to understand the controlled drugs and substances act, controlled drugs and substances act.

There was amendments, I believe, in 2021 or 2022 where the offense of possession of a controlled substance now legislated us to look at the principles and understand that drug use and drug consumption is a social and a health issue versus a police and law enforcement issue. It did not say that the police are prohibited from arresting for open drug use. What it did do is force us to look at the principles and the guiding principles under that legislation which arresting and charging are your last resort. So that piece of legislation guides how we respond and again, it doesn’t mean we can’t.

It means there’s a framework and decision-making process that our officers have to deal with and consider before they make arrests and I can also tell you that the feedback last year that I got from this community and a lot of our leadership got from this community and I tend to agree with this piece. You cannot arrest your way out of this. I agree with that sediment. I can tell you today the same people that had that sediment have changed and are asking us to enforce.

I can also tell you that the only option that our officers have right now if you want engagement is to arrest and jail. I don’t like that our officers only have that one option. I really don’t. There needs to be a system in place for our officers who are interacting with those individuals that need help and treatment.

There needs to be a way and a pathway for them to get that help. Jail is our only option. We don’t have another option where you see other communities have options, have the community coming together, have supports and organizations where if an officer when appropriate, when appropriate, to arrest for possession in public when appropriate that the officer has the ability when appropriate to jail if appropriate or hand that individual off to a pathway of care. Right now our officers do not have that.

They don’t have that ability. So this is a bigger discussion. This is a bigger conversation. There’s been discussions and I hope you don’t mind your worship.

I’ve had these discussions with his worship and talked about a solution and a change in what we need to do because for us, community safety as a whole, we need to make sure that we make sure everybody is safe in this community also. Thank you. In my ward, something I hear is that when property crime happens, a lot of people don’t report it. And the reason they don’t report it is they don’t feel like anything gets done.

So I’m just wondering if you can comment. I know we talked about modernization in terms of the process for reporting property crime, but there seems to be an expectation that still exists. And you talked about that discrepancy around 20 years ago, what the expectations were versus now and how there’s been little change. I think for a lot of my residents, what I hear quite clearly is that when they have an issue, they call the police so rarely that if there is an issue, they would love a call back or to see a police officer.

And it may seem like something minor, like a property crime, but to them, it’s major. And so I’m just wondering if you might be able to comment on that. Chief, thank you, Sharon, through you. And again, you know, my hearts go out to your residents and everyone experiencing that.

This is not something that is new. This is something that when I came last year in June, this was one of those big concerns. And again, if I can go back to Councillor Hopkins’ question about what we need to do, again, it’s the service delivery model that is so important that involves everything. If I and we as a leadership team do not change the way we provide service, residents that you speak of are going to continually be in that same position.

That’s not something that we want. That’s something that we don’t want. So we are looking to make sure that the residents have an ability to report more seamlessly because they feel nothing is going to happen. There’s two things there that we need to gain their confidence back.

We need to make sure that we move towards answering those calls for service and providing service when they call. And we have to make sure we modernize our ability to accept these complaints and these concerns with ease. So there’s a lot of work to be done in this space. This is something that is very important to us, Councillor.

Thank you. So recently, there was an article back in the summer about the media having to pay for access to data like crime statistics. I hope that through our process of modernization, we can make that information more available, more available to the media, but also to the public because I feel it’s quite important. And through that $130 spend from CBC, I learned that vehicle theft is down.

And that was up until about March of 2024. And then again, it was reported that recoveries are about half of less than half of the vehicles that were stolen were recovered. Can you speak a little bit to the car theft strategy here in the city? Chief, thank you, Chair.

And through you, I think there’s two real questions you asked about really involves transparency and access to data. So the way the organization has run for many, many years is if you want information, you want data, there’s a process to go through the FOI process. That has been embedded in this organization for many years. And there’s a number of reasons for that.

However, the change in leadership and the change in direction, we are making every effort as part of modernizing our business practices so that you don’t have to do that. That information is going to be readily accessible to you, whether it’s going to be on a monthly basis or by monthly basis or by way of a dashboard for you to dive down and find that yourself. That is something that involves the modernization of our organization. With respect to vehicle thefts and car thefts and the recovery of car thefts, what we know in our city is that the cars that are being stolen in this community are being sent to the GTA as crime vehicles are being sent overseas.

We have a very big problem with car thefts in this city, but I can tell you that the thefts and the car jockeys that we’re seeing across the province at an alarming rate, thankfully, we’re not experiencing it to that level in this community. Councillor. Thank you. I appreciate that willingness and openness to share data.

One of the pieces of data I was looking to receive is around, and I know with our call volumes, we have reports on calling volumes, but particularly what we classify as frivolous or nuisance calls. In other municipalities, they’ve looked at actually finding people that repeatedly call 911 for frivolous reasons or for prank calls and things like that. I’m just wondering how the service tracks that data. Chief, thank you, Chair, and through you.

We have just modernized our communications center with NG911 and the advance of NG911. It is new technology that all police services are facing or dealing with, and as we learn and perfect the use of the technology that we have, this is one area that we’re very mindful of. We need to do better in data collection in our organization. We’re collecting data right now.

There’s much better ways to collect that data to make sure that data is accurate and our process of collecting the data that we actually are looking for. This is one of these modernizations process that we’re dealing with from the call volume because as we’re looking at exactly what you’re getting at, Councillor, how many of our calls or 700 calls that we get daily are actually police-related calls and how many of them should be diverted. This is something that forms part of our strategy and our service delivery. That’s why we’re embedding the mental health and crisis workers in the call center.

That’s part of our overall strategy with this, Councillor. Thank you, and I appreciate that. I have to say that, again, I really appreciate when officers come out to the ward meetings, and I have one coming up in a couple weeks, and I know my residents are quite often reaching out to me about the traffic concerns, and one of the things I think where we have a little bit of a loophole is around how Councillors report into your data around traffic concerns and areas that are hotspots. I’m just wondering how we can do a better job of capturing that information, and then also how we can do a better job of providing accountability to our residents to be able to say, look, I’ve sent that email.

It’s been acknowledged because sometimes that’s weeks, months, sometimes before we get an acknowledgement. It’s been acknowledged, and that it’s being taken care of. So I’d love to see us come up with a process for that because I think it’s needed. Chief, there’s sort of some comments there, but did you want to respond to how we as Councillors can do better to inform you, you and your officers?

Sure, thank you, and Chair, through you. Part of the communication from the Councillors, I think we need to better in reaching out to yourselves as leaders in the community. There’s a process that I’m very familiar with that I had implemented in my former career that will bode very well here. So it involves us proactively scheduling meetings with you, and it also involves the modernization, again, of how to report issues in your ward.

From a technology piece, there’s, you know, I’ll share this with you. We’re looking at potentially an app that will provide service, not only to you, but ease for the community. So there’s things that we’re trying to turn our minds to. And again, I can’t run until we start walking, right?

So although we’re trending in the, in a good direction, there’s much more work to do. So thank you. But we will, we will be more proactive in this, in this regard. Okay.

Other than myself, that exhausts the speaker’s list. I’m going to hold my questions. Chief, I know you and I will be seeing each other at an ARGA BIA touch base. So I will perhaps avail myself of the opportunity to ask some questions in that form instead.

If committee will indulge me to very briefly just offer a couple of comments from the chair, though. I will say that I have, and my residents have, noticed an improvement, small, put an improvement in traffic enforcement. And I happen to be in Councilor Paloza’s ward at Earl Nichols Arena the other night. As hockey counselors, we are frequently at arenas.

And on the drive home, I saw not one, but two traffic stops on my trip from ward 12 to ward 2. So that was great to see two active situations happening there. Traffic is, is a continuing issue. I will say I, I have found in the last, particularly the last three or four months, Sergeant Nethersole and his team, not only have acknowledged emails that I have sent from residents about pot spots, but that I have actually received back an email from the officer who attended the traffic enforcement proactively and shared some of the results with me in terms of number of, of offenses that they handed out.

So that’s been very helpful. I recognize that that might be one of those first steps. And, and so I just wanted to share that. I appreciate that that data.

The loop is being closed. It’s been closed with me, I think three, three different times now, which is really appreciated because in the last term of Council, that loop was never being closed. And I’m starting to see that now. So I share that as a, a thank you to you and your officers, particularly Sergeant Nethersole and his team in the traffic enforcement division, because it matters to folks and they are seeing it a little bit more.

I know we have a lot more work to do. Hopefully those rookies who are hitting the streets on their own next month will be put on traffic enforcement first to, to cut their teeth there because I’m sure they will have no problem finding time during their shifts to issue some fines there. But I, I will say also the other piece that I wanted to share is I do appreciate the attention that has been given to reallocating some resources back into the core unit. I know for a while that unit had to disappear because resources had to be spent on 911 response calls.

But Sergeant Brown and the officers there have been very helpful in word to having them back in, if not necessarily full swing, at least back in the batting cage taking some practice swings. It’s been helpful. And so I absolutely acknowledge everything colleagues said about issues where we still have concerns. Open drug use is a big one for me too.

But I have noticed some small improvements. And so because you said earlier, we often hear the complaints, not the thank yous. The same is true of the 15 of us around this horseshoe. But I wanted to just take the opportunity to say thank you not just for being here today and answering our questions.

But thank you for all the work that you and your officers, especially those on the front lines. I know there’s lots of work happening behind the scenes too. But those on the front lines are doing. And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t say behind every great leadership team, there is a tremendous executive assistant.

And so I want to particularly thank Ms. Santos for all the work she does, coordinating all the communications that all of us send back and forth to you and your leadership team. I know that you can’t do your job without her. And because she’s here today, I wanted to take just a moment to recognize her for the tremendous volume of work that I know she does to keep you and the rest of the leadership team on track.

And as I have no one else on the speakers list, I can ask the clerk to open the vote on the motion as amended. Yes, losing the vote. Motion carries 15 to 0. Thank you, Chief, to you and your team for your time today, colleagues that moves us on to the item four of our agenda, which is items for direction.

Before we go into that, I’m going to look for an opportunity for a recess. I would suggest perhaps if we give ourselves enough time for a bio break and to start to eat, and if we need to bring something back in with us to finish, I think that that would be appropriate for the interest of time. So I’m looking to see if maybe a 15 minute recess seeing some Mr. Chair, a point of work.

I don’t know what might want to deal with the motion to extend past six. Well, we would do that when we return because we will be returning at least 15 minutes before six o’clock. So if we take 15 minutes now, we would be back at 5.40. Sounds good.

Okay, we’re going to do this one by hand, a 15 minute recess, all those in favor. Motion carries. Colleagues, I’m calling the meeting back to order. If everyone can take their seats, please.

We have quorum, so we’re going to resume our meeting and we are moving into section four of our agenda. This is items four direction, Councillor Hopkins. I just think that we need to make a motion to extend. Yes, we do.

So moved by Councillor Hopkins and seconded by Councillor ramen motion to extend the meeting past six p.m. And I’ll ask the clerk to open the vote on that. Councillor Ferrer, closing the vote. Motion carries 13 to zero.

Thank you, colleagues. So with that in place, I don’t know whether this is an incentive or a disincentive for you, but at 6.40, I will be leaving. So Councillor ramen will have to chair the rest of the meeting if I see Mr. Dickens nodding his head that that’s an incentive to drag the meeting out so that I’m not here.

But I just advise that I will be leaving at 6.40 as I have a ward meeting at Eastlands Community Center this evening. Items for direction 4.1 is the whole of community response evaluation framework reporting template. And I’m going to just go to Mr. Dickens to introduce this.

Thank you, Chair, and through you, this report is a report back from the previous evaluation framework that Council received in March and approved in April of this year. The evaluation framework represents sort of the template reporting structure that we were asked to bring back to Council for review so that they would understand the type of things that we would be tracking. As a reminder, this research and evaluation work is funded jointly by Western University London Health Sciences Center and then also through the St. Joseph’s Healthcare Foundation through a donation from Ryan Finch and that foundation.

The three groups have come together recognizing there’s a need to create meaningful and measurable change in our community. And the support and this report and the evaluation framework itself has been assisted in and supported by the Center for Research on Health Equity and Social Inclusion as well. So with that, I will turn it over to Mick. Mick Coons from St.

Leonard’s is one of our co-chairs of the System Foundation Stable and has been co-leading some of this work on the evaluation framework. Thank you, Mr. Dickens and Mr. Coons.

Thank you for joining us. I know you have been extremely patient. You were here before the meeting started at 1 p.m. today, so we appreciate your patience.

But if you’d like to go ahead and give us your five-minute presentation, the floor is now yours. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, Council members, for having us again to present this as a follow-up to our March SPPC meeting.

We want to start out with this image, which is very familiar to all of you because it shows the spectrum of housing in London with a highlight that we are focusing in particular on the homelessness and shelter piece, but also at a valuation of the whole of community systems response obviously. Now, this also looks familiar and it’s just sort of a reminder. We’re looking at certain concepts and now makes later structures, processes, outcomes. All of our research is really driven by a health equity driven quadruple aim and endorses a mixed methods design.

Our current approach has been solidified. We have four research and relation teams assembled, outcomes and experiences, workforce well-being, cost structures and processes, as well as the overall process evaluation. Now, before I really dive into this, our approach really is a consistent year-over-year approach. So, it’s not a one-time and done, but it’s something that we want to bring to Council or to SPPC every year.

That’s our commitment and we also want to bring into the community on an ongoing basis. Our research is rooted in the community and making use of what already exists through the expertise and resources of the London community and beyond. And one particular piece that we’ve heard from community members, from Council members, from researchers as well, is that we really want our approach to be attentive to potential biases. Now, potential biases, you know, a bias is really just a tendency or inclination to war against something or someone, including a specific outcome.

Needless to say, everyone holds certain biases. Some may help, some may hinder. Either way, biases may obscure the big picture, lead to prejudgment, and result in poor decisions. And those are things that we really implore our researchers and the violators to really address for themselves.

So, being attentive to biases means the researchers are addressing their potential biases when designing studies and collecting, analyzing and presenting data. But we also invite you, the community, to reflect on biases you may hold when reading, thinking, and conversing about our research and evaluation efforts and findings. Now, our presentation is also accompanied by a spreadsheet, which is an appendix. There’s a couple of comments I want to make about this.

I know Council and community members as well are huge fans of targets, right? Targets are important, it’s something that we’re aiming at. But it’s really difficult to develop targets, meaningful targets, if we don’t even have a baseline. And that’s really what we’re talking about at this point.

We don’t have a good baseline, because everything we’ve done in the past has been so siloed that data has not been shared. We’re in a good process of making this happen, as we’ve heard in the previous presentation. But so that’s what I want to highlight. We are also in this presentation, I’ll talk about these key performance indicator KPIs.

We’re listening and continue to listen to the community, what is important to them, and we’ll add those KPIs and metrics to our never-ending list. And this is an iterative learning process, as well as an expanding list of projects. Some of them you see named in that spreadsheet. And again, to break down those silo pieces, really investing in data sharing across team and across project collaboration.

Now, let’s get into the meat of this. And I don’t want to go through all of these different metrics that are in here. I’m happy to answer questions about those if members of council have any questions. But this first is the team one sort of piece, the whole system outcome and metrics.

And again, emphasis on whole systems, right? So we’re thinking about the homelessness system, the emergency system, and the health system. Those are the three big pieces that came together in the whole of community system response, right? So there are obviously some very important key performance indicators that we’re interested in.

I also want to highlight on this slide and any subsequent slide the little piece at the bottom. We always want to acknowledge who did that, I was compiled by. And we also always want to link to further research that exists out there, right? So while we want to come to council every year or to SPPC every year, doesn’t mean that you will not hear about data and research and metrics throughout the year, right?

But we want to also develop a repository of that information that exists out in the community. Speaking to our mixed methods approach, while we’re interested in obviously those numbers, that data, those quantitative pieces, the other piece is really that qualitative measure, right? Key themes related to current state of shelter system, emergency services, substance use health, for instance, and really getting some good quotes from community members to tell the story behind those numbers. Looking at the outcomes of journeys of those experiencing high-quality homelessness, again, you see a mixed methods approach.

What is really important here for the purpose of this presentation? There’s a huge disclaimer here. A unified accurate measure is really difficult at this point. By 2025, though, we will have worked with various partners to establish metrics.

In the meantime, teams will develop estimates for this measure. Looking at the experience of the broader London community. Mr. Kunz, just sorry to interrupt, but we have passed the five-minute mark.

So I need a motion to extend by an additional five minutes. Councilor Palosa and Councillor Hopkins, we’ll just do this one by hand, folks. All those in favor? Any opposed?

Sorry, I took the microphone away. Motion carries. Go ahead. Thank you very much.

So the experience of the broader London community with homelessness, those can be business members, quote-unquote, ordinary citizens, BIM members, business customers. This is a really tricky one because quantitative measures of this is really, really challenging, especially unbiased quantitative measures. But we are working with our partners, for instance, with the city’s community wellness and safety and well-being plan to really identify some of those potential measures. And again, really focus on the mixed methods approach.

Outcomes and experience of the workforce, some of those pieces that we’ve heard very strongly from the workforce, what they in particular are interested as indicators of their own well-being. Key themes that we want to indicate obviously are in there as well. And again, a fairly big disclaimer, human resource information is fairly protected by a lot of organizations. So we’re trying to pull in all powers to be, to support the centralized process for routine data collection.

Cost structures, processes related to health and homelessness, lots of cost pieces that we’re trying to work out with our health economists. Structures, obviously, those numbers of things that exist in our city, number of outreach teams, highly supportive housing units, affordable housing units. And then processes, thinking again about a previous presentation, data sharing agreements, memoranda of understanding, cross sector partnerships, and qualitative and quantitative assessment of the community of care. Also, again, mixed methods approach, really wanting to know these key themes and quotes from folks in the community.

And then finally, the review of the whole of community systems response. So this is actually something that is very, very actively being worked on, in particular media analyses of news coverage, social media narratives. And we’re working very, very closely with business partners and BIAs to strengthen our qualitative and quantitative surveys of residents of London, as well as of businesses, because we know that’s really, really important. Thank you for your time.

And I’m more than happy to take any questions. Thank you. So colleagues to frame the discussion, I’m looking to see if there’s a mover and a seconder. Excuse me, Councillor Frank and Cuddy to receive the presentation.

We have that now. So we will move forward, and sorry, colleagues post-break, mental. I want to check and see if colleagues are going to remove the recommendation from staff on the, not just the presentation, but receiving the report in our agenda. So just making sure that we’re clear that that’s for both.

So that’s now on the floor, and we can look for a speaker’s list for questions and comments. Councillor Frank. Thank you, and appreciate the presentation you staying so late. I just had one question from resident.

It was, when will data for the baseline in 2023 be available? And sorry if I missed it, if you didn’t say it already. Thank you for the question through you, speaker. Very good question.

We are actively currently working on a cohort study, which is mentioned in the report as well. I’m happy to commit to next September to have the data available, because it will also show us, I mean, this very little value, I believe, and I think I can speak for the research and evaluation of teams to have the data for 2024 and 2025 without having a baseline. So I’m happy to go to that. Councillor.

Thank you. No further questions? Councillor Stevenson. Thank you, and thank you for the presentation.

I did have a couple of questions. So on page 320, where it talks about the outcomes, team 1, 2, 3, 4. In team 1, it says, what proportion of those identified in HIFAS in July 22 are still alive today? So is that the only measurement is whether they’re alive or not?

And because I’m thinking about recovery, right? So there’s nothing there but recovery. And is it only the people from July 2022, are we tracking those that are added from that date? Thank you very much.

And through you, Mr. Speaker, very, very great question. Again, these are key performance indicators. We sort of started this journey of health and homelessness because we really wanted to focus on preventing deaths.

And so this is why this is a key performance indicator, folks that have recovered from addiction or mental health issues. Absolutely. That is on our radar. I don’t want to speak out of turn, but as you probably heard through media, there’s some movement happening with the provinces’ heart hubs, where we’re actually working alongside that proposal to intertwine our research and evaluation approach.

And clearly, recovery from addiction and mental illness will be a significant part of the reporting for those heart hubs. And we also want to carry that over to any other projects that we through health and homelessness endures. Councillor? Mr.

Dickens. If I may just elaborate, there are other key indicators in there too, around how many individuals from that cohort have been housed, how many remain housed, what are their stories? So as we’ve touched on, there’s a combination of qualitative and quantitative. So some of that qualitative data will help to tell the picture.

How is their health? That is listed on that page as one of the key indicators as well. That allows the researchers to go in depth with individuals, understand what that means for them in terms of their health. Has there been attempts at recovery?

Have people made some level of recovery? What are their stories? What are the other things that need to happen to improve their situation? So it’s not just a simple blanket.

Are they still alive? That was a driving force. Way back when this whole thing started was that we had too many preventable deaths happening in our community. So naturally, that is one of the key focus areas as well.

Understanding from that cohort, how many of those individuals are still alive today? And then what is their story? How is their health? Have they been housed?

Do they remain housed in those sort of things? Councillor? Thank you. That’s all very helpful.

And I’m glad to hear it. I didn’t get an answer on that. Are we only following that July 22 cohort? Are we also tracking the ones that are coming in since Mr.

Dickens? Thank you. Through you, Chair. We are starting with that cohort, but we will absolutely be looking to onboard other people that are in the system.

So we’re trying to establish that baseline. We have a by name list that we can go back to and look at that baseline, start to track that, follow that cohort through. But we also recognize that as we have more people come into our care and come into systems in different places, touch different aspects of the system that we would do our best to make sure that we’re tracking those individuals as part of this as well. Councillor?

Thank you. I’ve got a series of questions here. But when we talk about HIFAS, if I’ve heard correctly before, there were a lot of challenges in terms of getting information, getting accurate information, all that. How challenging is that going to be in this process?

Mr. Dickens. Thank you. Through you, Chair.

It won’t be without its challenges. I’ll tell you that much. So this is a process — this is helping us modernize, if we will, modernize our systems and our process and get our house in order when it comes to data collection and data sharing and validating data. We have actually spent a significant amount of time internally as city teams working across departments, bringing in resources from other areas to help us actually refine and clean up and make sense of a lot of the HIFAS data.

So we’ve seen that the HIFAS system itself go through a number of iterations and actually improve its data collection so that we can actually start to sift and comb and get better reliable data through that. So it won’t be without its challenges. We are limited to the systems that we have. But we will absolutely stretch and maximize those systems to the best of our ability using whatever bright resource we have across this corporation to make sure we can produce something of value.

Councillor. Okay. Thank you again for that. In team two section, it says, do they feel safe at work, referring to the service workers?

But I didn’t see anything here about whether the residents felt safe because we have a lot of concerns about safety in our current shelters and the neighboring community. I didn’t see anything there. Mr. Kearns.

Thank you very much. And through you, Mr. Speaker, a very great question. The safety of the residents is definitely an important part of our team one, the experiences of those experiencing homelessness.

And community members is definitely also a narrator, be that through those qualitative and quantitative surveys through BIA’s businesses, but also customers of businesses, part of our whole of community systems response piece has really been focusing on those folks that live in London, obviously, and that receive services, but also that make use of services. Folks that, you know, as the chief of staff, chief of police said that play, work, and pray in our community. So that’s really a major focus on us. Again, whole of community systems response.

Thank you. That’s again, really great to hear. When we talk about metrics and we’re talking about number of shelter beds, number of highly supportive housing, when we’re counting those, how do we, and when we’re talking about homelessness in general, how do we account for the fact that, say, the Thompson Road was 44 new highly supportive units, but we lost 44 affordable units, you know, and for lending, here’s, we gained 24 highly supportive housing, but we lost 15 resting spaces. So how, how, how will that be accounted in here?

Whichever one of you wants to take it. I saw eyes going both ways. So I’m happy to take that through you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you very much. Of course, the idea is that we’re hoping to just add pieces to the available housing stuff. We also know that the reality is that there may be some conversions. Those are important and difficult conversations that we need to have and will have to have.

And there’s nothing preventing us really making a critical assessment of if they set the right use of space, but also noting this is the net gain, but really what is the net gain when we’re talking about losing affordable housing units and supplementing them with highly supportive housing. So I think that goes back to that bias piece, right? Like really being honest with our community members, with member of council to say, hey, yeah, I mean, we’ve added 15 highly supportive housing units. We lost 15 affordable units in the process, right?

We want to be honest about that, because that honesty and transparency will bring trust, will give us your voices when it comes to advocacy with other funding partners, for instance. So that’s why this is really important for us. And that’s why that piece on the bias was in there. Councilor.

Okay, thank you again. Great. Oh, there’s another comment. Sorry.

Yes, sir. Mr. Chair, through you, I’ll just add the example of Thompson Road. We didn’t lose affordable units.

Those units are still affordable. What they still remain affordable units, what we’ve added is highly supportive housing. So the cost of rent did not increase. It was meant to be affordable housing that housing is still affordable to those 43 tenants.

What has been added is highly supportive wraparound services. So understanding Mr. Mathers and his team have a lot of work to do around the creation of affordable housing in every way, shape, or form in our community. And they will do their tracking of that as well.

And we’ll rely on that data to help inform some of our work as we will also look to onboard wraparound services and more high supports for individuals so that they can be successful in that affordable housing as well. And now I’ll go back to Councilor. Thank you. And I appreciate that perspective.

And we had 44 affordable housing units ready in the spring. And we chose to delay that until the fall to provide the highly supportive housing, which again is fine. But we had already counted them as as affordable housing units. We’re celebrating the victories multiple times, which is okay, just when we’re looking at the overall picture of homelessness in London, the need for affordable housing is as important as the highly supportive housing.

I mean, so we celebrate like we created 44 highly supportive housing units, but really we converted the affordable housing units we had available to highly supportive. Yes, they’re still affordable. And we really, really need those affordable housing units as well. I wondered when we again, when we’re counting the number of hubs and highly supportive units, I’m wondering if we’re going to be evaluating any, I don’t even know what the word is for, but like sort of any negative unintended consequences in the area, because when we’re explicitly saying people are allowed to do drugs in their room at both the hubs and the highly supportive housing, you inevitably have drug use outside, drug dealers coming, you’ve got that kind of thing.

So will we be monitoring that as well at the same time as we’re celebrating the opening of those units, will we be evaluating the impacts on the whole of community? Mr. Coons. Thank you very much through you, Mr.

Speaker. One of the really great pieces about the plans you have seen for highly supportive housing as well, perhaps, is that there’s an integral public engagement, ongoing public engagement strategy involved in these plans. So we’re not just going to plop down houses and tell the neighbors to deal with it, we want to hear from neighbors what’s happening within the neighborhood, within adjacent areas, to see and evaluate whether what we’re doing is working for the whole of community systems spots or for the whole of community. So this public engagement information will be a really important part for us to evaluate whether things are working or not.

And that’s information that we will have access to as our research and evaluation teams. Councillor. Just a couple more then. So on page 322, it talks about the number of 911 calls.

Is that going to be per location for encampments? Is that going to be split out? I’m just wondering how that’s going to be tracked. Through you, Chair, that would be the type of 911 call.

So not rooting it based on any singular service provider, but looking at the aggregate through police in terms of the types of calls that they would be responding to. And we benefit greatly from having representatives from the London Police Services and the Middlesex London Paramedic Services participating in this work. So it allows us to tap into their expertise and understand better how they capture this data. Councillor.

Thank you. So just to clarify then, that’s like all 911 calls related to homelessness, whether that be encampments, hubs, highly supportive housing, shelters, that type of thing is just going to be is that the tracking 911 calls related to homelessness? Mr. Dickens.

Through you, Chair, when we first ventured into trying to do something substantial in this community, a lot of it was rooted in data that the police had provided. And some of that data was very specific to call types and codes and categorizations. And I wouldn’t be able to pontificate that as clearly as they could. And unfortunately, they’ve all left for their macaroni.

But it would be a categorization of call type that they are accustomed to, whether that be, you know, and also kind of depends where the research teams go. If we’re looking at mental health calls for the police, we’ve heard some data shared tonight about that, whether it be for people with no fixed address and no paramedic services, they’re able to categorize some of their calls based on the patient that they are responding to. So please maybe similar in that vein. Okay, way too detailed even for me.

So I’ll leave that to you guys. So my last question then, I guess, is way as you’re doing these statistics and analysis, have you referred at all to the the auditor general reports from the province or the federal government? Because I know they were looking at how we the data wasn’t there to evaluate whether homelessness was being impacted? And there’s also core the center, Canadian Center of Recovery Excellence that’s come out of Alberta with the Alberta model.

So knowing that the province is just recently in April said they’re moving in that direction and choosing that recovery oriented system of care model. Any thought to look at or have you already looked to see what they’re looking at or measuring, just interested what what you factored in as you were building this? Councillor, I’ll just let you know. I let you wrap up that question.

You are here five, but we’ll go to Mr. Coons and Mr. Dickens for their response on that one. Thank you.

And through you, Mr. Speaker, thank you for this suggestion. We have not actively looked into it, but it is on our radar. And we’re using we’re grateful for any suggestion of resources that are out there in the community or in the world effectively.

So thank you for that. Sorry, Mr. Chair, last. Mr.

Dickens. Just if I might add, we have over 100 researchers tied to this work through various post-secondary institutions and research firms who are putting forward their time to assist in this and they will be looking at best practices far and wide as Mr. Coons has said both provincially, nationally and internationally. And I think what you have here before you is something that is locally made.

It is locally unique. It is regionally relevant. And I would say it’s provincially scalable. And so while we will absolutely look to other jurisdictions and other research to help inform and validate or perhaps prove our theories wrong, we also know that we’ll be able to actually produce some of its first-of-kind data where so many different systems are able to talk.

Mr. Perbal. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And question to Mr. Dickens. When we were able to talk about high fees, I know last year we had a very limited number of community organizations. They were able to input the data.

Then we said at the beginning of this year, we are going to enlarge this number of the organizations to be able to access it and input their data. Has it happened or where are we standing now? Do we get majority of organizations input the data? Thank you, Mr.

Dickens. Thank you, Chair. I don’t have that finite number at my fingertips today, but we did onboard more organizations to get into HIFAS, including our colleagues in Middlesex County. We’ve done a lot of work with the county to make sure that they can onboard to the HIFAS system as well.

So, thank you for the dispositive news for Mr. Coons. On slide nine, it’s outcomes and journeys of those experiencing high-quality homelessness. And I understand below its target, it’s specific, let’s say the hubs, etc.

But can we also target the low and medium acuity and start really kind of triaging so we can really have specific groups so we can do specific initiatives to each group that we triage? Thank you, Mr. Coons. Through you, Mr.

Speaker. Thank you for the question. Again, all of community system response. We will not forget about those folks who are only medium acuity or low acuity.

We have a really great system in the city of London as well that supports specialized groups, speed up of different acuity. Of those 50-odd key performance indicators, that’s really just a tiny little snippet of those 200 plus 250 indicators that we have, those metrics that we’re looking at. A lot of those look at when you’re thinking about food security, when you’re thinking about affordable housing, you know, we saw that spectrum of the London spectrum of housing graphic at the beginning. We are interested in all of those pieces.

So we really want to do diligence and effective research on the whole of community effectively. Councillor. Thank you for that last comment. Thank you very much for this presentation.

There is some really good data that’s going to be coming from and it’s going to be very helpful. Thank you and the entire team. Thank you, Councillor Preble. Next, I have Mayor Morgan, withdrawn, other speakers.

Seeing none, then I will ask the clerk to open the vote. Opposing the vote. Motion carries 13 to 0. Thank you, colleagues.

Thank you, Mr. Coons. And your colleagues up in the gallery, I’m guessing, who have been waiting patiently all afternoon as well. Thank you for your patience there as we dealt with that item.

Moving along, we still have some items for direction. 4.2 is consideration of the appointment to the greater London International Airport Authority Board looking to see if someone would like to move the recommendation from the report. Councillor Ferrera and seconded by Councillor Layman. Any discussion on this item?

Councillor Ferrera. Thank you, Chair. I’ll be quick. I’m happy to remove this.

Mr. Ware has served his entire life and he continually serves and, you know, he’s had a long career with the RCAF and he has definitely taken the Norton School to a whole other level. And I come from an aviation family, so I’m very, very knowledgeable of it, but he is way ahead of me on that. So I think we’re pretty lucky to have him.

So with that, like I said, I’m happy to support this and I’m happy to see what comes out of it. Any other speakers? Seeing none, I will ask the clerk to open the vote on. Councillor Hillier.

I go in. Yes, all right. Opposing the vote. Motion carries 13 to 0.

Thank you, colleagues. Item 4.3 is the RBC Place London Board Appointment Recommendations. You will note that the request in this report is that this be referred to civic administration to draft revised London Convention Center Corporation By-law and report back to the November 19th meeting of SPPC, looking to see if someone wants to move that referral moved by Councillor Cuddy, seconded by Councillor Hopkins, looking for any discussion on that. Seeing none, I will ask the clerk to open the vote.

Opposing the vote. Motion carries 13 to 0. Thank you, colleagues. Item 4.4 is consideration of appointments to the Animal Welfare Community Advisory Committee.

This committee has five vacancies. There are two applicants. I’m looking to see if someone wants to move the appointment of one or both. Councillor Stevenson.

I’m happy to move both. So both have been moved, seconded by Councillor Hopkins. Look for any discussion on this. Seeing none, then I will ask the clerk to open the vote.

Opposing the vote. Motion carries 13 to 0. Thank you, colleagues. Lesson learned.

I should have fed you all of 3.30 and we might have gotten through things more efficiently. However, item 5 is the next item on the agenda. This is deferred matters, additional business. 5.1 was the added from Mayor Morgan with Councillor ramen and myself with regard to the realignment of standing committee mandates.

This is a for information and I will go to Mayor Morgan. Yes, I actually want to try to be brief, but I can answer questions. I think it’s fairly clearly articulated in the letter what the intent here is. I’ll just emphasize two quick things.

One that the senior leadership team and SLT has been consulted on the division of these committee appointments as have the clerks who assisted in the drafting. I want to thank them both for their feedback. At the end of the day, as we look to do things a little more streamlined and more efficiently, we have all the same responsibilities and all across all the committees. We just have one fewer committee to do it with, which means instead of having to take our 14 Councillors and populate 20 spaces across four committees, we can take the 14 Councillors and populate 15 spaces, which means only my member of council now would have to serve on two separate committees.

Again, the articulation of the division of those responsibilities from the Civic Works committee across the other ones, mainly merging it with CSC and creating a new infrastructure and CSC committee was, again, through some consultation with our staff on what would be functional, what would make sense. And ultimately, again, the goal here is for us to do the same amount of work with fewer meetings, fewer IT staff, fewer time in this chambers, but still, you know, all of the overall components of the work being done and a little bit of a realignment of a few things to try to take some feedback and modernize and stick some things together that maybe we’re separated to a couple of committees in the past. Again, it’s articulated in the letter. I’m more happy to answer questions than speak any further on this.

And I will look to see if colleagues have any questions. Councillor McAllister. Thank you through the chair. One quick question to Councillor Hopkins and I have to duke it out for chair.

How are we going to do that? So this would be effective for the next iteration of committees, which means all of the committees would have potentially new compositions at that point. Councillor Hopkins. Yeah, thank you.

And I guess I’ll just make a couple comments here. I appreciate the need to balance the workload and make us more efficient as a council. But I think it’s also important that we’re reducing the staff workload as well. I think that to me is very, very important.

And hopefully by doing that, eliminating those silos that we sometimes get into how we talk to one another at committees. So I’m all in favor if we make these changes that it would improve. I do have a question though. And it is about our SPPC meeting.

So we’ll be looking at the Master Mobility Plan at SPPC. We’ve got SEAP on there, the Climate Emergency Action Plan. We’re going back to moving homelessness and housing to CAPS. Are we going to need more SPPC meetings as much as we try to reduce our meetings?

I’m just a little cautious. Will we be creating more SPPC meetings? Or do we know that? Because I know the SPPC agenda now will start to get quite heavy.

So I’m not sure if anyone can answer that. But do we have a schedule already set for 2025 and would that need to be adjusted? So I will start. And then I will look to the clerks to add some additional information.

Until this change is signed by the mayor, the existing calendar stands. But part of the consultation with the clerks was that they would be able to turn around a new 2025 calendar fairly quickly because it would mainly be removing CWC meetings. By the virtue of doing that, it also makes a more flexible calendar where, and again, I’ll let the clerk speak to this, but it would allow for scheduling of additional SPPC or PAC, which sometimes needs an additional special meeting as well. Because the clerks may be able to arrange in the calendar a little bit more time for what I’m going to call constituency weeks where we don’t have a standing committee meeting.

And so counselors would be able to spend a little more time in their wards unless a special meeting was needed to be called. But I’ll go to our city clerk for a little bit more comment on the calendar process moving forward. Thank you through the chair. That’s correct.

I don’t have much to add on that. Of course, removing one standing committee, it does provide the additional flexibility of the deputy mayor indicated looking at what’s being added to the SPPC mandate. Those items, we already have lengthy SPPC meetings, which I think you are well aware of. So I’m not sure that adding these depending on the matter that goes on the agenda would be a substantial change.

Now, that said, there may be some need for additional SPPC meetings and we can make those accommodations by adjusting the calendar as needed. And sorry, I’ll just add, Councillor Hopkins, something I didn’t think to share in advance. But as these changes are made, the consultation with Ms. Dator’s Bureau and the SLT was also that they would take into consideration timing of when things come.

So ideally, we wouldn’t have an MMP update and a SEAP update on the same agenda so that we have 900 pages to go through on two items. It will also be partly dependent on us as Councillors when we provide direction on an item and then we stipulate that staff need to report back by Q and of Q2 or something like that. We are actually impacting their ability to balance the agenda workload too. So it’s something that we will have to keep in mind as Councillors in terms of when we’re setting report back meeting dates or quarter deadlines for a report back.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for those comments. And I’m glad to hear that we can make adjustments if needed for SPPC meetings. I think having that flexibility, as much as we want to try to reduce committee meetings, I think we also need to deal with the matters at hand as well.

So there’s that flexibility. I’m okay with this. Looking for any other speakers? I see none.

So we’re just receiving the communication colleagues. So we will open the vote on that. And I hope somewhere on Zoom, Mr. Yeoman is watching so that he can celebrate urban forestry finally being reunited with all of its parks and recreation siblings.

Housing the vote motion carries 13 to 0. Your worship? I just, I know this is not on the agenda. But given colleagues didn’t have substantive questions, I’m not going to wait for Council to receive an information report.

I’ll probably move on this in the next few days. That way it sets the direction in order for the clerks to be able to make the changes to the calendar with lots of time for the next committee cycle. I just didn’t want anybody to be surprised that I’ll probably just issue the order in the coming days. Thank you, Your Worship.

And I know that you also have to take your leave very shortly from us, as you have a call with one of our provincial colleagues. So as you will, we only have the closed session items to deal with. So before we move a motion to go into closed session, so as not to be disruptive to the closed session proceedings, I’m going to suggest that I will turn the chair over to Councilor Raman at this time. And I will leave.

And if others, Councilor McAllister is attending the same community meeting as I am. So I think Councilor McAllister, myself and the Mayor, will be leaving. And we will hand over the confidential session to Councilor Raman to chair. Okay.

So I’m looking for a motion. Thank you. Councilor Hopkins, Councilor Ferreira, and wait for that to open this. That’s to go on camera for 6.1 and 6.

Closing the vote. Motion carries 11 to 0. Recording in progress. Okay.

Thank you, everyone. We’re returning to SPPC. We’ll accession. And I’ll go to Councilor Ferreira to report out from in camera.

Thank you. Presiding officer. I can report out that progress is made in our in camera session. Thank you.

With that, I’ll look for motion to adjourn. Councilor Stevenson, Councilor Cuddy, and with that a hand vote. Okay. Motion carries.

Good day.