A Chatham-Kent councillor wants to make it easier for residents to access information about planned municipal projects.
Councillor Mary Clare Latimer is bringing forward a motion on Monday night, asking staff to make recommendations to optimize current processes where councillors and members of the public can monitor and be notified of all upcoming planning, engineering, drainage, development or any other anticipated projects in their respective wards.
Latimer said the goal is to make things more accessible and streamlined. With multiple projects going on at any given time in Chatham-Kent, she said it can be difficult for residents to stay informed.
"It's really just an organizational, informational challenge to improve transparency and ease access of information," she explained.
Latimer said, if you know where to look, it can be easy to find information on larger projects happening in the municipality. However, she wants to make sure residents are able to stay up to date with smaller projects as well, especially those that may impact their neighbourhood.
"It's not just major projects," she said. "It's all those little projects as I say, depending on who you are, what they're doing and where they're doing it, may be very relevant to the people it impacts."
She said she is also hopeful that a more streamlined approach could help lessen some of the burdens on municipal employees.
"I'm hopeful the recommended process would actually mean less time spent by our customer service desk and our department managers who are repeatedly seeking or requesting notification or clarification of a service issue or project status," she said.
Latimer is requesting that the report with recommendations go back to council at the June 15 meeting.
