Tantramar council is telling municipal staff to get rid of a cap they had suggested on the number of banners they will install on lightpoles in the municipality.
At their committee of the whole meeting Monday, councillors sent a revised banner policy forward to their next regular meeting. The revised policy would lift a proposed maximum number of 245 banners, and also exempt the veterans banner program from policy directives such as having to apply for installation every year, and limitations on storage of the banners during downtime.
The volunteer organizer behind the veterans memorial banner program says he was gratified to hear “strong support from Council” on Monday. “I think this is a good policy,” said Garth Zwicker after Monday’s meeting. “I think it’s probably overdue.”
Each fall since 2016, banners honouring local veterans coordinated by Zwicker and paid for by local families are mounted on light poles by municipal parks and recreation staff. After Remembrance Day passes, municipal public works staff take them down and replace them with winter light decorations.
In recent years, Active Living and Culture director Matt Pryde says the operation cost the municipality about $7800 in overtime pay, plus foregone revenue from the rink, which is closed during the installation period to free up staff.
The original pole banner policy was proposed last month at council’s May committee of the whole meeting. The idea of a maximum number of banners didn’t get negative feedback at that time, though concerns were raised by resident Mike Gillespie about changes to the municipality’s current practice of storing Veterans banners during their downtime each year.
When the policy came back to council on June 10 for a decision, Deputy Mayor Matt Estabrooks asked that it be removed from council’s consent agenda, and sent back to a future committee of the whole meeting for further discussion.
On Monday, Pryde presented a revised policy based on private feedback he received from one council member, whom he did not name. Those recommendations included lifting the cap, changing rules around storage, and exempting the veterans banner program from most of the policy. Pryde said staff supported the idea of exempting the veterans banner program, but suggested that a cap should still be in place for other groups requesting banner installations. He suggested a cap of 100 banners, based on the number of municipally-owned banners the town currently installs.
But ultimately councillors disagreed with Pryde, and asked for the policy to move forward with no cap on the number of banners a group could request to have installed.
“What if the school came in and wanted to put up 102 [banners]?” asked Councillor Barry Hicks. “How do we say two of your banners are not going up?… I feel it would be much better to deal with it at the time when it comes in.”
There was some debate around the council table about whether or not the municipality had shown “resistance” to the banner program, an idea mentioned by Councillor Michael Tower in his opening remarks on the topic. Mayor Andrew Black pushed back. “The entire time I’ve been on council, which has been nine and a half years now, every time the banner project has come up, Council has agreed to expand it,” said Black. Tower agreed that council has been supportive of the veterans banner program, but held firm that there was a “perceived resistance” to the program by some in the community.
After the meeting, Zwicker also said he has felt some resistance, because staff seemed to be “concerned with the costs or the time involved.”
Earlier, Pryde explained that he was providing costs to council to help them “make an informed decision.”
“I’m not saying that we can’t do it,” Pryde told council. “I’m making sure that you guys understand that it does cost something, and so if we’re going to continue to expand it, the money is going to have to come from somewhere.”
Zwicker says for his part there are other factors involved in the growth of the program. “How long do I want to continue to do this? How many more banners? How many more families do we have?” he asked rhetorically after the meeting. When he started the program, he himself had put a cap on the number of banners he could produce, because of large numbers of requests. Now there are smaller numbers of requests coming in each year. But, says Zwicker, “there are still families out there.”
