City council began budget deliberations on Nov. 23, part of the process includes the new bylaw 6251, which was brought forward by the city clerk’s department to potentially save money.
A new city bylaw had its first reading last week resulting in the possibility of newspaper advertisements published by the City of Lethbridge to be cut.
Bylaw 6251 was established to create alternative methods of public notification and advertisements. In 2019, the City of Lethbridge spent $99,123.08 on print (newspaper) advertisements required by legislation to inform residents about public events, bylaws zoning changes and projects around the city among other things.
City Councillor Belinda Crowson says city staff was asked by council to find ways to cut spending by five per cent and 10 per cent in preparation for the Nov. 23 budget meeting.
“Every department went looking for ways including the city clerk’s department. They don’t have a large budget, so this is one of the things they looked at and brought it back to council to have a look at. That’s where we are right now, council, including myself and my colleagues have to weigh everything; is the cost savings worth it or is it better to have as many avenues for advertising as possible? This will be a part of the debate when this comes back before council.”
According to the City of Lethbridge, analytics from 2020 have shown an average of 7,400 weekly visits to the city’s website with the city’s Twitter and Facebook pages having 20,900 and 18,110 followers respectively.
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The new bylaw could potentially see advertisements being posted to social media pages directing people to the city’s website for notifications of upcoming meetings.
City Councillor Mark Campbell says it is still early and more details are to come, but in terms of saving money, it seems like a good way to go.
“[Going digital] would give more of an opportunity to go into detail for people who need it. If these advertisements can go more online rather than go in a newspaper as newspapers can be cost prohibited and you can’t go into as much detail because it’ll cost that much more.”
The majority of the legislated newspaper advertisements the city posts are for bylaws, public hearings and meeting notices. Each advertisement, depending on the subject matter, costs between $500 to $1,000 per advertisement, with many of them being duplicates of the same advertisement across two weeks to meet legislated requirements for bylaws.
Newspaper advertisements won’t be completely cut, but will move to a smaller weekly advertisement directing readers to the city’s website for more information. This move can save the city upwards of $88,000 a year on legislated advertisements.
City Councillor Rob Miyashiro says this bylaw has got lots of feedback from people that think the advertisements should stay in the newspaper.
“We’re getting a lot of response to this and most of the response is from people that are against having everything published electronically. It’s [interesting to see] what our residents look at for options for cost savings, for things they don’t think is valuable doesn’t matter to them if we cut it or not, but things they think are valuable they have an opinion about.”
This bylaw provides opportunity to reduce organizational advertising costs. Moving online will allow the city to post higher quality images, colour images and as many images as required to adequately inform the public. This bylaw is to help increase transparency and openness of communication with city residents. All electronic advertisements pertaining to bylaw 6251 will be posted on the city’s website.
“We have about 145 submissions in front of council for the budget meeting [on Nov. 23] and this is one of them, but because this one needed a public hearing it got to council before the budget deliberations,” added Crowson.
The City of Airdrie already runs newspaper advertisements directing the public to their website for detailed advertisements. If the City of Lethbridge passes the bylaw, it would cost approximately $11,000 annually saving upwards of $88,000.
If passed, the city clerk’s department says the changes will take place on Jan. 1, 2021. Bylaw 6251 was deferred during the Nov. 16 meeting and will be discussed at the next proposal in the coming weeks.
