Saint John Approves Public Safety Committee

Saint John council is expanding its committee structure to include a public safety committee.

The committee will provide a strategic framework for municipal decision-making regarding public safety issues.

Kevin Clifford, the city’s fire chief, said the committee will focus on more than just police and fire-related issues.

“The committee purpose is to maintain comprehensive situational awareness of the safety position of all services, and more importantly what it is the city is doing to establish, maintain and improve the safety component of all the services it provides to our community,” Clifford told council on Monday.

The idea of a public safety committee was first brought forward two years ago by Coun. Greg Norton.

At the time, council passed a motion asking the city manager to explore the idea and come back to council.

Mayor Don Darling said he fully supports the committee but thought he would have a greater focus on police, fire and emergency management.

“I just believe that in our conversations all the way along, we were somehow going to take these $54 million very important services and we were gonna put a lot of horsepower around them to work on a range of issues.”

City manager John Collin said the committee is free to explore matters within those areas but notes that public safety is much broader than that.

“The public safety committee and the voting members of the committee, if they wish to explore matters within police, fire and EMO, absolutely, the committee will do so. It’s not exclusionary to that at all. It’s just it can’t be just that,” said Collin.

The committee will be made up of five councillors, one of which is the mayor. Each quarterly meeting will be attended by at least one representative from various city departments, the Saint John Board of Police Commissioners, the Saint John Police Force, Saint John Transit and Saint John Energy.

Collin said the committee will operate similar to growth and finance in that any items discussed or voted on will go to the proper authority, such as council or the police commission, for approval.