Delta Deserves Real Leadership at City Hall

DCC Now · September 24, 2026

City staff should advise. The mayor and council should decide. That is how local democracy is supposed to work.

In Delta, that line has been blurred.

After 2022, Council transferred defined operational, financial, and development powers from public meetings to senior administration. Delegation of Authority Bylaw 8199, adopted unanimously on January 9, 2023, gives officers authority over specified contracts, agreements, legal proceedings, settlements, and development-related documents within stated limits. Development Application Procedures Bylaw 8347 then delegated specified development permits, variance permits, and related application decisions to the General Manager of Development or authorized staff, subject to a reconsideration process.

Staff can and should give professional advice. They should not be doing the job residents elected the mayor and council to do.

Those transfers can speed routine administration. They also mean some decisions that used to appear as individual Council motions now occur inside staff authority. That is a transparency and oversight question, not a claim that every delegated file is improper.

The same pattern now appears at the front door of Council itself.

Council Procedure Bylaw 8330 still says an external organization wishing to appear before Council must send a written request to the City Clerk, and that the request is subject to prior approval of the Mayor. The scheduled appearance is likewise approved by the Mayor; the Clerk then sets the date. The bylaw text does not name the Corporate Officer, the City Manager, or external counsel as the approving authority.

The public record does not match that wording in practice. Written denials of delegation requests have come from external counsel and from legislative staff. Fifteen written questions asking the City to identify, by name and by bylaw section, who had authority to deny those requests did not produce that answer. One Delta has separately proposed that, if elected, delegation requests would be “received and approved by the Corporate Officer.”

If elected officials are not willing to carry out the responsibilities that still sit with them on the face of the bylaws, residents should replace them with people who will.

Taxpayers are paying for accountable, democratic leadership—not a system where staff run the process and the mayor and council simply sign off. Delta needs the public record in the open. Delta deserves better.

Sarbjot Singh Locham
Resident & Editor
DCC Now – Delta Community Concerns
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