Homecoming recommendations passed at city council meeting

Kingston City Council has moved one step closer to trying to improve this year’s Homecoming.

Last year, about 5,000 people partied on Aberdeen Street during Homecoming weekend and a car was overturned and set on fire.

Council passed all 17 recommendations made by the Committee for the Safe and Legal Use of Public and Private Space at last Tuesday’s council meeting, with only a few council members voting against one or two of the recommendations.

“It’s a difficult issue and I think the committee did the best job they could in the circumstances,” Mayor Harvey Rosen told the Journal. “It certainly brought the various players in this particular situation together to discuss possible solutions, and it’s never bad to have open lines of communication.” The committee of students, politicians and University administration was created in October with the intention of presenting a report to city council in July.

Ryan Quinlan-Keech, AMS municipal affairs commissioner, said the AMS encouraged open and reasoned dialogue after last year’s Homecoming.

“We present to you tonight the product of that reasoned dialogue,” Quinlan-Keech said.

One of the committee’s recommendations suggested that committee members “meet with local news people and Queen’s media to encourage balanced reporting during the lead up to Homecoming,” in spite of recommendations to the contrary from the city’s communications department.

It elicited laughter from one of the councillors.

Quinlan-Keech, Rosen, Patterson and Janice Deakin, who served on the committee as acting dean of student affairs but is now graduate studies chair, all stressed that a “catch-all” solution doesn’t exist.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Quinlan-Keech said to council, adding that safety for all must be “the absolute and overriding priority.”

“What unites us as Kingstonians is far greater than what divides us,” Quinlan-Keech told the council.

Rosen said some of the recommendations were somewhat vague “motherhood statements,” which was what he’d expected.

“In my experience, those sort of motherhood issues are dear to committees’ hearts and will appear notwithstanding what I want to say,” he said. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt to support motherhood, and at least it shows their hearts are in the right places.”

Council will now follow up on these recommendations with various groups involved, including University administration and the Police Services Board.

--With files from Anna Mehler Paperny