Water bottle. Check.

Pillow. Check.

Popcorn and other snacks. Check.

BS detector… Check.

At 9:30 a.m. Monday, Calgary’s second rezoning public hearing will begin, only this time it’s a public hearing on the potential repeal of citywide rezoning.

Here’s your primer on what to expect as this week rolls on:

How long will this citywide rezoning hearing last?

It’s difficult to say exactly.

Technically, the first day goes from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., and then city council can make time adjustments from there. By the book, the meeting starts up again at 1 p.m. the following days, and can go until 9:30 p.m. each day, but that will surely be changed.

To start, the city administration will present on the proposed walkback of citywide rezoning, and then the item will be put forward for a public hearing.

As of Friday at 9 a.m., 339 people were registered to speak at the public hearing. Each speaker gets five minutes to present. Presentations alone could take 28 hours.

Then, of course, there are potential questions for the panelists. There may be none, or the questions may go on for an hour. Often, there are repeated councillor questions of both the same panelist and of different panelists.

Speakers can sign up throughout the week, too! There will be a sign-up desk on the south side of city council chambers, also where there will be some big screens and chairs for semi-comfortable viewing.

Now, 339 people might seem like a lot – and it is! However, it is roughly half of the number of speakers who spoke at the original public hearing (1,100 registered and 736 spoke). If you recall, that took about a month to finish.

As you can see, there is attrition involved here. Once people realize that the same points have been made possibly 338 times prior, they may scratch their names off the speaker list or not show up at all.

It’s important to consider the break times for Calgary city council (lunch, afternoon break, and dinner), which are moveable (with council consent), but take up about three hours each day.

After the public hearing concludes, it goes into councillor questions of administration. Again, as is quite often the case, councillors need to make sure they get their day in the sun (or they haven’t paid attention to previous admin answers), and there are repeat questions.

Once that’s complete, councillors will begin debating after the motion is moved and seconded by councillors.

Each councillor has five minutes to speak.

Once the councillors have had their say and the first reading of the item is passed, then amendments could be made. At this point, no amendments have been submitted. That’s likely to change.

This is where we get into the real weeds, and there may be no amendments, or councillors may try a few. For each amendment, councillors get the chance to speak if they want, and then there’s a vote.

As you can see, you can’t really put a thumb on how long it will take, but if we were betting, it will likely take the bulk of this week.

What if I am signed up to speak?

Congratulations, you’ll get your five minutes on citywide rezoning.

The City Clerk will put people into panels of five. As of Friday, there were 69 panels scheduled. The City Clerk, as per a previous council motion, will attempt to put them into rotating panels – for repeal, against repeal, and neutral.

Panelists will be able to participate online or in person.

You can have a presentation (you should have sent your slides in already if you have visuals) as a part of your five minutes. At the end of your presentation and the panel, councillors may have questions for you.

Because of the unknown time for each panel, the City Clerk is advising that participants keep track of the proceedings online and via the live agenda for the meeting. They will indicate precisely where they are in the public hearing and potential participants can keep track of when they speak from there.

The public submissions of speakers will be made public via Calgary.ca each day.

There will be two security gates in order to move people through quickly, so the panels can assemble swiftly before each session starts and after the breaks.

Even though you may have missed your spot to speak, the mayor has often gone back through the list of missed speakers to ensure that everyone has their chance to present.

Also included in the public’s portion of this discussion were the 2,390 written submissions included as a part of the proceedings.

In all, the agenda for this week’s meeting is 6,804 pages. That’s a lot of printer ink.