The mayor of Surrey will not have to face a gauntlet of local media reporters the next time his criminal case comes before a judge.

That's because Doug McCallum's pretrial conference on a charge of public mischief will take place in the Prince George Law Courts at 11:45 a.m. on April 11.

Previous appearances have been in Surrey, where the information was sworn following a review by special prosecutor Richard Fowler.

The charge was laid in connection with a police complaint filed by McCallum on or around September 4, 2021.

On that day, he alleged that a motorist ran over his foot and that he was verbally assaulted on a trip to the grocery store.

He was seen arguing in the parking lot with Ivan Scott, founder of Keep the RCMP in Surrey.

According to the B.C. Prosecution Service, the conference will be online and attendees will appear virtually.

It's because Prince George is the location of the presiding judge and the conference is not open to the public.

All in-perso appearances will continue to be held in Surrey.

McCallum is being defended by Vancouver criminal lawyer Richard Peck.

More than 16,000 names are on an online petition demanding that McCallum, rather than the City of Surrey, pay for his legal fees.

According to a bccourts.ca information sheet, pretrial conferences are often held to avoid "unnecessarily long trials". McCallum did not enter a plea on his last appearance.

"Whether a trial is unnecessarily long is not something which can be measured solely by its length," the information sheet notes. "Some relatively short trials may be unnecessarily long while some very lengthy ones may be efficiently managed and reach an appropriate just and, in context, timely result.

"The difficulty in assessing the optimal length of a trial is that its length is highly dependent on a number of factors many of which are outside of the control of the court. The combined result of those factors can be trials which are long by any objective measurement, but which are nonetheless no longer or less efficient than required in a judicial system focussed on achieving a fair and just result."