Working on THE Boring Stuff

Elections often revolve around recreation, culture, and other shiny projects. Or around taxes, snow removal, and other topics that get people passionate. But to support exciting initiatives, save money, and optimize services Councillors need to be ready to engage with the “boring” parts of regular day-to-day good governance.

 

If re-elected, I intend to advocate for:

  • Continued focus on delivering City Services more efficiently and maximizing the impact of every dollar. Like all organisations, the City is seeing escalating costs. It has also faced declining provincial infrastructure funding. But tax rates have been going up far below inflation. This has been largely accomplished through finding efficiencies. But it has also been a result of using reserves, which can’t go on forever. Something has to give. The next Council is either going to need to make hard service cuts or increase taxes beyond inflation. To minimize the impact, extreme care needs to be taken with fiscal management.

  • Expanding revenues other than residential taxes. The City spends about what other midsize cities spend per capita, but a large portion of that comes from residential taxes. Cost impacts on families need to be minimized by expanding other revenue sources.

  • KPI, benchmarking and performance measurement frameworks so we have objective information that can be used to improve services.

  • Asset management. I don’t want to see the community face huge financial road blocks because of poor planning and fiscal discipline now. We need to be taking good care today of our infrastructure. And we need to be taking stock of future large renewal projects and saving for them now to avoid tax shocks in the future.

  • Creating a Benefit Based Procurement policy to enable City capital spending to provide better benefits to our local community and economy. Ideas within this policy may include a requirement to source locally when legally allowed to do so, and incentivizing some City Contractors to hire people with barriers to employment.

  • Commissioning an independent study to benchmark City salaries against comparable positions in the private and non-profit sectors and other government organisations. An Executive Summary of this study should be publicly released. In the community and at Council, I’ve heard lots of conversations about staff compensation. We should be sure to base these discussions on facts and data, not anecdotes.

  • Ensuring the Police Transition continues to progress well. We need to deliver a Police Service that is reliable, professional and effective. Base services that are equivalent to what was offered under the RCMP contract should be delivered at our below the cost of maintaining the RCMP. Investments in enhanced levels of service need to have their benefits carefully weighed to their costs.

  • Create a long-term roadmap and fiscal plan for recreation and culture investments as the City grows. We should have a fiscal plan now so that we can build in the future without having a huge impact on taxpayers’ pocket books. Just like we do with road and water infrastructure, we should be strategizing and budgeting for long term growth.

  • A risk management framework. The City’s approach is often very risk adverse. And we should never take on un-necessary risk in certain areas including safety and protection of sensitive information. But there are times where we should take more risks than we currently do in order to deliver better or less expensive services. Council should be talking about risk more to insure we are seizing appropriate opportunities.

 

During my time on Council, I am proud of the following:

  • Set budgets which led to the average residential property’s tax going up at less than half the rate of inflation. This was accomplished despite inflation, ballooning RCMP costs, large cuts in provincial funding, and new services such as the Outdoor Pool and Mobile Outreach Program. Key to this success was Council undertaking Service Level reviews to best align services with resident priorities and Administration modernising systems and processes to be able to achieve operational efficiency.

  • We have an excellent City Manager and Corporate Leadership Team in place

  • We have set a strategic plan that was clear and drove service improvement for the community

  • Implemented an aggressive Road Rehabilitation program to catchup on maintenance backlogs, avoiding huge future costs as roads degraded

  • Enhanced regional collaboration with other municipalities, including negotiating Cost Sharing Agreements for recreation and culture with the County

  • Administration enhanced procurement practices including introducing paperless projects and beginning a Supplier Performance Evaluation Program to ensure the City gets better value from the money it spends on contracts

  • I served on the Board of the Alberta Municipal Services Corporation, which delivers corporate services such as insurance, employee benefits, and electricity to the City. This allowed me to have a direct hand in ensuring these essential corporate services that the City purchases are sustainable and well priced for all municipalities (and non-profits) which access them.

  • I obtaind my Institutue of Corporate Directors (ICD.D.) Designation in order to learn and practice best governance practices

Do you have questions, ideas, or feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Find me on social media (@DylanBresseyGP) or click here to contact me.