Council Just Takes The Easy Route: BENN

Change needs to come from above. Above being city council.

Council as a whole must tell staff that what staff has been delivering needs dramatic improvement.

There are two problems that need to be overcome.

First and foremost is that few if any city councillors, including the mayor, know what they don’t know. They have not held positions where they received high quality reports that were complete, accurate, timely and in a format to support the decisions that needed to be made. Instead, they are accustomed to getting what they get: large volumes of boiler plate, with limited, if any, meaningful analysis. The last mayor to have any understanding of what is needed was Larry O’Brien. Before that was Bob Chiarelli. Since then … meh.

The second problem is that the senior administrators within city hall have risen through the ranks producing the reports that previous councils accepted because – see above. Very simply put, what they are producing today is not materially different from what they produced yesterday. We would have to go back a couple of decades (I am thinking specifically of of the late regional CAO Merv Beckstead) to find a senior administrator who knew what was needed and demanded that staff deliver it.

The solution starts with a decision by council to no longer accept mediocre reports. To no longer accept incomplete, biased reports. To no longer be willing to wade through the volumes of boiler plate and incomplete data sets. That means retaining outside expertise. People who know what a quality report looks like. People who are able to teach the rank-and-file how to prepare higher quality reports. People who can navigate the nightmare that is HR in a unionized environment. That is not meant as a shot at unions. It is an observation that when someone’s feelings get hurt (and trust me more than one person’s feeling will be hurt), one of their remedies is to file a grievance. And grievances slow everything down.

It starts with council.

Sadly, this council has not demonstrated the will power to take meaningful action on anything of consequence. Pass a virtue signal about this. Declare an emergency about that. Pass a bylaw that is impossible to enforce. Delegate important decisions to staff.

Taking on the task of change a culture that is as complacent about quality as the one that populates city hall is not easy. And this council is all about easy.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.

For You:

City Hall: You Can’t Always Get What You Want

What Happened To Objective City Reports? BENN

It’s So Bad The Rats Are Leaving: PATTON

Democracy In Doubt At City Hall: QUOTABLE

Lansdowne: Who Cares What Councillors Want: MULVIHILL

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