City’s Good At ‘Busyness’, Not Business: BENN

Staff and council excel at ‘busyness’.

Staff regularly creates work to justify its continued employment. See much of what passes for traffic calming and management. Initiatives that are never followed up on to confirm whether they were successful. See planning department plans for the sake of planning because the existing longer-term plans were prepared by the prior generation.

Council excels at raising issues that are well outside the mandate of the municipality, and asking staff to prepare a report on … well that is seldom very clear. Not to worry. Staff reports are seldom clear anyway. What staff files is not clear – squared.

Council excels at instructing staff to prepare a report on why staff shouldn’t do something, or to prove council was right in the first place, but for the fact that the issue was outside municipal responsibility.

Much of it is just ‘busyness’. What doesn’t get done particularly well, let alone on a timely basis, is the business of the city.

Ron Benn is a former finance executive.

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