A review of Mountain View County's two largest departments found staff were ìgenerally following darn good practicesî but were working under ìsome anxietyî due to uncertainty and constant change, said the consultant in charge of the reviews.ìGenerally what we saw in both departments was what you would expect in any municipality,î Mike Langstone of Sierra Systems told council's policies and priorities committee on Aug. 24.ìThese are not broken organizational units.îIn late May, council hired Sierra to conduct process reviews of the planning and development services and operational services departments, approving up to $55,000 for the contract.ìWe arrived on the scene and a number of changes were already underway,î including ìa number of vacancies,î Langstone said.ìSo we did face that sense of uncertainty and some anxiety.îAmong the shortcomings found during the review, Langstone said operational services employees do not have written policies to guide them. As a result, ìthere is some internal contention around that Ö and it's an issue that has to be resolved.îThe department also needs to modernize its processes by adopting new computer technology, ìwhich goes hand in hand with the policy foundation,î he said.While they sometimes get the job done ìby the seat of their pants,î Langstone added, ìI found the operational services department is trying to do their best for the county.îOn the planning and development side, consultant Bob Riddett said processing times for applications meet provincial standards under the Municipal Government Act.ìWe also found your staff are helpful to people coming through the door. Working with applicants Ö your people do very well and you should be proud of that,î Riddett told P&P.ìA lot of municipalities don't do it that well.îAmong staff, however, one ìconcern was that council and MPC are not always consistent in their interpretation of land-use policies,î Riddett said.ìYou need a written guide Ö to reduce uncertainty.îAnother improvement, he said, would be a more detailed brochure for applicants on the process for meeting conditions of approval ñ a recommendation adopted by the previous council last year after an earlier review.Regarding ìa suggestion of open bias in the planning department,î Riddett said he ìdidn't find much evidence of an urban viewpoint. It's more that planners have to look forward (and) much of that is seen as too urban.ìWhat seems to be an urban bias Ö comes with increasing development, increasing densities, increasing population,î he said.Both departments, he said, ìare relatively stable structures,î though the ops director position remains vacant and the planning director position was about to become vacant when the review was done, and has since been filled on an interim basis.But county operations as a whole, Riddett said, suffer from a lack of cohesion among senior managers.ìWe saw different departments taking different perspectives on the same issue,î he said.ìThe thing that's weak here is the senior management team.îLooking at Ponoka County and three others as benchmarks for comparison, ìwe didn't find many big exotic new ideasî that could be applied to Mountain View, Riddett concluded.The planning review's focus drew some criticism from Div. 1 Coun. Kevin Good.ìThe airline industry improves by reviewing the wrecks ñ what went wrong,î Good told the consultants. ìYou reviewed the airplanes that are flying successfully. I didn't see any wrecks analyzed, any applications that went off the rails and caused the ratepayers big issues.îIn his interview during the review, Good said, he gave several examples but ìnot one was identifiedî in the report.ìI would have liked to see more focus on areas where we need improvement.îAnd the comparison with Ponoka and other counties failed to address the public's wish for smaller government, Good said. While Mountain View might be ìsignificantly differentî from other municipalities, as the report states, that difference doesn't explain why MVC has ì300 per cent more staff,î he said.That figure is skewed, the consultants suggested, by the fact that Ponoka contracts out assessment, planning, and other services that Mountain View provides, and only recently hired a county constable.Good acknowledged that including contracted services would increase Ponoka's staff costs but reiterated he ìwas disappointed the cost to the ratepayer was never addressedî in the report.In a similar vein, Div. 2 Coun. Trish McKean told the consultants: ìIt's all great that we're following the MGAî for planning applications, ìbut it wasn't the MGA who voted us in here.îReeve Paddy Munro said Ponoka County has simpler processes that cost applicants less time and money, but Riddett argued that Ponoka ìif anything is moving closer to your practices here.îDespite his critique, Good said he ìenjoyedî the report and ìit would be useful.îListing the report's ì10 fundamental recommendations,î Langstone said: ìFirst, this uncertainty ñ you need to get beyond that.îTwo recommendations advise the county to ìre-commit to, fully implement and communicate the ë176 Guarantee' and undertake a reassessment of this program over two years of full implementation.îThe 176-Hour Guarantee, introduced in 2006, is a program guaranteeing a minimum number of hours in a four-week cycle to permanent, full-time employees. It currently applies to 29 employees in the operational services department, the review says.For council, one recommendation was to ìset policy; let staff administer that policy.îFor the CAO and senior management, the report recommends reducing ìthe ësilo' culture by collectively examining practices, committing to and leading change.îOther recommendations ñ simplifying planning language meant for public consumption and fully adopting a complaints policy ñ were also recommendations from past reports.P&P received the report and voted for council to direct the CAO to draft an implementation plan.Interviewed last week, CAO Tony Martens said he found the review to be worthwhile.ìThere's a lot of recommendations we can put in place and that's going to make Mountain View County a better operation,î Martens said.ìOn the planning side it was encouraging to hear we have good processes in place.îMartens said there may be some additional costs beyond the $55,000 allocated for the report because he had requested the 176-Hour Guarantee review, but a final number was not available.Sierra Systems is an IT and management consulting firm with offices across Canada and in Los Angeles, Calif., Austin, Tex., and Olympia and Seattle, Wash.
