Rossland City Council met Wednesday to review its strategic plan leading up to the municipal election on Oct. 20.
With less than a year left in the council’s term, mayor and councillors debated which goals they should continue working toward. They recognized that not all of the goals were achievable in the time left, but wanted to leave the plan as a legacy document for the future council.
The strategic planning review exercise was completed during a committee of the whole meeting, and council will review the document for approval at its next regular council meeting on Monday at City Hall at 6 p.m.
High
• Continue to develop and implement an Asset Management Implementation Plan that considers full life cycle and the impact of climate change in a manner to cost-effectively and efficiently provide an identified level of service and investment for each asset
• Reduce inflow and infiltration to reduce wastewater treatment costs
• Increase water and sewer parcel taxes and user fees by reasonable amounts to move towards more transparent and self-supporting water and sewer services with an emphasis on user-pay
• Increase senior government grant revenue over the next three years from senior governments, but keep future debt levels to a debt to property tax ratio of 15 per cent
• Focus on energy efficient and innovative solutions for the regional Liquid Waste Management Plan Stage 3 project
• Get the funding proposal for the regional Liquid Waste Management treatment into the Feds and the Province before the infrastructure grant window closes
• Create a parking and snow storage strategy
• Improve and update guiding documents: Official Community Plan (OCP), Strategic Sustainability Plan (SSP), design review guidelines, sign bylaw, subdivision and serving bylaw
• Review of development application fees, create procedure and guide to assist applicants
• Continue to improve human resource issues including staffing, training, team building, leadership and morale
• Invest, and continue to improve computer technology (including moving services online or automate) within city facilities to increase productivity, reduce repetitive work and eliminate or reduce work by employees
• Improve city record keeping
• Work with regional and provincial partners or independently to reduce the cost of shared services such as fire protection and improve local ambulance service
• Ensure that the city is “shovel-ready” for various priority infrastructure projects (see Capital Projects List)
• Create a strategy for the development of the Midtown Transition lands with a focus on Emcon/Third Avenue
• Implement Strategic Community Energy and Emissions Plan
• Support affordable housing initiatives
Medium-High
• Rationalize city facilities to meet the changing needs of our community (including cost-benefit analysis of moving City Hall to another city-owned property, the justification of other city-owned buildings)
• Improve return on investment (ROI) and usage on city facilities
• Conduct service reviews to ensure they still meet the needs of customers, reduce costs and reduce environmental impacts
• Change corporate culture towards annual process improvements resulting in measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and cost efficiency
• Create a welcoming attitude for new ideas and reward employees for innovative and cost-saving ideas
• Prepare business cases for energy projects to generate new city revenue and/or reduce operating costs
Medium
• Improve internal and external communication with staff, council, stakeholders, citizens, regional partners, and people outside region
• Refresh city website — improve user experience
• Try to implement resource sharing with other communities to reduce operational costs and capital expenses (e.g. specialized equipment or personnel)
• Align tax rates, fees and charges with market pricing and city goals and objectives
• Fund regional partners for tangible economic development services that measurably benefit Rossland (i.e. efforts to make region and Rossland more attractive)
• Invest in the development of more summer recreation to increase Rossland’s appeal (campground, tennis court rebuild, mountain biking trails, swimming facilities; support Tourism Rossland)
• Provide more support for food sustainability
• Review SSP
Medium-Low
• Help ensure that broadband also reaches the residential and non-downtown-core businesses of Rossland
Low
• Monitor and improve bylaw enforcement services within the city
• Support efforts to seek out affordable access to regional recreational amenities
More parking and snow storage needed in downtown Rossland
Council decided to make creating a parking and snow storage strategy a high priority after hearing from the manager of public works Darrin Albo.
“Some of our biggest complaints … especially this year [are] lack of parking,” he said. “And unfortunately, or fortunately — it depends on how you look at it — there’s a lot of designs coming in for possible development in the downtown area and if we lose that as parking/snow storage, which we’re going to — we’ve been fortunate enough that private properties have allowed us to use it. A strategy, maybe not for more parking, but for more snow storage and stuff in the downtown core, should be very high on our list.”
Updating SSP will take time
Mayor Kathy Moore acknowledges that a review of all guiding documents would not be possible within the next 10 months, but was hopeful that the SSP could be completed with the help of the Columbia Basin Trust (CBT).
Stacey Lightbourne, city planner, was skeptical about the timeline.
“CBT may be interested, but to do it well, it takes a lot of staff time and involvement and an outside consultant too and budget,” she said. “When we last did it there were two full-time planning staff members and a nearly full-time paid employee of the Sustainability Commission to do that document.”
Improving and updating the SSP won’t be as big of a project as it was to initially create it, but Lightbourne said it’s still a significant project.
Council opted to keep updating the guiding documents as a high priority, though it may not be able to complete any of the reviews before the election.
Lightbourne did add, however, that she and Albo are working on the subdivision bylaw and it will hopefully come to council before construction season starts.
Plan to increase return on investment
Council would like to see the return on investment (ROI) at city facilities improved and Mayor Moore said that the city’s new manager of recreation and events, Kristi Calder, would be key in making it happen.
Coun. Lloyd McLellan wanted to see council establish some parameters for Calder to have as a reference and Moore felt that establishing such parameters would be part of the process of increasing ROI.
Bryan Teasdale, CAO, explained how the process would work going forward with the Rossland Arena as an example.
“Part of the plan would be, for example with the arena, now that we have user rates for the whole 2017 season and now our invoices are finally coming in for the end of 2017 so we can do a direct cost comparison on 2017 revenues and expenditures,” he said.
The data would then be presented to council, and mayor and councillors would then give further instructions to city staff.
Public works manager wants service reviews high priority
Mayor Moore opened the conversation on conducting service reviews by saying that “it should be ongoing, standard operating procedure.”
Albo, the manager of public works, said he thought it should be a high priority.
“This is everyday stuff,” he said. “It should be high.”
It ended up as “medium-high” but wasn’t removed from the list as some items that council considered “operational” were.
Progress made on bylaw enforcement
Council considered removing the item on bylaw enforcement completely, which originally concerned “establishing bylaw enforcement,” as the city now has regular enforcement in place, but decided to amend the item and keep it on the list.
“My thought was maybe bumping it down to a low priority and change it to … instead of establishing … to monitor and improve the service,” suggested Coun. Andrew Zwicker. “Because it’s established, it’s already done. And as far as council’s role now it’s more just sort of sit back and give us the results or give us the thoughts on how we could improve it.”
Coun. Andy Morel also wanted education to remain an important part of bylaw enforcement.
Regional rec facilities low priority until election
Mayor Moore didn’t feel it was possible to resolve access to regional recreation facilities in the next 10 months, but there was some hope that the issue might be worth revisiting after the next municipal election.
Moore suggested the possibility of doing a referendum on the issue during the election and Teasdale confirmed that there was still plenty of time to include a referendum question on the ballot.