By Justine Kelsie

Mayor and new councillor reflect on Jasper planning session

Mar 9, 2018 | 12:28 PM

All nine members of city council and the city’s senior management team recently spent just under a week in Jasper for an annual planning session.

Mayor Bill Given said it was an opportunity to work on becoming a “cohesive group”.

“Council also worked to improve its governance capacity and sharpen our critical thinking skills. We brought in a trainer to help us with that. We also did a significant amount of work with the Priority Based Budgeting. This is a completely new process for all of us, including myself,” said Given.

“I said this at the Strategic Planning Session, it is a little bit like changing the tires on a car while it is still moving. We are doing some important work with this Priority Based Budgeting and we need to acknowledge the fact that the city still needs to run. This council is undertaking a big commitment in our willingness to change that system. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the resources that we need from residents, in the form of property taxes, are better aligned with the service expectations of citizens.”

Coming out of the time spent in the mountain municipality, the city will be creating a new Strategic Priorities Committee that would meet separately from other committee and city council meetings. They would meet about once a month and Given says this will be a time for councillors to focus on the “big picture” more than just once a year.

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Council also identified three different lenses they would view all issues through during their tenure.

“We saw them from a social perspective, an environmental perspective, and fiscal perspective. We acknowledge that each council member might apply those differently to different issues at different times. We agreed that those were the aspects we wanted to look at.”

The group also pin-pointed broad categories that the senior management team would assess programs.

“Those were service, safety, economy, infrastructure, community, and governance. Probably in the next month or so, you will see coming to council a priority based budgeting measurement chart which is what our management team will use to assess all the city’s programs and services as they build the budget that council will review in the fall of 2018,” explained the mayor.

In the past, Council has traveled to Grande Cache, Valleyview, Dawson Creek and other places for the annual meeting. Given says the one situated at the beginning of a new council term is the most pivotal. They meet with the local council when they visit for their sessions. Their conversation with Jasper council focused on Grande Prairie Regional College, Highway 40, and tourism marketing efforts.

This was the first planning session experience for new councillors including Dylan Bressey.

“I appreciated the training we got on decision making and complex environments. I appreciated the time away with management to learn the complexities and background on some of the issues we are dealing with. Informal conversations with colleagues are a big way of learning for me, so I really learned a lot on this trip,” said Bressey.

Given said this session made him realize there is a lot of energy on this council.

“Council members are absolutely viewing things from different perspectives. This council is very committed to customer service, not that any other council wasn’t it is just a theme, as well as engaging the community. Commitment to ensuring that there is a strong working relationship between the elected officials and the management team came through loud and clear.”