The city will develop a framework for conducting internal efficiency reviews but no one at city hall will utter those words.
Instead, the city manager will work with a trio of councillors to develop a policy that will “result in a continuous improvement review process.”
The council members involved are Mayor Nolan Crouse, Cam MacKay and Malcolm Parker.
Crouse has been working with MacKay to develop a framework that will scrutinize the city’s operations to ensure departments are running as efficiently as possible.
“We’re going to continue doing that in the near term and figure out what’s a good fit for our city,” MacKay said.
A proposal is due to come to council by Sept. 15.
MacKay first tried to advance this idea shortly after being elected last fall. But his bid to pass a bylaw to create an audit and efficiency review committee failed because there were unanswered questions about the cost and implementation.
MacKay has since been doing research and meeting with a variety of organizations to learn how they pursue efficiency. He’s still not sure how he wants St. Albert’s system to work but an idea he likes is to choose one area of the city’s operations each year for an in-depth probing.
“That’s kind of the core of what we’re looking at, picking one or two areas every year and saying ‘how can we improve this?’” he said. “We don’t have the answer yet but we kind of know we’re [going] in the right direction.”
He sees a need to have a fresh outside perspective on the city’s operations.
“A lot of times when you’re doing your job, you’re so busy doing your job you don’t have a chance to look at some of these bigger pictures,” he said.
He noted that efficiency seems to be particularly tough to achieve for organizations like municipalities.
“It’s always difficult when you’re in the public sector because you’re not going to go bankrupt if you’re doing a bad job,” he said, “so you need some sort of external check and balance to always prompt continuous improvement.”
Continuous improvement is a phrase Crouse has often used to describe his overall philosophy for running an organization. The decision to adopt those words for this particular initiative came after a meeting with members of the city’s senior administration, he said.
“If it was going to be accepted in the organization we were going to have to call it continuous improvement as opposed to efficiency review,” Crouse explained. “Efficiency review had a negative connotation to it.”
