City council put a stop to its plans Monday night to move to a new committee structure after the city manager told them he doesn’t have enough staff.
Following an in camera discussion after the regularly scheduled council meeting, council met again in public and voted to stop all work on the committee pilot and report back to council on July 2.
“I advised (council) that in my opinion from an administrative standpoint we were not adequately prepared to be able to manage and implement the proposed test,” Draper said.
Draper pointed to the current workload as well as the expected increase in work for the legislative services branch as the election draws closer. Legislative services would have been largely responsible for the test of the two new committees.
“We are currently at a bit of an administrative capacity, particularly in legislative services,” said Draper. “We tried but I realized we were not going to be able to provide the high level of quality service council would expect.”
Council had voted in March to test a new committee structure that would see two separate committees replace the standing committee on finance.
The community services policy was to deal with infrastructure, planning and engineering, economic development and community and protective services. The internal services policy committee was to be responsible for corporate, financial and sustainability services, as well as the city manager’s office.
Each committee would have had four members. The goal behind the new structure was to ease the workload on staff and councillors. The first meeting was scheduled for July 8 and the trial was supposed to run until September.
“There was some anxiety about the trial in the first place, whether or not it was going to be successful and whether it was going to be the right thing,” Mayor Nolan Crouse said.
Now Draper will report back to council on July 2 with a proposal on what to do next.
Mayor Nolan Crouse expects the city will simply resurrect the standing committee on finance and add another meeting or two to the summer schedule. Potential agendas were to be pieced together late yesterday afternoon when council’s agenda committee was scheduled to meet.
“What I’d like to see happen is a continuation of the standing committee on finance,” said Crouse. “We just need to make sure we have an agenda. We kind of abandoned it.”
Draper said he could not yet say for certain what would happen July 2, but added resurrecting the standing committee on finance made the most sense.
“The most logical thing is we would revert back to the previously published schedule,” Draper said.
Crouse could not say if other proposed changes, such as adopting a consent agenda, in which previously agreed upon items are passed all at once by council, will also be scrapped.
“We didn’t get into it in that much detail,” Crouse said.
The news isn’t all that bad for Crouse, who has not been shy in sharing his skepticism of the new structure, saying he didn’t believe St. Albert was big enough.
“I absolutely can tell you I’m not surprised,” Crouse said. “I had the most anxiety that this would be the right thing, that it might work. Part of me says we are too small a municipality to have this many committees.”
