By Pepper Parr
February 3rd, 2016
BURLINGTON, ON
During a recent city council meeting City Manager James Ridge advised council that he was going to be preparing “mandate” letters for all his Director level staff.
Cathy Robertson, will not be getting one of those letters – the city parted ways with her last week. Our informant advised that she was escorted out of the Roads and Parks maintenance office.
For the record we found Ms Robertson to be accessible, fair and competent. The department now tells people who call that she is no longer with the city.
City manager James Ridge.
Mandate letters are documents that set out what is expected of a Director; Ridge also mentioned that performance evaluations would be based on how well a Director meets the criteria set out in the mandate letters.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne released the contents of the mandate letters she sent her Ministers – will the public have an opportunity to read the mandate letters Ridge writes ? – he should make them public.
The operations at city hall are divided into two units: Development and Infrastruture (D&I) and Community and Corporate Services (C&CS).
Each of those used to have a General Manager that reported to the City Manager. At one point there were three General Managers – today there are none.
The departments within D&I and CCS are run by Directors.
Development and Infrastructure has two Directors:
Director Planning and Building – Mary Lou Tanner
Director of Roads and Park Maintenance – now vacant
Squeezed into D&I is an Executive Director of Capital Works – Allan Magi.
Community and Corporate Services has 7 Directors:
Director of Finance – Joan Ford
Director of Information Technology – Christine Swenor
Director of Legal Services and City Solicitor – Nancy Shea Nicol
Director of Human Resources – Laura Boyd
Director of Parks and Recreation – Chris Glenn
Director of Transit – Mike Spicer
Director of Transportation Services – Vito Tolone.
The corporate structure is such that there isn’t a number two in place to cover for the city manager and there isn’t a strong fall back should we lose the city manager – and with our recent five year record – losing city managers isn’t an unheard of experience in this city.
The current city council has gone through three of them – prior to that the city manager was in place for a decade.
City Council is working its way through the Strategic Plan – the document is full or promises – and we might see a different organizational form once that document is approved.
City \Manager James Ridge, centre, with one of the KPMG consultants who are writing the Strategic Plan with input and comment from staff. Michelle Dwyer on the right has kept the flow of paper moving smoothly and managed a large part of the public engagement.
Ridge has said on numerous occasions that the city is at a point where it needs to be paying serious attention to succession. There is some strong talent within the current manager ranks – female for the most part. There doesn’t appear to be anyone within the Director ranks that is an obvious candidate for either a General Manager level position or ready to move into the job of city manager. Ridge has a five year contract.
Things move at a different pace in the municipal world – but it is reasonable to expect the city manager to bring forward a revised corporate structure – if he is going to do anything – by the fall.
He now has a budget with a number of strong recommendations that he refine the reporting on financial matters.
When Burlington cut over to a Service Based budget model different services were grouped together with a dollar number for each service and a person who is responsible for the delivery of each service.
The problem with that model – which apparently wasn’t evident when it was put in place is that different operations are lumped in together. Paletta Mansion, Tyendaga Golf Club and the LaSalle Pavilion are all lumped into the same dollar allocation.
Councillor Jack Dennison who has the sharpest pencil on this council has complained that with the Service based approach he isn’t able to drill down and get a closer look at the line by line numbers.
For the most part the other members of council either don’t have the accounting smarts to fully understand the various levels of detail or are happy to trust staff to do the right thing and manage effectively.
Oversight of day to day operations can’t be as tight as it needs to be when the city manager has 9 Directors reporting to him. When there were General Managers in place it was their job to ensure that silos aren’t created and that there was real accountability.
Ridge brings a military bearing to his work – he served in the Canadian Armed Forces for a decade. Burlington is the first municipality where he has been the commanding officer.
Comments from people in the city who talk about things like this are neither hugely positive nor is there any negative comment about the man. He professes to be a private person but then has a picture of him and his dog in the personal blog of a local lawyer. Mixed messages there.
He is forthright, a little on the shy side and a hard worker. What we have seen in his personal work plan and what he seems to be advocating for with the Strategic Plan is very ambitious with a tendency to lay down hard promises – which in the world of municipal politics will get you nothing but grief. If the promises are delivered the public will say that is what we pay you for – and if he doesn’t deliver they will want strips of his hide.
Not sure that Ridge can handle hard on the head criticism.
Watching how James Ridge evolves as a city manager is going to be an interesting exercise.
As far as bringing on a new set of General Managers, I would like to know what they actually do that adds value and not redundancy.
If they are mainly there to help the Directors out in a jam (if there is such a thing in municipal administration), then we need more than that for the about $260,000 a year they are paid.
I would like to see their work descriptions and plans, deliverables, and concrete performance indicators. Maybe this is something like the City Managers’ “mandate letters”.
The public ought to be able to see what the expectations of our senior executives are.
A couple of years ago I sat in on a development charges advisory committee meeting and heard a presentation, that included the then General Manager of Development, talk about the “Prosperity Corridors”, and other similar development themes, but I have never seen any concrete progress beyond studies, reports, and talk.
Is this the kind of thing General Managers do?
I don’t expect miracles, and these kind of things are not easily controllable, but deadlines and timelines cannot be allowed to go on indefinitely, especially for the senior management staff.
We really need transparent and realistic targets and timelines for serious results that can be measured and contribute to the city bottom line.
But we also need to be realistic about the context the staff have to work in, and be transparent and disclosing of that.