By Pepper Parr
November 7th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
It was the start of a two day review of what Staff wanted City Council to hear as they worked their way towards what in the end would be a budget that the Mayor presented.
Ward 6 Councilor Angelo Bentivegna brought the meeting to order and turned it over to Executive Directror Sheila Jones who told Council there was a lot to get through and then turned the meeting over to City Manager Tim Commisso who said “I think today and tomorrow are very important sessions. This is the third iteration of coming to council to speak about needs and your decision making.
“It is not very often that we drop a 92 page, PowerPoint deck on you. I want to acknowledge the work that went into that. The entire Staff team worked on this and you will see a tighter integration with the budget. The other that is really important is alignment; when I speak about alignment it is more in the context of how do we align with strategic objectives, goals and operating objectives.
It is in this area that I see us really advancing. We’re not quite there yet, but I think at the end of the day how we set objectives and how those objectives guide your decision making in terms of resource allocation and budget are fundamental to us in terms of our strategic management.
Last week when we introduced the budget I unfortunately did not acknowledge John Ford’s leadership. I’m not sure what other municipalities are doing but I can tell you, Burlington is at the very forefront of it.
Burlington always does as good a job as any municipality in terms of how we’re moving forward. So thank you, Sheila. I’ll turn it back to you.
Executive Director Sheila Jones ran a tightly focused meeting and kept it ahead of schedule. A rare feat with this Council.
Jones who is all business asked the AV people to put up the first slide – there were 91 left and Jones made sure that there was no slippage.
Lauri Jivan Budget Coordinator
“In the past we have had Service Information approaches – in today and tomorrow’s session, you will see a shift in approach. You received the 2024 Financial Needs and Multi year Forecasts presented by our CFO Joan Ford, and our coordinator of budgets Lauri Jivan on October 30.
“You received the mayor’s budget on November 2.
“The session today and tomorrow are designed to be directly aligned to your decision making process not only for the 2024 budget, but for future years. A multi year approach means the decisions you make today will have a cumulative impact on the future operations of this city. What you will hear in the next two days is intended to augment the extensive information that was provided in the 2024 Financial Needs forecast.
“We are coming into these sessions on the assumption that you are familiar with the business cases and the other budget information . Today and tomorrow provides counsel with an opportunity to ask questions and better understand the complexity of the financial needs for 2024. We have aligned the key investment information to the 2020 to 2026 Burlington Vision to Focus (V2F) which you endorsed in principle this past October.
“For ease of reference we have included the business case number should you need to reference the 2024 Financial Needs book.
“As you can see, we have a very extensive schedule within each focus areas. We will go through a couple of presentations, then pause for questions from Council. Our time for questions is short. So I’m asking you to keep your questions focused on the information. Members of our leadership team are here to respond to your questions. I will do my best to keep us on track and on schedule.
“It will be a bit of a judgment call as the questions are asked to see what we can answer in these sessions; we may need to move on. So please understand if your question requires a more extensive answer you can submit your questions to me and we will work to get written responses to all of council by the end of this week.
“This morning you received an email from me with the responses to the two Staff Directions that were raised in committee last week. These will be on the table for discussion during our session tomorrow. So please get comfortable get your note paper ready get your to jot down your questions and as we go along because we will have quite an extensive day.
“Every year you as counsel make investments in our services to better our community, it is important to acknowledge these investments and more importantly, what outcomes those investments have achieved, along with provincial funding councils investment and support for our staff and community planning, building forestry, digital services, corporate strategy, engineering and corporate communications and engagement throughout 2023 resulted in a streamlined and improved pre building permit process, including the visibility of the process to applicants the results will telling a decrease in processing time from 17 weeks to five and a half weeks and 30% of applications being processed within two weeks or less.
“Through this work, our staff now have the knowledge and skill to look at their work in a different way through the continuous improvement lens. We literally taught our staff to fish. So that process improvements can continue.
“For example, in seeking out ways to improve the collection of development charges to provide applicants with better clarity of charges to be paid and saving processing time by conducting this work at the optimal time in the development approval process. We know the improvements will not stop there, but will continue councils multi year investment in transforming information technology to Burlington digital services has advanced our organization. Not only have we broadened our approach to technology to include functions supporting digital enterprise architecture, product delivery and decision support and human centered delivery.
“We have our first digital business strategy by creating and fostering awareness of our capabilities, our skills and technology utilization to deliver better customer outcomes.
“We have an actionable strategic planning framework and road-map for how to use digital technologies, staff empowerment, and culture change to fuel business outcomes. The transformation has significant impact on our organization and needs to continue so we can continue to increase our agility to keep pace with rapidly changing resident expectations and broader external environment.
“Councils multi year investment in creating a new bylaw compliance department has enabled the focus transition and stabilization of our existing board based approach to a proactive team based approach to bylaw review, enforcement and licensing. With the new director carry dive run in place. The transition is underway.
“With continued investment outlined over a four year timeline the end state is a centralized service department for bylaw enforcement, with officers training in multiple areas for efficient response to all areas. This approach will increase service hours provide capacity to respond to emergency issues, such as like taxis and coyotes and reduce the risk that issues will grow to unmanageable levels and support a comprehensive review and public consultation for all bylaws.
“Finally councils investment in coyote response strategy is related to the new department. The focused response has resulted in improved community communication and education of living with coyotes through the collaboration of animal services and corporate communications and engagement. The continued collaboration of Animal Services customer experience and Digital Services resulted in significantly improved reporting and tracking of coyote sightings to enable Animal Services to respond and serve the community.
“These are just some of the highlights barely scratching the surface of the results of the past year and of previous years investments
“Our organization like every organization faces risks, we are not immune. In fact, we are dealing with some of these macro risks today. We don’t need the World Economic Forum to tell us although they will confirm we are in a world dealing with the impact of climate change, as we see the continued need for investment in green infrastructure and changes in our behaviours to adopt. In dealing with the dark side of technology where bad actors use cyber and data security against us. Hence the need for increased awareness and heightened vigilance in preventing and detecting these threats in dealing with the aftershock of the pandemic, and its impact in several areas, in particular human capital.
“Following the pandemic, we saw an impact on supply chain where we see the increase in costs and timelines for delivery. As the world gets back to pre-pandemic times. We see the impact on consumer behaviour, where you will see and have seen adjustments to budgets to reflect the changes in our customers use of recreation programs transit and parking and on operational resilience as we become more agile in our service delivery.
“We are in a world dealing with digital disruption as we see ourselves become more active through our digital business strategy. We are dealing with regulatory and law changes in disruptions. We have become all too familiar with this in the recent months with the provincial government changes.
Finally we are dealing with the fallout from geopolitical events that may not happen are in our backyard, but they have an impact on us as an individuals, as a family, as colleagues and as a community.
“The macro risks are not the only risks we need to be concerned about. The aspirational goals set out in vision 2040 or 25 year strategic plan also face risks. The audit committee and council received the risk assessment in June of 2022 where we identified the top common risks. Each of these risks has a mitigation strategy.
“Your decisions in this budget will have implications not only for today, but for the future years to come. Not unlike the cumulative effect of zero tax increases for a period of eight years during the 1990s. All our efforts are needed to increase our confidence in achieving these aspirational goals.
At that point Jones introduced Sue Evfremidis, Acting Executive Director Human Resources – over to you Sue.
