Readers have an opportunity to give council the benefit of their creative thinking. Let’s help them do the job.

By Pepper Parr

February 11th, 2019

BURLINGTON, ON

Yesterday the Gazette published an opinion piece on an opportunity for the current city council to take steps to ensure that Burlington got the kind of city manager it needs.

Mayor Meed Ward made a point of telling the public that council was going to take the time to get the job done right.

A Gazette reader commented as follows:

You have provided a good and thoughtful perspective on the current situation. There is a rare opportunity today for City Hall to be opened up, programs made understandable to citizens, performance made transparent and staff made both accountable and visible to the clients they serve.

Burlington has hundreds of residents who want to play a part in creating a city that fits the vision they have. This is one of the crowds that took part in a public meeting.

There are a number of readily available exemplars in the form of other jurisdictions that have adopted ‘open government’ reforms to make the bureaucracy responsive/understandable to the public, to greatly improve client service, to reduce unnecessary processes and boost overall function.

I would hope that this Mayor and this Council would look for best practices in other jurisdictions, as they exist quite close at hand – Toronto, Hamilton and Oakville to name just three.

Similarly, I would expect that Burlington might want to beg, borrow (or steal) the directly applicable expertise that is at hand, both in other municipalities and right in our own backyard.

However, to date (and it is early days), the signs have not been overly positive. Simple reforms such as staff contact listings, clear organizational charts and simple program guides remain on the ‘to do’ shelf.

This was a meeting for people interested in the process of getting elected. The desire for a better form of local government was there. The 2018 election did bring in a much different city council that can now tap into all the talent available.

More substantive improvements such as performance dashboards, responsive reporting and feedback vehicles and effective self-service portals are not even referenced. Indeed, the COB website remains one of the worst and most difficult to navigate of any municipality in the GTA (IMO). And recent staff additions appear to focus on communications and social media without any marked improvement in these areas either.

Time will tell whether this is the watershed Council many had hoped for. Early indications are not promising.

Let us not despair this early in the game.

Gazette readers have commented intelligently in the past; there is an opportunity now for those readers to do some research on just where they feel “open government” is practiced and set out some ideas that members of council can benefit from.

We look forward to publishing what we receive.