Monday, July 6, 2009

The Community Plan: #5 being Responsive, Accountable, and Forward Looking

We embrace the principles of continuous improvement and best practice to ensure that we deliver reliable, efficient and effective services to the community. We achieve this through responsible financial management, effective advocacy and engagement, and by highly valuing our people.

Our steps include:

  • Regularly engaging the community in diverse and innovative ways
  • Persistently and effectively advocating on issues of community importance
  • Ensuring we do everything we do, the best way it an be done
  • managing our finances and risk in a responsible (and responsive) way

2 comments:

  1. Regularly engaging the community in diverse and innovative ways: This could be more effectively accomplished by establishing a more open dialogue with ratepayers. The closely controlled question time at the council meetings takes a step in this direction but does not really let people have their say. I would suggest that:
    • Local Councillors hold Ward Meetings three times a year and that this be a priority of the council to insure this happens. They might be uncomfortable to the councillor but then that says something also
    • The council itself should hold at least one series of open meetings with the ratepayers similar to the ones held on Climate Change.
    To keep these meetings under control some rules would have to apply but they should be fair and impartial and all meetings should have an agenda of issues. This agenda could be established by asking ratepayers for their inputs and then consolidating the issues (items for discussion) for the agenda.
    The meeting rules should be “approved” by some ratepayers as fair and impartial to give credibility to the meetings.

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  2. This statement is so general as to be meaningless. The Council spends too much time generating meaningless jingoism.

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