What have the current city leaders and board members accomplished?
That was my starting point. I went to the Chilliwack website and did some searching and digging and then more searching. What I found was some basic information about the councillor's official activity over the past three years.
Click here to open the above sheet.
Next I assigned points. Not really fair as the activity is mostly assigned by the mayor. Regardless, it's something to inform the larger picture.
Click here to open the above sheet.
Reporting challenges
As you can see city councillors are pretty busy. Some more than others. What's missing is an indication of what they have done on each of these committees and boards. My thought as I was going through this process was that if this was an organization each person would have reports, maybe a work plan and outcomes linked directly to goals and objectives. In short there would be evidence of accomplishments.I did find a report, of sorts, on the city web site and was directed by Mayor Gaetz to another, more recent report similar to one I had found. Viewing that report inspired a post about how to write and report out on goals and objectives. It also ignited a lot of discussion with some of my colleagues.
The problems with small
I work with several brilliant and politically savvy people so I asked them to weigh in on the challenges that municipality experience. What we came up with was the problem of small. Smaller municipalities have fewer resources and few people to draw on. Often getting it done shoves the finer process details out of the way.At the provincial and federal level you are more likely to find professional politicians who hold MBAs and other leaderly degrees. That doesn't make them better than our local folks. It does make it more likely that they are well versed in governance processes and norms. Local leaders tend to have a solid grounding in business but not necessarily in areas like organizational design or leadership studies.
My point here is that this isn't an exercise in pointing fingers. It is a discussion about the very real capacity challenges that plague municipal politics.
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