A Well-Oiled Machine
The nation's capital? Ottawa? Nestled in the Ottawa Valley? With its green ambiance, its theatres, art galleries public and private, its national museums, its Gothic-architectured Parliament buildings, the Rideau Canal of world heritage designation, and the great Ottawa River running alongside it, with its heritage of lumber days building the city out of a forest of giant pines? You've got it, that's the one. The city of orderly and responsible administration of which its citizens are inordinately proud. But.
That does not appear to describe its administration, either at the council level, or that of the municipal bureaucracy. The concept of efficiency and cost-effectiveness appears to have eluded the administrators on the executive level as well as on the practical level. And oversight appears, unfortunately, to be a huge problem in both. Who, exactly, is minding the shop? Well, it appears the city auditor-general is. Alain Lalonde has looked at the record and he is not at all impressed. Neither as a taxpayer nor as a staidly professional auditor.
On-the-job attendance is often taken fairly lightly, it seems. Not as flagrantly as one sees within the federal civil service, where the general atmosphere of entitlement to sick days is rampant, but the same attitude appears to prevail. Written into the union contract to empower workers by guaranteeing paid time off when one is incapable of performing due to ill health, it's construed as time due, to be taken at will, as a perquisite, not insurance against loss. So, there's that.
And what else? Why an inadequate system of judging which 911 medical-emergency calls should be classified as high-risk as life-threatening, the result being that more than a single Paramedic Service crew will be dispatched in response. When, in two-thirds of cases, the judgement should be made, on the basis of data collected, that a single dispatch is sufficient, leaving crews available for dispatch elsewhere for other call-in emergencies, thus meeting the currently-failed critical-response times.
Allocations of resources such as those by municipal security services are seen to be overwrought as well, since without fail, despite an increasingly tight budget for the municipality and a consequent alert to taxpayers that their taxes will be increasing year-by-year, the city's police anticipate a raise commensurate with increased policing needs. Puzzling, in the face of a decreased crime rate. But increased policing resonates in the minds of taxpayers, nonetheless.
So how about double-dipping, then, city employees in various public-works departments. Let's take the traffic operations branch, where the department's manager had another interest, operating a private company that just happened to provide traffic-signal services to neighbouring municipalities. Just to complicate things a little further, that very-busy manager also employed those who worked for him at the city, to work for his private company.
That resulted in an issue of moonlighting where sick time on the city's payroll might enable employees to work at their second job off the city payroll. Other little trifling irregularities like massive overtime tallied up for city workers, who also worked their leisure-time second job. It's not quite a covert operation. Rather, city managers have been well aware of the double-dipping situation, but were unconcerned, and remained unconcerned. Perhaps now a little uncomfortable in the hot-seat of public disclosure.
Then there's the little issue of the $27-million the city allocates in yearly grants, available to be directed toward different areas of need, but never tracked. City grants go out, and presumably to fund activities needful to the social networking of the city, aiding and assisting people in various ways. Is there a tracking system to determine who gets what and precisely what has been achieved? Well, the policy was supposed to be under review, but no one got around to it.
Mayor Larry O'Brien, he of the dedicated pledge to keep taxes at the level they were at when he was elected, appears to have little concern for the tightness of operational funding. Throwing a celebratory bash as a farewell party for middle-management employee who was retiring. Which, with a guest list of 140, rang in at slightly under $20,000. And here we thought that bureaucrats understood that such self-availing events were never to be paid from taxes?
And then there's the glad-handing of ceremonial keys-to-the-city events, once seen as a rare and relished occasion in recognition of some truly signal, outstanding individual. The events have run amok with fully fifteen individuals recognized as sufficiently outstanding in character or deed to be ceremoniously recognized since 2001, with the key to this grossly dysfunctional city. Cost for these 15 occasions? $276,500. Totally at the discretion of tax-busting Mayor O'Brien.
When, for heaven's sake, is the next municipal election...?
That does not appear to describe its administration, either at the council level, or that of the municipal bureaucracy. The concept of efficiency and cost-effectiveness appears to have eluded the administrators on the executive level as well as on the practical level. And oversight appears, unfortunately, to be a huge problem in both. Who, exactly, is minding the shop? Well, it appears the city auditor-general is. Alain Lalonde has looked at the record and he is not at all impressed. Neither as a taxpayer nor as a staidly professional auditor.
On-the-job attendance is often taken fairly lightly, it seems. Not as flagrantly as one sees within the federal civil service, where the general atmosphere of entitlement to sick days is rampant, but the same attitude appears to prevail. Written into the union contract to empower workers by guaranteeing paid time off when one is incapable of performing due to ill health, it's construed as time due, to be taken at will, as a perquisite, not insurance against loss. So, there's that.
And what else? Why an inadequate system of judging which 911 medical-emergency calls should be classified as high-risk as life-threatening, the result being that more than a single Paramedic Service crew will be dispatched in response. When, in two-thirds of cases, the judgement should be made, on the basis of data collected, that a single dispatch is sufficient, leaving crews available for dispatch elsewhere for other call-in emergencies, thus meeting the currently-failed critical-response times.
Allocations of resources such as those by municipal security services are seen to be overwrought as well, since without fail, despite an increasingly tight budget for the municipality and a consequent alert to taxpayers that their taxes will be increasing year-by-year, the city's police anticipate a raise commensurate with increased policing needs. Puzzling, in the face of a decreased crime rate. But increased policing resonates in the minds of taxpayers, nonetheless.
So how about double-dipping, then, city employees in various public-works departments. Let's take the traffic operations branch, where the department's manager had another interest, operating a private company that just happened to provide traffic-signal services to neighbouring municipalities. Just to complicate things a little further, that very-busy manager also employed those who worked for him at the city, to work for his private company.
That resulted in an issue of moonlighting where sick time on the city's payroll might enable employees to work at their second job off the city payroll. Other little trifling irregularities like massive overtime tallied up for city workers, who also worked their leisure-time second job. It's not quite a covert operation. Rather, city managers have been well aware of the double-dipping situation, but were unconcerned, and remained unconcerned. Perhaps now a little uncomfortable in the hot-seat of public disclosure.
Then there's the little issue of the $27-million the city allocates in yearly grants, available to be directed toward different areas of need, but never tracked. City grants go out, and presumably to fund activities needful to the social networking of the city, aiding and assisting people in various ways. Is there a tracking system to determine who gets what and precisely what has been achieved? Well, the policy was supposed to be under review, but no one got around to it.
Mayor Larry O'Brien, he of the dedicated pledge to keep taxes at the level they were at when he was elected, appears to have little concern for the tightness of operational funding. Throwing a celebratory bash as a farewell party for middle-management employee who was retiring. Which, with a guest list of 140, rang in at slightly under $20,000. And here we thought that bureaucrats understood that such self-availing events were never to be paid from taxes?
And then there's the glad-handing of ceremonial keys-to-the-city events, once seen as a rare and relished occasion in recognition of some truly signal, outstanding individual. The events have run amok with fully fifteen individuals recognized as sufficiently outstanding in character or deed to be ceremoniously recognized since 2001, with the key to this grossly dysfunctional city. Cost for these 15 occasions? $276,500. Totally at the discretion of tax-busting Mayor O'Brien.
When, for heaven's sake, is the next municipal election...?
posted by Pieface @ 6:28 PM
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