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Update: City of Nanaimo core review finds $2.75M in one-time savings

NANAIMO – Consultant also identifies $1.7 million in annual savings for city.
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Tracy Samra

Nanaimo’s top bureaucrat is looking to add employees to the municipality in the wake of a core services review.

The City of Nanaimo released the review, which shows areas of improvements and potential cost savings of $1.7 million each year. There’s also the potential for another $2.75 million in one-time savings.

The core services review, budgeted at more than $248,000 and underway since December, shows the city is financially sound with good quality services, but there is room to improve, including fostering greater compliance to purchasing policies, having a corporate way to attract and retain employees and set fees, and saving money by standardizing and consolidating different functions.

Among the recommendations in the more than 200-page report is to also eliminate some job positions, including four prisoner guards, while developing strong staff capacity; closure of the Departure Bay Activity Centre to avoid a $2.1-million capital expense; and closing Beban Park pool for three months instead of one.

Joyce Tustian, project lead with Western Management Consultants, said it is not about massive reductions, but using resources in an optimal way. Much of what the consultants are talking about is consolidating functions, standardizing and automating them, so instead of having 10 ways of doing something there’s only one, she said.

“The analogy I think is that you’re going from a small municipality to a large municipality, you are going form informal processes to more formal processes and you’re going from a situation where almost everybody was a generalist to where you need to start hiring specialists,” she said. “It’s a big cultural shift for an organization.”

The report shows the city could realize significant cost savings on what it buys, for example, if it follows recommendations to have a standard way of purchasing goods and services and foster greater compliance to purchasing policies.

Consultants weren’t convinced purchasing policies were being followed and in the report estimate less than half of purchases have purchasing orders.

Tustian said a group in one place may buy items through tender, while another group might buy from where it always has. Even where there are procedures in place, she said staff sometimes don’t know about them. It means the city pays too much for what it's buying and probably buys too much of the wrong stuff, she said.

Nanaimo city council hasn’t made any decisions on the recommendations, but were expected to discuss the report at a committee of the whole meeting Monday (May 30).

Chief administrative officer Tracy Samra said the budget is locked in for 2016 so there’s no rush to make any changes right now and nothing has to be imminent.

“There’s going to be a lot of engagement, and a lot of dialogue and a lot of work and heavy lifting over the next while,” she said during a presentation of the report to the public on Friday.

Samra does, however, plan on adding new jobs. The consultants recommended an integration team for the core review and when asked whether she anticipates hiring someone new, she said, "yes, absolutely."

There’s nothing in the report to recommend cutting staff, according to Samra, who sees the spinoff more about adding staff and capacity.

“If we are going to go out to the public and go, what types of services do you need? What are your service levels? They’re going to want more recreation, they’re going to want more social planning,” she said, pointing to the four people in social planning, culture and heritage as an example. “We’re trying to put them together in a grouping and you can’t have four people doing all that work.”

Samra said one full-time employee does social planning and she plans to get that person more support to build the department.

Implementing recommendations is anticipated to take up to two years, but Samra said some immediate alignments will be where the city is “staffing up” and ensuring it has capacity for strategic planning, operational planning, capital asset and facilities management. She’s looking for cost savings so she can increase service levels and add staff to different departments.

“If council gives me a few hundred thousand here or there then I can start staffing a few more positions. If they don’t, we’re going to find that eventually internally,” she said.

Samra also said an organizational alignment and new positions could be on an open agenda on June 13. The total for the review isn’t known but Samra said she has between $50,000 and $60,000 to draw on. She used $10,000 for an IT study and might use consulting dollars to look at financial policies around procurement.