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Councillors return from FCM conference with ideas in tow

Jun 5, 2013 | 12:10 PM

Prince Albert sent a contingent of city councillors to represent the city at this year’s Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) Annual Conference in Vancouver, and they have returned with ideas and lessons learned by other municipalities.

During the four-day event, May 31 to June 3, the councillors were among the thousands of delegates representing municipalities across the country. They had the opportunity to rub elbows with members of the federal government.

For three of the councillors, Couns. Tim Scharkowski, Rick Orr and Mark Tweidt, it was their first opportunity to attend the FCM conference. But others, such as Coun. Don Cody, are veteran attendees.

It was also an opportunity to get all players on the field – federal, provincial and regional – according to Tweidt.

“The issues are so big with infrastructure and different things, like you can’t play it alone as a single town, single city or anything like that.”

He said it’s going to be imperative to have Members of the Legislative Assembly and Members of Parliament engaged in a lot of the ideas brought forward.

Tweidt said it was also an opportunity for them to see what other municipalities were doing to deal with the problem of homelessness.

For Orr, attending the conference for the first time was exciting. He noted that those gathered at the FCM conference all seemed to have the same problems and concerns.

“And they were all working towards one common thing: How to make their communities more sustainable, and how to get through the challenges that we have. Everybody was on the same page, and I think that’s one of the things that was the most exciting.”

The attendees were able to go to workshops, and one of the ones Orr chose covered global transportation. There he learned how important Western Canadian goods were to the Port of Vancouver.

But there were a number of takeaways from the conference, whether it was fresh ideas or lessons learned from the experience of other municipalities that the councillors have returned with to Prince Albert.

One of those takeaways was finding out what some of the potential negative effects of having a public-private partnership (P3) involved in an infrastructure project could mean.

“I want everybody to understand that it sounds good, but be very, very careful when you’re entertaining something like that. That we all know what’s going to happen in the long term, not just the dollar amount that everybody thinks that they are saving,” Scharkowski said.

He pointed to a discussion during Tuesday’s executive committee meeting about the public-private partnership behind the announcement late last week that the all health care laundry services within the province will move to Regina. A private company will now handle those services. About 100 people in Prince Albert will be affected by that decision.

“Nobody is happy about it here,” he said. “So, if we’re going to start entertaining P3s, obviously you’re going to have to look through that pretty well and make sure it’s not going to affect our own employment within the city. You always want to keep those jobs around.”

The conference in Vancouver offered Orr an opportunity to learn about a new approach used by that city to try to provide a safe place to stay to homeless people.

Vancouver, he said, offers the homeless safe housing with no strings attached, and pays the rent and provides furniture. But once a week, a social worker will drop in to check in on that person.

Orr called it a group effort – between Health Canada, the mental health community and the city.

He said he’ll speak with Ken Hunter of Community Mobilization Prince Albert.

“Just to talk to them about this, and see if our HUB and COR (Centre of Responsibility) can’t figure out something to do with it.”

The councillors who attended will collectively get together to decide on what to suggest to the council as a whole, Cody said.

“Certainly there’s ideas … put forward that will be good for us. In municipal financing, you know, there’s P3s we looked at. There’s other ways of doing business. There might be such things as collective purchasing. All measures of things like that. And those things you have to talk out, bring before council and go from there.”

The conference was also an opportunity for municipalities to address their concerns with federal and provincial officials.

Tweidt was able to bring forward a concern that rail lines in rural Saskatchewan were being shut down, in a meeting about CN Rail. He said Saskatchewan, especially the north, will open up in terms of business, within the next few years.

“That makes it hard for us, especially in northern Saskatchewan because we know that’s going to take off and we don’t want to see any more tracks being ripped up and different things.”

One point that has always been an issue for Cody is the amount of regulation put in place by higher levels of government on municipalities.

“We just cannot simply have our citizens, taxpayers, paying for all of these things they want to regulate all of the time.”

And raising concerns in a forum like the FCM, as a collective, is a lot stronger than approaching the federal government as an individual municipality, according to Scharkowski.

“When the government hears everybody talking about the same issue being a problem, they have to hear that, more than just hearing one individual, they have to hear.”

As a collective, attendees at the FCM pushed for infrastructure investments by the federal government and increased spending on housing.

“They got to hear us loud and clear, [there’s] no question about that,” Cody said.

He said the municipalities were “crystal clear” with some of their messages, including the need for a longer-term framework for financing, especially infrastructure financing.

Cody said infrastructure was mentioned a “gazillion” times.

He said there has been a lasting impact from previous conferences. He said there is now a longer-term infrastructure program, the indexing of the gas tax, among other things.

There is, however, a $250-billion infrastructure deficit in Canada, Cody said.

“We the cities, the provinces, and the feds must get into co-operation and collaboration to be able to handle that. And I think that’s the kind of thing that will move forward as we go on now.”

For more about the discussion about P3s, see: North Sask. Laundry closure leaves councillors fuming

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames