Community Solutions Team chair Floyd Laughren doesn't know how much recommendatons in his report will cost but he said not implementing them would be costly.
The report, presented to city council Wednesday is entitled Constellation City: Building a Community of Communities in Greater Sudbury. It makes 35 recommendations regarding how to fix what citizens find frustrating about living in a city that is two-thirds the size of the province of Prince Edward Island.
“It sounds cliché, but there’s cost to not implementing it, and that’s a more dissatisfied city," said Laughren.
“All of the recommendations in the report, without exception, are do-able, and we think affordable. I’m not saying there isn’t going to be a cost but this council seems to be very supportive of the report.”
If they make sense for the city, Mayor John Rodriguez said all of the recommendations would be implemented by the end of the term.
“The vast majority of them don’t require the expenditure of money. They’re all common sense recommendations,” Rodriguez said.
To realize those elusive savings, the solutions team has a number of suggestions, including reducing the number of consultants used by the city, elimination of the landfill tipping fee and linking the amount of taxes taken by the city and amount of service received.
After his presentation, Laughren was asked by a number of councillors how they should proceed with certain recommendations and how much money they will cost the city.
“We told you what we think needs to be done, you’re the decision makers,” Laughren said.
“We’re hoping that if they embrace those core values in the city, and implement some of the recommendations in the report, it will go some ways towards making it a more unified city,” Laughren said.
Rodriguez suggested that if council looked at five recommendations a night, within seven weeks they could put some into action and develop timelines for implementing the rest.
He said most of the recommendations involve giving the public greater access to government, something that is needed in the city, especially in the former municipalities.
“The City of Greater Sudbury is a community of communities and once you buy into that concept, everything else that you do after that is to re-enforce the idea that you can be a good Capreolite and a good citizen of Greater Sudbury. Even in the Donovan and Minnow Lake, people are committed to their communities.”
Laughren said road maintenance, whether it be summer patch-work, winter snow-plowing or capital infrastructure projects, was the single biggest grievance among residents in outlying communities and was a point of concern at all 30 public inpu meetings.
Laughren said someone at one of the meetings told him if the roads in Greater Sudbury were in good condition, the solutions team probably wouldn’t have been needed in the first place.
Road maintenance was used as a practical example of everything wrong with the City of Greater Sudbury, Laughren told council.
The solutions team has recommended clear and transparent standards for road improvements and seasonal maintenance, which would be easily accessible to the public.
Other major recommendations deal with transit between outlying communities, developing policy on ATV use, enhanced powers and funding for Community Action Networks (CANs) in each former municipality, ways to improve communication with citizens and a review of decentralized services.
The final recommendation is to commit to an annual public review of the solutions team report and a full report on the status of the recommendation prior to the next municipal election in 2010.
In total, the report contains 35 recommendations, each with a short, medium or long-term time frame and a low, medium or high-cost structures. All but 10 of the 35 recommendations are labeled low-cost, meaning the recommendation could be implemented with minimal cost or within existing resources.
About 55 people were on hand at Tom Davies Square Wednesday as councillors voted unanimously to accept the report and form an ad-hoc committee made up of the entire council, in order to deal with the recommendations.
The report’s first recommendation, which Laughren said is the basis for the rest, asks council to declare Greater Sudbury a constellation city, or a community or communities.
To build and sustain the Constellation City, the solutions team has suggested eight core values to drive policy and decision-making. These include inclusiveness, celebration of community history, openness and accessibility, transparency and accountability, responsive customer service, fairness, superb communications and appropriate decentralization.
Laughren said amalgamation should no longer be the excuse for problems, and that if the recommendations brought forward by the solutions team are to have any positive impact, council cannot rest on its laurels.
“I haven’t been happy with the way it has worked either, so my view is that if you can’t go back, make it better going forward.”
