Whistler council has a plan, and now so does municipal staff.
Following on the heels of the Council Action Plan (CAP) that was unveiled earlier in the year, staff released the RMOW’s corporate plan as a ‘roadmap’ for the municipality.
“The reason why we wanted one was to set a strategic direction between mandate and work plans and articulate of roles and responsibility of the organization,” said Mike Furey, Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) for the RMOW. “We also wanted managers and staff to understand and see what our goals and objectives are and see themselves in the delivery of those goals and objectives.”
In the plan, which was completed internally by municipal staff as one of the directives of the CAP, the muni’s strategic approach is broken down into several categories such as community priorities, corporate goals, corporate strategies and employee objectives.
Within those categories each department has a list of tasks to strive for, such as the communications department supporting annual town hall meetings in order to expand RMOW’s community outreach and engagement or the legal services department reducing their reliance on external legal resources in order to ensure efficient financial management policies.
It’s a document, said Furey, which sets a concrete foundation for what direction staff will take in the next two years.
“Employees are the foundation of our organization,” he said. “In order to deliver on corporate strategies and meet our corporate goals we need our foundation really solid.”
However, Furey was quick to point out that while the plan is exhaustive and robust, it isn’t the only directive for municipal hall.
“This by no means represents all of what staff does at the hall,” he said.
Included in the report are details of the kind of services the RMOW already oversees, including processing more than 26,000 customer payments at municipal hall, managing more than 5,500 bookings for municipal facilities and venues and processes more than 40,000 pieces of outgoing mail.
When asked what he felt were the most important points in the document, Furey said while the plan as a whole was valuable in its entirety, economic viability and building community trust were the issues he felt had the most priority.
“I think it’s important the community has a high level of trust in the organization and the municipality,” he said. “I think we need to have trust to be effective and for people to have confidence that we’re carrying out our responsibilities with due diligence and in an honest fashion.
“In any community – and especially this one – I think that’s really important.”
According to Furey, while the plan is designed to apply from 2012 to 2014, it will be updated annually to better reflect the feasibility of such goals as well as update what’s been done in reaching those goals.
Following the document’s unveiling at Tuesday’s (July 3) council meeting, Mayor Nancy-Wilhelm Morden praised the document as an exercise in accountable governance.
“I would encourage all members of public to look at this as it really does set out what our municipal government does what we hope to be doing over the next while and how we account for that process,” she said.
To download a copy of the muni’s Corporate Plan go to http://bit.ly/KSDn6r
