With the aim of freeing up advisory committees and staff to focus on the tasks at hand, the city has hired a boards and committees coordinator to provide procedural assistance and training, among other things.
“It’s a good recognition of the fact this body of work has grown as the city has grown,” acting-clerk Dylan McMahon said of the new position. “We take it seriously and we want to make sure we’ve got the appropriate resources to enable these committees of incredible volunteers to operate effectively.”
The coordinator will manage the recruitment and appointment process for the city’s 20 advisory committees and nine boards, as well as assisting with committee policy reviews, gathering feedback, making recommendations for policy improvements and meeting with committee chairs and staff liaison officers to answer legislative questions.
Providing training for committee members will be “a big part of the work,” noted McMahon.
“This is really a recognition of the fact you can’t deliver training to 150 board and committee members off the side of a desk, we ought to have somebody focused on it,” he said. “As the city’s grown and we’ve got more and more of these committees, all of the volume of work associated with them has increased.”
Though the new position is considered permanent and full-time, it’s not the result of increased staffing.
“It’s a reallocation,” McMahon explained. “We had a little bit of capacity freed up on the council support side … we were able to gain some efficiencies and then reallocate a position that was primarily focused on council so that it focused now primarily on boards and committees.”
The coordinator role was initially envisioned to begin last year but that was delayed in light of the pandemic and instead was filled in January.
“It was a vacant position that we held vacant for most of 2020 because of the pandemic and then in early 2021, when we began doing some hiring again, we were able to go out and fill it,” said the acting-clerk.
“The goal here is to make sure that we give staff support so they can focus on their subject matter work and we can help with the legislative services work, which means the committee can focus on its own work,” he added.
“That’s really what this is, in essence, to get these committees able to focus on the important work they’re doing on heritage or public art or whatever it may be and let us provide some training to help with the procedures and the legislative side of things.”
