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Mono undergoes service delivery review

December 17, 2020   ·   0 Comments

By Peter Richardson, Local Journalsim Initiative

Optimus SBR presented a service delivery review to Mono Council last Tuesday.

David Lynch, Jessie Burns and Marian Ali held the presentation, which is an extensive review of the delivery of all County services, consisting of over 85 pages of documentation, covering everything from accounting to fire services and policing.

The report includes a summary of the strengths and challenges, recommendations for operational efficiencies, and service improvements. It also mentions the rationale for recommendations as well as financial and resource implementation considerations.

The document presented would not be possible to discuss in detail due to size and complexity, however in very broad strokes, the general recommendations were to bring everything more inline with a County run or orchestrated approach, centralizing many decisions and procedures at the County level.

This would include such things as shared software applications and procedures. However, in some instances, such as fire services, the approach was to eliminate Fire Boards and have departments wholly owned and run by an individual municipalities and to then enter into contractual agreements with surrounding municipalities for fire protection services.

Deputy Mayor John Creelman mentioned a pet issue of his was group procurements.

He felt that a larger buying body would result in better pricing from suppliers and asked if this was discussed in the report and how it might be implemented? The response was that no such discussion had been held for Dufferin Municipalities specifically. Coun. Ralph Manktelow pondered the advantage of having permanent HR suppliers as opposed to the current contract arrangement and was told it would be an economy of size and be more efficient, supplying a broader base of expertise.

The opportunity for a larger HR firm to provide greater and more in-depth expertise was a major consideration, over a one-man show or smaller firm. Also there would be continuity across all the municipalities.

Coun. Manktelow then brought up the issue of fire departments. He saw them as a cost prohibitive venture, since having one municipality own the department would require that they buy out the current investment of each of the sharing municipalities. This would become an overbearing expense.

Jessie Burns suggested that they could use a few for service model and stagger the buyout over time rather than all at once. Although, Mono currently has three fees for service arrangements and this is not a controllable expense for the Town. Rather, the fire department arrives, fights the fire and sends the Town a bill, which is constantly going up. With the fire board scenario the Town has some control over the costs, said Mayor Laura Ryan. Also the change would be difficult to achieve as Dufferin has three large municipalities, Orangeville, Grand Valley and Shelburne and then there are all the rest of the smaller municipalities. Council received the delegations presentation and will await further reports.

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