Audit gets high marks from Mayor
Brad Herron editor@cochranetimes.com When Mayor Truper McBride was elected to office in October 2007, there was some trepidation among employees of the Town of Cochrane about what the two-term council
Posted By Brad Herron
Posted 25 days ago
When Mayor Truper McBride was elected to office in October 2007, there was some trepidation among employees of the Town of Cochrane about what the two-term councillor would bring to the Mayor's position.
For three years previous to the 2007 election, McBride had butted heads with then-Mayor Ken Bech and felt his concerns and opinions were not being received by Town staff.
During his mayoral campaign, McBride pledged if he were the one tasked with leading the next council he would conduct a complete corporate audit of the Town of Cochrane, and as mayor elect, he confirmed those promises.
Some among Town staff where worried about what this would mean moving forward. Staff, as well as council and the public, learned exactly what McBride had in mind Oct. 26, as the audit was made public in council chambers. Included in the audit were 25 recommendations to council and staff centring on how to improve the Town and a scorecard that rated the Town with a B grade.
When everything was tabulated, the report did not focus on members of staff or target the Chief Administrative Officer, but instead focused on aligning and focusing council's strategic priorities with senior staff.
"For council to go down to that level and examine how reception is working is hardly strategic and it's not really worth taxpayers' dollars, and that is why we have managers. But we wanted to make sure the operations surrounding council, the operations with our senior leadership team that they are doing the best job they can and doing what they need to do to execute our agenda," McBride said.
The Mayor added the report confirmed to him that staff had not always been implementing council's agenda, but the audit outlined how this can be done more effectively. McBride said council chose not to audit any further into operations as it would have called the CAO's position into question, something that was never supported by council.
"This project has always been about taking our existing resources and improving them. We've had some examples where we weren't ready to continue on with existing resources and those changes have been made and they have been made appropriately and not made in the public sphere," McBride said.
Many of the recommendations included in the audit will be expensive, McBride admits, especially the reorganization of the Town of Cochrane to hire at least one more, if not two, directors to the Senior Leadership team. There will also need to be plans put in place over time to complete the objectives in areas like communications and succession planning.
"Going into budget, obviously that is really the opportunity to implement this, and of course this will be competing with other priorities, but council has said the three priorities going into the budget are the sustainability plan, the health check and Domtar," McBride said. "I expect we will be able to implement a significant amount of the recommendations, but keeping in mind a lot of these will have to be done as we grow. We can't do everything in one year and if we did everything in one year, we'd obviously be looking at a tax increase that we can't afford."
But as the Town reaches another milestone in its growth, McBride said the audit better prepares it for that level.
"The goal here was to look at where the organization needs to fit to be at 30,000 population which will we will be responsible for. I wanted the project to stay at a strategic level and I think that is what we got back," McBride said.
