Thursday, July 2, 2009

Combined Staff might help our Boulevards

The TC wrote about "Boulevards of broken budgets stump Victoria officials." While the article did not mention how the other 12 municipalities deal with their boulevard issues, we can assume each has to do so in some way. I really do not know for sure if this would be an issue better dealt with by amalgamation. One might find different results in different areas in any event.

However, a united area will have better resources to deal with the issue. Perhaps dedicated summer relief, who could mow all the boulevards in the core, would become more practical than each municipality dealing with the issue separately. Perhaps this too is not feasible.

Interestingly, there are many ideas being put forward regarding what to do, but the city is just turning people away because they do not have the capacity to manage the requests and they don't have a policy in place.

Certainly it is more likely that a unified city, with sufficient staffing (and more to the point, with the proper allocation of staff time) could deal with the issue. A city of a reasonable size, could deal with issues like this and many more, by having departments large enough to deal with issues.

A city should have departments with sufficient people and expertise to work effectively for the population. It is impossible to believe that if all the relevant staff in the many cities we have were combined, we would not have a more effective administration.

By combined staff, we would be able to afford to have people in place who both know what they are doing and have the time to do it. Rather than an individual having to do a number of different tasks within a department, staff could maximize their efficiency by focusing on more defined tasks for a larger area of our cities.

A larger city, while it will still have to deal with its boulevards, would at least have the manpower to ensure that people are not `just turned away. `

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