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Community services department could see major overhaul

Oct 8, 2013 | 6:43 AM

The future of the City of Prince Albert’s community services department will be the subject of debate during the 2014 budget deliberations, according to Mayor Greg Dionne.

The department’s director, Greg Zeeben, parted ways with the city in September, and Dionne said the position will remain vacant until a new city manager hires a new head of community services.

“And we’re also going to discuss it during the budget, whether we want to keep one department, make a super department, what changes we want to make to that department before we hire the person,” Dionne said.

“Because once you have a new department, if you take a bunch of stuff away, then you have a department left, we want to hire somebody with those skills to manage what’s there.”

He confirmed that there has been some discussion of shaking up the department.

“A perfect example is since we moved the Rotary Trail to public works which was the right thing to do, because it talks about base and asphalt, the trail is moving forward,” he said.

There’s also the possibility that more of the community services department’s responsibilities could be moved into public works.

“That’s what we’re looking at,” Dionne said. “Because they interact so much.”

He gave the example of when the city builds new streets, the public works department constructs the street, then the city waits for “quite some time” after for community services to perform landscaping. “So, I’m questioning why isn’t that landscaping crew part of public works? Same thing in the winter time. Community services does snow removal, public works does snow removal. Why? Can they not do it together? And then we have the same equipment available to all departments.”

But any action taken where the community services department is concerned will have to wait until after a new city manager is hired.

The city manager position has been vacant since early September, when former city manager Robert Cotterill and the city also parted ways.

Dionne said the city manager position has been posted on an online job board and the job posting will be published in newspapers in Prince Albert, Saskatoon and Regina. “We are doing a massive search to try to fill that position,” he said.

The preference is to hire someone who is a Saskatchewan resident.

“At the end of the day, people are tired of us going out and hiring our main position out of Ontario [and] other province[s]. And I agree with that. If we have a talented person or persons in our province, those are the people we should be looking at first.”

He said that a Saskatchewan candidate would understand how the province’s government works, which is an important part of the city manager’s position. The city manager interacts quite a bit with the province, Dionne said.

“So, I really think that’s an asset. If you’re from the province, and you’ve dealt with the government, you know how it works.”

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames