Craig Pollett, vice president of Strategic Steps. The Atlantic branch of the company is based in Nfld & Labrador
Consultant Craig Pollett says Tantramar Town Council and senior staff will hammer out the final details of the municipality’s strategic plan at closed-door meetings in September.
“The sessions won’t be open to the public,” he said on Tuesday during the last of three public consultation drop-ins at the Sackville Music Barn on Station Road.
Pollett, whose firm Strategic Steps is being paid $42,100 to help develop the plan, says councillors and staff will participate in day-long workshops to come up with the plan after sifting through the results of the public drop-in sessions, interviews with various stakeholders and an online survey.
When asked if his firm would write the plan, he said no. That would be up to members of council and senior staff.
“They’re actually doing the writing. At the end of the workshop, they’re saying ‘Yeah, we’re comfortable with that, we’re comfortable with that.’ We will take that and create a document out of it, but we don’t change their language or anything like that. We take what they came up with.”
Pollett gave a number of reasons why the workshops would not be open to the public.
“I would have difficulty inviting the public to an event that they can’t engage in,” he said.
“This is an opportunity for this council who are the board of directors, if you will, for the organization and that’s the kind of strategic plan we’re writing here, a strategic plan for the corporate entity known as the Municipality of Tantramar,” he added.
“They have to own this plan as a council. They have to be free to have the discussion and focus in that workshop because a two-day workshop for this kind of thing is actually not a long time. It’s a heavy amount of work to do in two days and it’s difficult work to do, not that we’re hiding anything, but just with an audience or with other people in the room who, all they can do is watch you,” Pollett said.
“Council needs two distraction-free days to focus on getting the best out of them for this plan,” he concluded.
Note: On Tuesday, I e-mailed Mayor Black and all members of council as well as CAO Jennifer Borne and Town Clerk Donna Beal asking that they hold these sessions in public so that Warktimes can cover them. So far, I have not heard back from them.
To read my e-mail, click here.
To read the full text of the Supreme Court of Canada ruling I refer to in my e-mail, click here.
Two and half decades of strategic plans that have not gone anywhere.
Why? In the 1990s, a well-known Sackville Citizen observed that after the brainstorming, public meetings, specialists, committees, reports, submissions, that great ideas [ same as the let’s get connected ones] never went anywhere.
Education is wrapping up the ten year plan, other departments are working on a five-year plan. I love this citizen’s question: “Since we have revised, studied and reviewed, do you think we’ll do anything by the year 2000?”
I noticed that consultant Craig Pollett used the term “board of directors” echoing John Carver, a clinical psychologist, who cooked up a model he called “policy governance” that defines and guides appropriate relationships between an organization’s owners, board of directors, and chief executive.
To summarize briefly, a municipal council would start applying the Carver model by engaging with the community to define the broad goals or ends that the town should achieve. The council would delegate the responsibility for achieving these goals to town staff.
There are many reasons why this Carver model is a disaster for municipal governance. The number one reason is that it is a fiduciary bombshell with a too-powerful CAO with no limitations except not to bankrupt the Town.
In the end, it becomes literally all about the Town Hall bureaucracy and not about practical concerns like fixing potholes.
Citizens are relegated to being clients of municipal services, not seen as solvers of local problems because they’re not considered to be knowledgeable enough.
In the minutes of Anglophone East School District before I was suspended for thinking I was a representative for Tantramar schools, you’ll find that 24 more employees were added to District Office instead of prioritizing the needs of the teachers.
Shhhh we don’t want any real councillors quibbling or suffering the abuse of citizens, no just leave it all to consultants.
Strategic plans developed by external consultants are often a way to shift the blame if anything goes wrong. I know, I have been an external consultant for 25 years. Of all the strategic plans I have been involved with, only one was implemented by the client — https://extension.unl.edu/strategic-initiatives/Technology2020Plan-FINAL.pdf
I no longer get involved in strategic plans.
Let’s check back in 5 years and see if any of the actions have been implemented, or if this is just one more plan that will gather dust.
My strategy family of Tantramar:
Ignore almost everything and anything that comes out of the Town Hall and their well paid hired consultants.. YOU can make the place better just by living a good life, caring about others, and engaging with your fellow townsfolk.. sharing a laugh, story, and some good news… this place is already amazing.. why they keep wasting money on the exercise of social engineering is just typical of the dominant university culture which is the managerial class we call the ‘chattering class’ flexing on the rest of us.
[I didn’t even mention the new concrete skatepark project this comment.. Blaine Higgs is already on the job with Bruce Phinney – once elected – to get one built]