I remember when the city put in its expensive and complex SAP system 15 years ago. There was a lot of hair-pulling as people adjusted to the system, with dire predictions that it would never work. Now, theoretically, it allows the city to run statistics on budgets, inventory, permits and you name it instantly.

But, back to reporting on 311:

Charles Gauthier from the DVBIA said he’d had to wait a long time but then got pleasantly transferred to the right place and it was an improvement from trying to phone all over city hall.

Marc said he had to wait 20 minutes and was still holding.

And I got this interesting email, plus attachment, this morning:

While I think in theory that it could be a very useful service, in reality at this point it’s probably causing more confusion and delays than it is addressing. A lot of internal phone numbers listed in City publications have been changed as the old #’s were co-opted by 311, and right now staff in different departments sometimes have trouble reaching each other by phone, let alone members of the public!

I’ve attached a listing of numbers now being directed to 311, and the new internal (direct) numbers that replaced them. Technically this is not to be published to the public, but it is my belief that if you know what you want, and know who to talk to, then you would be benefiting everybody by directly contacting the branch or individual you need and eliminating an unnecessary intermediate step.

Phase 1 – Blue Page Phone Numbers Transferring to 311 Contact Centre

From:   COV Broadcast Server
Sent:   Friday, February 13, 2009 3:27 PM
To:     All Staff (COV) – DL
Subject:        COV Broadcast – Memorandum from City Manager – Human Resource Measures

MEMORANDUM FROM THE CITY MANAGER – Human Resource Measures

I am writing to you as the impacts of the ongoing global economic crisis begin to be felt more fully in the province generally, and the city specifically. As many of you will be aware, both the federal and provincial governments will be running deficits in their annual budgets for the first time in many years. As a municipality, the City of Vancouver does not have that option. Each year we are required, by law, to produce a balanced budget, showing exactly how we are going to fund all of the activities, initiatives and services on which the City intends to spend money.

A significant portion of the funding for our annual operating budget comes from revenues associated with development activity in our city. Most of the rest comes from residential and business property taxes. Due to the sharp decline in development over the past several months, associated revenues have dropped precipitously. This is well beyond what we had predicted as we were building budget forecasts. If we continue with “business as usual”, it would mean that Vancouver taxpayers could face a property tax increase of approximately 11% or more.

In order not to place such a burden on our taxpayers, City Council has instructed me to look across all agencies, entities and departments of the City (including Vancouver Police, Parks, Library, PNE, etc) and take any steps necessary to produce a revised operating budget that will “protect taxpayers and mitigate any compromise of key City services”. In short, to rethink the way we do business.

As a first step, I have implemented, effective immediately, a general freeze on hiring for all staff positions. I understand this is a disruptive and disconcerting measure, however it is a critically important step to first, understand our current staffing pressures, and then, to determine how we can best restructure and reorganize our resources to better meet our key business priorities.

I also understand how important it is that managers and supervisors have clear, consistent information upon which to base their staffing direction and decisions. This afternoon, our Human Resources department will be providing to senior managers detailed guidelines related to vacancies, overtime, travel and training, external contracts and many of the other important resource management questions you have.  You can also e-mail your questions to hrinfo@vancouver.ca.

For the most part, any exemptions to this freeze will be limited to positions that are critical to health and safety, required by statute, fully cost recovered through external funding, or key to the priorities of Council. However, even these requests for exemptions will require a firm business case that demonstrates how we are acting in the most cost-effective and efficient manner to meet both Council priorities and public service needs.

I know that some of you, unfortunately, will be in positions that will not be renewed or extended due to these measures. Collective agreements will be respected, and the city will be working hard to help make transitions in a supportive manner.

Change is difficult.  It is also particularly hard when it happens in such a volatile economic climate. But change is necessary if we are to adapt our business to new realities. As we move forward, I know that many of you will bring innovative ideas and creative solutions on how we can work smarter, and how we can improve the way in which we provide our excellent services to the citizens of Vancouver. In fact, many of you have shared some of those thoughts with me already, and I look forward to hearing more.

I know that working together we can exceed the high expectations that we have set for ourselves as public servants, and I appreciate your commitment and support.

Penny Ballem, MD FRCP
City Manager

Accounting, human resources, communications and other service departments, which are now maintained separately, are the kinds of departments that might become shared. As well, the announcement later this week will also make it clear whether people who have already been offered jobs will get to take them (likely) and whether current competitions will be allowed to continue to hiring (unlikely).

As you can imagine, unhappy employees are coming up with their own suggestions for saving money. One that I’ve heard is making the rounds: Trim the fleet cars, largely used by management and supervisors who are allowed to take them home. Instead, those people can drive their own cars and be paid mileage.

Anonymous city employees are welcome to post more suggestions here.

To help out them and all the new bloggers currently invading the civics scene, here is what I teach in my Journalism Research class at Langara when I do the session on FOI. The first rule of FOI is to pick up the phone and ask the right person if you can get the information without having to FOI it. Often you can.

There are no set rules in any government organization specifying what you have to FOI and what you don’t. It sometimes even varies from person to person within a department. So, repeating this one more time, it’s always wise to pick up the phone first.

That’s something that I have to keep reminding myself all the time and I’ve missed more than a couple of scoops because I sat around waiting for my FOI request to come through while someone else just made a call. I’ve even managed to scoop myself, in a way.

I remember putting in an FOI on the cost of former mayor Sam Sullivan’s Project Civil City launch, which involved Norman Stowe’s PACE Group public-relations team, printing costs, hotel rental costs and a few other things, if I’m not mistaken. Anna Lilly, who was in the mayor’s office at the time, took pity on me and let me know during a phone converstion that I could just ask for those expenses, which she promptly gave me. So I ended up getting the information from her before my own FOI request came back. Duh.

Obviously, city hall can’t start answering every random request for information from every citizen who wants to know something. And there are certain pieces of information that it’s pretty standard that you can’t get without an FOI. (Judy Rogers’ and Estelle Lo’s severance payments, for example.) But staff usually are pretty forthcoming with anyone who qualifies as public-serving news media. Granted, that’s a little bit of a hard line to draw these days sometimes, so maybe some of you will have to make the case on that.

Seven job competitions for the cultural planning department that were listed (almost half of the total 15 listings of open jobs) have now been cancelled.

Here’s a sample.

Notice is hereby given that Competition Number 08-0697, Cultural Planner I (Culture Plan Implementation) in the Cultural Services Department, Community Services Group has been cancelled, effective Friday, December 19, 2008.

What could it all mean? interested parties are wondering.

I say it looks like budget preparation — why start hiring people when you might have to be chopping 10 per cent. But some see it as another sign of what may be coming for the cultural planning department overall.

Oops, realized after I posted this that the Globe stories are only free for a week and then you have to pay, so here’s the text below, for you dedicated ones.

JJoined at the hip: The mutually beneficial relationship of a mayor and his closest adviser

We could have started with one of those hushed-voice golf types for the first part of the meeting, when motions were being punted gently here and there to this committee and that. It felt like the new council was, possibly, going to be civilized.

Then one of those tennis commentators might have been good for the next round. Things started to warm up a little as Lonely Girl NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton started questioning why the Visionistas had to get reports back so durn fast on everything. How would staff be able to take proper holidays, she kept asking, when they were being asked to produce reports on arts councils, car-free days, sustainability and Nationalization of All Private Apartment Buildings (okay, that last one not true — just said it to get those apartment owners going again) by only January or February.

Staff, likely thinking they’d rather have no holidays at all than a super super long one like Judy Rogers is enjoying, kept reassuring everyone that they’d have no problem getting those reports done by January, so Suzanne had to give up on that one.

Round Three probably needed a soccer commentator — you know, the kind who can keep things going for the viewers as the ball just gets pushed around the field, no one really ever scores, and players occasionally fall over their own teammates.

In Round Three, things got testy for a bit, when the new COPE bloc (David Cadman and Ellen Woodsworth) suggested that the motion for car-free neighbourhoods be expanded to talking to everyone, not just three neighbourhoods, and making sure that businesses were included in the discussion because not all of them think car-free days are an unmixed blessing.

It looked like a fight might break out between them and the Visionistas, but it turned out in the end that actually they all agreed on everything. And the whole discussion helped poor Tom Timm, head of engineering, who had thought that Andrea Reimer’s motion meant he had to do a massive city-wide consultation on which three neighbourhoods the car-free Sundays should go to, along with studies on the possible impacts, like rerouting trolley buses and finding people to run the car-free days (now done by volunteers, but unlikely to be the case in future if car-free days are every Sunday for three months instead of once a year). As it turns out, Andrea’s motion meant his over-the-holidays report should set the stage for going out to consultation to find the best neighbourhoods.

But then it got to Round Four. Now that really needed a boxing commentator, someone who could tell you when something was just a vicious jab and when it was the equivalent of a knock-out punch. Round Four was the discussion about putting money into the city’s new homelessness efforts and it started out with Councillor Raymond Louie’s motion to put in $750,000 — not the $300,000 he had originally proposed. (Because they put $500,000 into a plan with the premier earlier that morning for 200 shelter beds.)

Well, people got distracted a little by David Cadman’s suggestion that the city should put all $1.34 million from the remaining money in the 2008 contingency fund into homelessness. There was all kinds of back and forth about that, with Raymond saying they weren’t putting everything in because it wouldn’t be prudent and David basically saying, Well, you said there’s a crisis so why not put all the money in that you have?

But that was nothing compared to what happened next, when former Crown prosecutor Suzanne got up and started popping out the punches.

“Unfortunately, your worship forgot to ask me to the press conference (about the homelessness emergency action team, she meant) and, at the moment, HEAT is only the product of your press conference and not the council. I hate to be churlish (I’ll bet she did), but I don’t actually know what HEAT’s mandate is. And your worship, with the greatest of respect, you cannot create entities on your own.”

And off we went into almost an hour of debate, where Suzanne kept asking them about the legalities and the process of what they had done, in creating a homelessness action team and handing out money to various initiatives.

Along the way, she managed to pin staff to the mat, with deputy city manager james Ridge saying he’d have to consult with the legal department before answering her question. And Gregor, I mean your worship, just kind of sat there taking it, not really saying anything. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was trying to maintain the neutrality of the chair or because he couldn’t think of what to say.

But eventually, the other side woke up to the fact that they were being socked in the stomach and started to hit back.

David Cadman was first up off the floor with: “I have to say, it’s a little bit rich of Councillor Anton” and then went on to list the many announcements former mayor Sam Sullivan announced about his various initiatives, long before he ever presented them to staff or to council formally. David also was the first to trot out the classic line so frequently used post-election: “We won and you didn’t so nyah nyah.” Oh, actually, that isn’t what he said. It was just the sub-text. What he actually said was: We asked the electorate, they said yes and we’re taking action.

Anyway, it went on and on forever until we were begging for mercy in the media-peanut gallery, with councillors displaying many of the idiosyncratic traits that we will undoubtedly come to know and love.

Suzanne kept going on about process and legality, grilling everyone in her prosecutorial way. She also pushed as many in-your-face buttons as your average provocative teenager (“I guess there’s no sense of facetiousness or irony in this chamber.” “I guess I’m an observer of this council and not a participant.” “This is shocking, shocking, shocking.” “This is a remarkably contemptuous way of dealing with this issue.” “I want to be assured that I am a part of this government.” Etc Etc)

And she kept making the argument that Vancouver is now trying to take on all the problems of the Lower Mainland and it already provides most of the shelter beds already, so why is it now throwing its own city money into even more.

Raymond kept interrupting her on points of order or trying to claim that there was nothing out of order with the procedure. Kerry Jang accused her of scare-mongering (before Suzanne rapped him on the knuckles and said he should not be directing comments at her personally). Geoff Meggs and Andrea Reimer mostly stayed out of it except to make succinct points. Tim Stevenson made an eloquent speech that wandered all over the issue of the homeless and why they come to Vancouver. George Chow was mercifully silent. And Gregor, towards the end, quietly said he would take into consideration her remarks about process and that he had been trying to work quickly, but perhaps things could be improved.

On the whole, not pleasant. Suzanne did raise some questions about process that piqued my curiosity and I’ll be waiting to hear the answers on those.

But I wonder how far her attacks will get her. She seemed to be trying to go after the new city manager, Penny Ballem, asking her several times to clarify city policy, which clearly Penny was in no position to do and had to pass off to the deputy, having just started the job last week. It felt like Suzanne was trying to make that point, but in an indirect way. It made me think: If you want to accuse her of being an inexperienced political appointee, why not just say so instead of trying to embarrass her this way?

Also, I’m not sure all the fuss about policy and procedure will go very far with the public. The election clearly showed that the public had little enthusiasm for Peter Ladner’s argument that the city had followed proper policy in not releasing information about the $100-million loan approved for the Olympic village developer. It’s hard to see the public storming the gates of city hall because Gregor didn’t wait to go through public consultations and policy meetings before deciding to take some action on homelessness.

It also seems to me that the public said pretty loud and clear that they did not want a council that was going to say, We’re not going to do anything because the other municipalities and the provincial government should be doing it.

Oh, by the way, the $750,000 for the homeless initiatives got approved. Then all the councillors went into  — tada — an in-camera meeting, where they spent the next four hours. I had to go back to city hall at 9 p.m. because I’d left my bag there by accident and they were all just emerging.

So that was two hours of public meeting, four hours of in camera. Welcome to your first day.

A couple of us got the word last night that there was going to be an in-camera vote early Friday morning about Rogers’ fate. (One of the great things about covering city hall in depth is you discover how orchestrated these things are. I was told the previous night: “The in-camera meeting will be from 9 to 9:30. Then they’ll issue the press release. Then Gregor will talk to reporters individually, but they won’t issue a news release or have a general scrum.” Etc etc)

So I got to the third floor of city hall around 9:30, where my Vancouver Sun fellow traveller Jeff Lee and photographer Bill Keay were already waiting.

Shortly thereafter, a CTV camerman showed up, followed by NW reporter Marcella Bernardo, followed by CTV reporter Shannon Patterson. Marcella and Shannon said their newsrooms had been phoned by someone anonymously saying Judy was being canned and they should get a reporter down there.

We waited until about 10, (after they’d apparently gone in at 9:25), when a disgusted-looking Suzanne Anton emerged, saying we’d have to wait to speak to Gregor to find out what happened.

Then there was quite the scuffle as new media wrangler Kevin Quinlan told everyone Mayor Gregor wouldn’t do a scrum, only individual interviews and since he had to be at a Metro meeting by 11. Much carrying on, as various reporters threatened to make it the story that Gregor was trying to control the media.

In the end, everyone calmed down and we all rushed in so that one after another, Gregor could tell us exactly the same thing, delivering his set lines. (He can be a funny guy with the occasional good one-liner, and he also comes across at other times as warm and thoughtful, but, boy, when he has to deliver the message box, it can feel awfully androidish.)

In the meantime, throughout all this, various staffers came, avoiding our eyes for the most part as they passed through.

This has got to feel weird at city hall. City managers just don’t come and go around there. In 30 years, they’ve only had three: Judy, then Ken Dobell her, and then Fritz Bowers before that. In fact, the last firing of a city manager was shortly after the TEAM council was elected in 1972, when they canned Gerald Sutton-Brown, variously described as autocratic/all-powerful/a czar/etc, to replace him for a couple of years with Lorne Ryan (which no one remembers, thinking it went straight to Bowers) and then with Bowers. That was widely seen as a good move to take power away from a technocrat trying to jam freeways through Vancouver and give some of it back to the council of the day.

It remains to be seen whether future historians of Vancouver will see this week’s surprise move in the same spirit.

I found this squib on Bowers, by the way, which tracks the unusual route that took Bowers into the city manager’s position. (It’s from the UBC Archives.)

His first appointment at UBC was as an associate professor in Electrical Engineering. He was promoted to full professor in 1964. He also served on Senate from 1963-69 as a member at-large.

His career was broad-based and he served both UBC and the community of Vancouver with distinction. As an academic, scientist and administrator at UBC he was well respected and his inventiveness lead to the development of four patents in the field of communications. He entered civic politics in 1969 when he was elected as a Vancouver School Trustee. In 1971 he was chair of the Vancouver School Board and in 1972 he was elected to Vancouver City Council as an aldennan. He served as City Manager of Vancouver from 1977-90. He retired from UBC in 1976 and was accorded Professor Emeritus status upon retirement in 1990.

It’s not unusual to get rid of a city manager. It is unusual to put in someone with zero experience in city issues. Typically, cities see it as wildly adventurous to get their city manager from a city department besides engineering.

People are splitting, of course, somewhat along party lines, but not always. Leftoids see Ballem as stunningly competent and not at all a political appointee. One NDP MLA told me she was never seen as particularly doing anything to help them while she was the deputy minister for health and she worked for five years in the Campbell government before her final flamet-out, which was more directed at deputy premier Jessica McDonald than Campbell.

But one developer type said, if the new government was going to make a change, better they make it quick and at the beginning.

Others, of course, see it as the completely politicization of the bureaucracy, the lefties bringing in a fellow traveller to do their bidding. (I kind of doubt anyone with a reputation like Ballem’s of being a strong, forceful manager is going to be quite that compliant with anyone.)

I’ll have more about the dynamics of firing city managers on my CTV blog tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s the final version of my Globe story today.