Financial Restructuring City Hall

Chestermere is an amazing City. Which was messed up enough to be causing problems, messed up enough that money was being wasted , abused and bad(wrongful) decisions were causing serious debt accumulation. The City needed more expertise in Council and within its staff, more transparency, and more financial controls. 

Many years of issues and irregularities needed to be looked into and explained, to allow a course correction and the necessary steps to be taken to allow the economic growth that Chestermere could take advantage of and to catch up and resolve the many shortcomings that have been missed for the past 15 years.

Restructuring Chestermere, is based on 4 key pillars to build a strong foundation upon.

1. Elevated Financial Sophistication. New Revenue Streams, Strong Commercial tax base, Developers paying their way 

2. 3 E's. Efficiently spending of tax dollars, Effectiveness of reaching goals, Expertise within the City.

3. High Quality of Life. Listening to residents needs. Planning for a high quality of life for residents and Safety & Crime prevention.

4. Educated Long term planning

• Increased disclosure of financial information. Council has better full access to , read only, all financial information. Improving understanding of Budgeting, spending and revenues. 

• Stop banking developers - Developers front fund infrastructure costs, City cannot afford to continue doing this and was stopped, freeing up millions that were tied up.

• Review and increase Offsite Levies - OSL were increased by 35% when we did our review. 

• Allow Developers to review and design infrastructure as planned and approved by the City. This allowed the Developers professionals to bring increased experience to the projects. Plus helped remove the opportunity for illegal kickbacks to the City, as there was significantly increased transparency by having all parties involved in design and pricing.

• Centralized procurement. Bringing it to the CAO and Director levels only. We found a significant savings by reducing the number of Visa cards widely held by staff, to very few. 

• Opening up options for the RFP quoting process to allow more options to be considered, rather than just a select few. Plus encouraging staff to call around for best pricing, rather than taking the first price offered. 

• Changing the culture. Reminding the staff to be concerned with wasting tax payers dollars and trying to find ways of saving money and do things more efficiently and effectively. 

• Putting staff to work, if we can do the work, we asked our three CAO's if they can determine if we can simply get it done. Saving time, money and move quicker, rather than wait and contract it out. This worked very well.

• Tri-CAO model forced increased transparency amongst each CAO and staff. Allowing for and encouraging team work and team atmosphere, along with increased awareness of what was happening in different departments. Council was much more aware of what was happening in each division.