A Strategic Plan For An Organization In Flux

Jeff Green | Mar 27, 2014

The draft Frontenac County Strategic Plan, which is being promoted to local councils this month, focuses on three unfortunately named Wildly Important Goals (WIG). As someone who has attended too many municipal meetings in Frontenac County, “wild” is not a word that should be associated with anything to do with the County.

But if you remove the wild, and call them Important Goals (IG) they are reasonable enough.

The first IG is to focus on services delivery for the ageing population in the county, which is large and growing and will need more and more public services in the coming years.

The second IG is to prepare for a post-landfill reality by looking towards a regional solution for dealing with waste once all the landfills in the county are full. This goal is an odd one, not because it is not important, but because the Frontenac County role in seeking a solution will be minimal. This whole matter will be dealt with on a regional basis through negotiations between large players such as the City of Ottawa, the Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus (made up of 19 municipalities in eastern Ontario, of which Frontenac County is the least populated) and the Province of Ontario. At most, Frontenac County needs to assign the task of keeping informed about developments in this file to whoever the warden and chief administrative officer are at any given time. It is important but is not really a county goal.

The third IG is to tweak small-scale sustainability initiatives towards economic development and away from purely social or environmental-oriented projects. This one, it seems to me, is a real goal, but although it is relevant it represents less than 1.5% of county spending each year.

Taken together, the draft strategic plan is limited in scope, and it represents those issues that the current members of council can all agree upon. To that end it is at best a useful document, and at worst a harmless one.

What is does not address, and what should be the preoccupation in the next term of Frontenac County Council, is a way of delivering services efficiently to all residents of the county. To do that, the relationships between the county and the townships and the City of Kingston need to be addressed. Currently there are areas where the townships have sway; those the county handles; and those that are handled by the social services department of the City of Kingston. Further complicating matters is an initiative spearheaded by the local township public works and waste departments who are setting up a fourth level of service delivery - jointly delivered services that do not involve the county.

Political vision is required from Frontenac County Council working with the township councils to make sense of all this and to find efficiencies, and savings.

A new CAO will be in place soon at Frontenac County and a new council will follow. They will have the task of sorting out the future role of the county and the townships.

The opportunity exists for some new thinking to take hold and break an eight-year log jam between the townships and the county.