2011-04-27 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. O’HARA: It’s just that our thought had been a recommendation for future commission not the current commissions because we would not want to see it restructured. MR. KUROHARA: I think what might be better because if you had like say nine members, and like this commission, how it functions, you don’t get everybody in there all the time. But if you were to have only five out of your nine commissioners present at a meeting, let’s say four of them were your ag sector, one was energy, but you’re discussing an energy issue, it would really be hard. I really feel like you need two commissions. What might be better is just every other month so that we’re getting the right people, the right group of experts there at the same time. But maybe meet less often and maybe task them with things to do in between these meetings. MS. WONG: One of the things that also came up with Pomeroy’s presentation at the last meeting was talking about two positions instead of just one position, changing the subject here. Dayday is currently the person in the office and she’s mostly ag. MR. KUROHARA: She is the ag specialist, yes. MS. WONG: But she touches upon other topics if it’s related to ag. Ms. Pomeroy talked about maybe two positions or two and a half positions to address ag. MR. KUROHARA: You’re talking about hiring more people? You know that’s been brought up and that’s the debate right now. If it is that important, why aren’t we providing more staff and more resources towards these programs? On side you’re trying to save cost. So like in every department we really are running thin right now with the staff that we have. And we try to do our part in trying to limit, and I think if you look through our records, that we’re probably one of the few departments that has probably hardly any if any, overtime. But these staff guys, they work really hard. They’re out because they have to work the community. It’s a distinctly different type of role that we play, not really in an office every day. They’re doing both. They’re out meeting with stakeholders and the community, business people, with different organizations. So their schedules are quite more like a director’s type schedule. They’re always meeting with people after hours if need be so they use sort of a flex schedule. And they are working very hard. One thing that I do see coming from the private sector is that the staff works really hard. They really do. I can only speak for our department about what I see, but I think they do work very hard. They are very efficient at what they do. And our role is to facilitate within these industries. We’re not really necessarily intended to be the economic driver of an industry, but we’re there to support, to facilitate, to bring groups together to find solutions. Things of that nature. But if the question is, would adding more staff help? Possibly. So there are ways that you could increase the resources without necessarily having to hire more people. You could contract. There’s a lot of other entities out there that would be doing somewhat similar functions. Within our department, what we try to do too, is we’ve kind of shuffled people around to have them support a busy program. So, our busy programs are agriculture and energy, tourism. So we try to use some of the staff that were focusedon other areas before like the CDPs. We use to help out with having to organize the communities for those so we took some of that staff since that’s pretty much done, and they’re supporting some of the specialists that are really busy right now. So, we’ve kind of shifted those people 20