A shared services committee, including council members and CAOs from Pictou County’s six municipalities, has been meeting every two to three months for the last year and a half and have talked to recreation directors from all the towns to see how they could work together.
“It came out of the mayors and wardens meetings,” says New Glasgow councillor Troy MacCulloch who chairs the committee. “The idea was to start looking at things that as a county we can start sharing.”
While in the future they would like to look at other areas such as IT and payroll services that the municipalities could use shared services for, recreation was seen as a good starting place because the recreation directors are already working well together, MacCulloch said.
The details of how it could work will be presented to the committee in September and MacCulloch said it could be as soon as 2012 that they are all under one umbrella or some other shared services format.
The committee is allowing the recreation directors to drive the process and so far they are enthusiastic about the idea, he said.
“They’re steering the ship right now,” said MacCulloch. “Why wouldn’t you listen to the people that do that job for a living?”
Some of the issues that will have to be resolved is what to do with the rinks that are not owned by municipalities, including the Westville rink and the Thorburn rink.
“That’s the kind of things that are a little more lengthy to work out,” says Lynn MacDonald, one of Westville’s representatives on the committee.
The advantages of being able to have a joint recreation service are plentiful, says MacCulloch.
For instance when it comes to ice rental, rather than teams having to call every rink to see what’s available, if they were all managed by one body it would allow people to make one call.
It would also allow for towns to specialize in certain sports, as Stellarton has in soccer.
“In the end we’re going to have better programs and better delivery and ease of use,” says MacCulloch.
While this process is not intended as a way to start amalgamating the towns, it is putting the community into a position that if it wanted to down the road it would be a lot simpler, says MacCulloch.
The way that the towns and county have been able to work together on this alone shows that progress is being made, he says.
“The feeling of co-operation between our communities is higher than it’s been in a long time,” he says. “It’s a very positive thing for the people.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Adam MacInnis
Quelle/Source: The News, 10.06.2011
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