Select Business Committee Has 16 Recommendations for Council to Consider
Saturday, February 18, 2012 @ 5:00 AM
Prince George, B.C.- The Select Committee on Business will present its recommendations to Prince George City Council Monday night.
The committee was tasked with coming up with ideas "to create a better environment for business to grow and generate new jobs".
The final report puts forth 16 recommendations .
The recommendations are:
1. Treat the potential investor or developer like a valued customer.
Ensure that potential businesses and developers are able to meet with the key staff decision makers from the preâdevelopment factâfinding stage, right through the development process. The investor has many choices and Prince George City staff must provide the highest levels of customer service, and ensure that everything possible is done to make the process as simple and easy as possible. Providing a single point of contact will help developers
expedite their projects through various levels of city administration and a project management system can monitor the responsiveness of the process. This is a recommendation to change the culture across City Hall, with an emphasis on Development Services, to a more positive and accountable focus on client service, including development friendly interpretation of bylaws, continuous improvement in processes and public communication of aggregated results and client satisfaction. It is important to ensure that very early in the development process or at the time of building permit application, clients fully understand all costs and specifications for works and services mandated by the City.
2. Address service levels around development approvals.
Avoid multiple iterations of changes to developer plans to significant reduce costly delays to construction. Consider the utilization of senior staff at an earlier stage in the development process in order to better understand and assist with project success.
3. Ensure a seamless working relationship and a culture of being like a “Business and Development Concierge” and “One Window for Business”, between Initiatives Prince George and City Development Services staff.
Align the organizations and measure success through increases in building permits, employment base and customer satisfaction. Continue to promote Prince George as a transportation, logistics, service and supply hub, with measurable results tied to the budget.
4. Review the portfolio of City owned vacant property and develop an action plan to divest properties,
Streamline land sales to provide more decision making to the Real Estate Manager, while ensuring that necessary staff decision makers are involved. Utilize appraisals and ensure that planning staff understand the economic impact of their input and requirements.
5. Implement the recommendations of the Core Service Review in a timely, bold and accountable manner, especially where they may address cost reduction and containment strategies, or processes to improve service.
6. Ensure fiscal responsibility in budgeting to send a positive message to the business community that the city is a stable place to invest.
Control spending and adopt budgets that are aligned with increases or decreases in the municipal tax base and the strategic objectives of the City.
7. Implement a public relations campaign to promote the positive attributes about living and working in Prince George, as well as the advantages and incentives offered in starting a business in the city.
Use business friendly language and garner positive coverage in national and provincial media.
8. Ensure that there is an appropriate inventory of heavy industrial land with the local area, while being mindful of the resident’s desire for a high quality airâshed.
9. Continue to support a tough stance on crime and enforcement, and advocate for adequate local resources in the judicial and social response systems.
10. Ensure the City is open to innovative contract solutions for projects with budget issues or constraints, outside the traditional procurement approaches.
Confirm that when the City chooses to manage or construct a project, it is done to the same standard as bid documents. Publicly retender the work if standards are revised.
11. Continuously research the best practices and policies of cities in BC and across Canada that are being
Implement the top successes from across the country in Prince George on a continuous basis and work to develop positive perceptions about our city. An example would be exploring Surrey’s results in attracting investment and creating jobs from reducing the business licence fee to $1 for the first three years, for clean energy companies. Explore ways to link future tax incentives to the investment value, projected increase in assessments, and the number of new jobs created.
12. Send a strong signal that the City is open for business through timely decision making that results in capital investment, increases to the tax base and jobs.
Show leadership by making decisions regarding the Prince Golf and Country Club lands.
13. Benchmark Prince George with other cities for both development cost competitiveness as well as process timelines.
To attract investment with consideration for the shorter construction season, Prince George must be as or more competitive than other communities across the province. Post timeline commitments and quarterly measured results of application processing times publicly at City Hall and on the City website, with demonstrated continuous improvement. Determining client timeline needs and endeavour to consistently exceed the performance expected by the client. Ensure developer success despite the short building season through being known for speedy decisions and approvals which maximize the available construction window.
14. Aggressively attract new businesses to Prince George.
Encourage mining, forest and energy companies to set up head offices or regional procurement and staffing offices in Prince George. Actively solicit franchise or chain store businesses that are successful in similar sized communities and determine why they are not located here, and respond with appropriate actions. Complete interviews with all companies enquiring about doing business in Prince George, who do not choose to locate here and utilize the results to
continuously improve client service and the city’s competitiveness position.
15. Work with business and the federal and provincial governments on workforce attraction and avoiding a critical shortage of labour in Prince George.
Current local development projects shortages of available qualified tradespeople due to increased project activity in our Northern region. This will require increased capacity and accelerated throughput in local technical and trades training programs, as well as an expansion of dual credit secondary school trades entry programs. It is important to keep skilled people working and reinvesting in this community as well as attracting workers from other regions of the country,or from out of the country, to fill jobs currently going unfilled.
16. Solicit business and public opinion more actively with concise onâline surveys which can influence positive change.
Implement annual ‘Client Satisfaction Surveys’ for City and economic development services with public reporting of ‘actions to improve service’.
Comments
Well Done! Kudos to Green and the Business committee. This report took about about 2 months to prepare. Under the old administration would have taken about 9 months. The business community came together for free! No costly consultant. I love that green leads by example, cutting her budget by 17%.
All in all I’m very pleased with this new direction!
Great to see. But as we have all seen in the past it is one thing to put ideas on the table and another to implement these ideas. If Green can start pulling this off she will be fine as mayor.
“Well Done! Kudos to Green and the Business committee. This report took about about 2 months to prepare. Under the old administration would have taken about 9 months. The business community came together for free”
Based on what I see here, it should have taken about 2 days to prepare. In my opinion, it’s full of ambiguous, nebulous and completely regurgitated material. You know what they say, you do get what you pay for, LOL :)
“Based on what I see here, it should have taken about 2 days to prepare. In my opinion, it’s full of ambiguous, nebulous and completely regurgitated material. You know what they say, you do get what you pay for, LOL :)”
Exactly. What does success look like? What are the measurable goals? Who is accountable when they are not met?
If you’re not going to have any goals or hold anyone’s feet to the fire when they aren’t met, this is not worth the paper it’s printed on.
If you look online, the full mandate of the committee was to “identify specific examples of perceptions by the business community of what the City is doing well in regards to creating a better environment for business to grow and generate new jobs, and to provide specific advice on what the City of Prince George could do to create a better environment for business to grow and generate new jobs”.
Personally, I am rather impressed that the report was completed so quickly. A number of hard working people have come together and volunteered their time and expertise to provide the City of Prince George with 16 specific suggestions (likely honed down from a much larger list). Given the mandate, I doubt a paid consultant could have provided a more comprehensive product in a shorter period of time.
Implementation was not a part of the mandate of the select committee. It’s up to the City to implement the advice of the business community, including establishing the specific actions that will be taken, how the effectiveness of those actions will be measured, and who is responsible.
NMG , since you seem unimpressed with the ambiguity of the “regurgitated” suggestions, and since the city is clearly interested in hearing ideas on how to make Prince George a better environment for business to grow, what clear, unambiguous, and original ideas do you have?
Given that the whole process so far should only have taken a couple of days by your estimation, maybe you could take a few minutes to provide some meaningful input into how to improve our City instead of just making off-handed comments about the efforts of the people who are actually investing their own time and effort.
I’m certainly willing to invest as much of my tax dollars to see your ideas as I did to see theirs.
Huh? This is 2012, this list is re-worded from years ago………… The city should have kept up with it over the years. If this is what they came up with there must be people in the city’s workforce not doing their job in the first place.
Now we need recommendations for the people the city can follow – not just for business. The city works for the taxpayer not the other way around.
Oh, it is my day off I must be dreaming…….
One just needs to read the first 3-4 pages of their yearly annual reports to find similar statements…
JohnnyBelt – I agree no accountability or measurable goals – bla-bla-bla
If all these business people can come up with these recommendations, why the heck will it cost $350k for a review that the city should be doing yearly or a Municipal Board……….
Zack Tucker, these aren’t ideas on how to grow business and jobs, they are cut and paste motherhood statements that mean nothing. Examples:
“Continue to support a tough stance on crime and enforcement, and advocate for adequate local resources in the judicial and social response systems”
Huh? What exactly does this mean? What is a “tough stance” and what resources would be “adequate”?
“Implement a public relations campaign to promote the positive attributes about living and working in Prince George, as well as the advantages and incentives offered in starting a business in the city”
Isn’t this part of what IPG was supposed to be doing for years? Would it not make more sense to just evaluate how they did?
“Send a strong signal that the City is open for business through timely decision making that results in capital investment, increases to the tax base and jobs”
What exactly are they talking about? Heck, if they can’t even get the name of the Prince George Golf and CURLING Club right, how are they supposed to be taken seriously on anything else?
The way these things are phrased it makes it sound like the city hasn’t been “open for business”, whatever the heck that is. Give me a break! This is a city that approves virtually everything that comes before council, even if it goes against the OCP and other major planning documents. This is a city that allows second and third rate developments to proceed because they are too scared to say no to a developer.
You want my advice on how to grow business and jobs? Start managing the city in a manner that enables it to grow. For example:
– Say no to ugly developments and proposals that don’t adhere to the OCP.
– Be a complete and utter thorn in the side of government and industry until the air shed is cleaned up. Lobby them to declare PG a sensitive air shed and force heavy industry to clean up their operations.
– Invest in projects (such as a PAC) that help to diversify the city and what it can offer potential residents.
– Stop encouraging sprawl (and the additional costs to the city because of it) and offer tangible incentives for developers to focus on key areas where in-fill is desired
I suppose you could also shake hands with the corporate representatives of the Olive Garden and Old Navy, work to attract workers to the mills that will be defunct within 10 years, develop benchmarks that will compare PG to cities with completely different demographic profiles than PG (well you could use Thunder Bay but their population is also shrinking) or get other ideas from the local businesses that haven’t really done all that much to grow the PG economy either. If we’re being honest, if it wasn’t for the expanded health care and post secondary investment in PG in recent times, the population could be 60,000 instead of 70,000.
I say council should focus on making PG a better city. If they do that, business and people will come. I think the underlying issues are at a much higher level than the amount of time it takes to get a building permit approved or the fact that local business people don’t feel like they are valued enough. PG has serious external threats to its’ future and focusing on some fluffy motherhood stuff as though it will solve the problems is a complete disservice to the people that still live there IMHO.
There is one guarantee out of this. Mayor and council will pass the recommendations and sing the praises of the group for their insight and timely report.
The fact is the 16 recommendations contain nothing new. It is useful that they are listed again as a reminder but that is it. Much of what is recommended already occurs or has been previously flagged.
It is interesting that recommendation #5 is implement the recommendations of the “Core Review”. Huh? How can they say that without knowing what the outcome of that review might be? Or do they?
The answer is obvious. The mayors friends and backers who sit on this group endorse contracting out and privatization of public services because they can then get a bigger piece of the public purse. So it figures they endorse the results of the “Core Review” even though it hasn’t even started yet.
Just remember to “follow the money”.
Mitch 2, if they were as prone to contracting out as you say, they would have contracted out the business committee report. Nowhere in the 16 recommendations is there any reference to contracting out and privatization of public services. With regard to recommendation #5: “Implement the recommendations of the Core Service Review in a timely, bold and accountable manner, especially where they may address cost reduction and containment strategies, or processes to improve service”. I believe the message they are trying to communicate to the City is that if the City is going to spend a substantial amount of hard earned taxpayer’s money on a Core Services Review, they better have the balls to follow through with the recommendations when the results are available.
NMG, thanks for the insightful comments. Too many times on this site posters rail against story after story without providing a single constructive idea of their own. I appreciate your willingness to share your ideas.
Personally, I wasn’t expecting any astonishing new information to come from this report. It was intended to be a list of ideas to create a better environment for business to grow and generate new jobs. These recommendations were designed, in large part, to inform the City where there are obvious areas for improvement.
I am quite curious to see the results of the first part of the report – the list of things the business committee believes the City is currently doing well. Do you think the list will be nearly as long?
I believe that the quality of experience that business people and developers have when they interact with the City on issues like obtaining development permits is extremely important. Local governments should not be any different than businesses when it comes to the importance of customer service.
What is wrong with our city manager? Can’t he head a core review. That should be included in his daily work all year so why are we paying someone else to do his job? When I operated a business, cutting costs was on the table 365 days a year. It’s odd that a city manager has no part in the business he was hired to managage. Boot the bum out! I’m sure there’s a lineup of much better people for that position.
Zack. I don’t disagree with some of your observations and perhaps I am crystal balling a bit on the outcome of the core review but that forecast is based on the results of other core reviews that have suggested contracting out as an option in changing the way services are provided.
As for your observation:
“Local governments should not be any different than businesses when it comes to the importance of customer service.”
What makes you think customer service isn’t already a priority? IMO it is too easy and also demeaning to those who have worked there for years to suggest they aren’t dedicated to customer service. Now if the city staff have never ever heard of the phrase “customer service”, then the problem, as supertech has noted, lies with the city manager.
I agree 100% with NMG and Johnny belt. If this is all they came up with, it was a total waste of time.
BTW, where there is no saving of 17%. “I love that green leads by example, cutting her budget by 17%.”
Show me!!! That is a one line item saving. The total budget Green has is higher than the previous year’s Mayor’s budget.
Couple of add ons.
1. The entire notion about short construction season seems ot be written byt a lower mainlander. Face the facts. Construction time here is as long as it is in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winipeg, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec and points east. It is 12 months long. Some months are colder than others, some wetter than others, some drier than others. Canadians know how to build over a 12 month period. If those in PG don’t, it is time they learned. Watch the RCMP building go up, and watch the office building go up on 5th near Ospika.
A couple of months for a committee of volunteer business people to come up with results yet our million dollars plus group of IPG political appointees could not. I guess the difference is people who own or operate a business just have a far better grasp of the business needs than the photo-op pretenders at IPG.
2. “Align the organizations and measure success through increases in building permits…..”
Building permits increase when people are interested in building here since they want to set up businesses and this is the location that they feel is the next growth opportunity for them. To measure service success based on completely different criteria for establishing businesses here is a totally false indicator.
To think otherwise would mean that the reason businesses move to high growth cities and regions is because they receive better services there not because it is a sound business decision. I have not heard anything so ridiculous in my life.
NMG and Johnny Belt – right on!
BTW – I think the only thing Mayor Green and the business committee have going for themselves is a “Mutual Admiration Club” a MAC…if you go to McDonald’s you can have a “Big MAC Meal” only $8.19…some food for thought, because there ain’t much thought to the above report..Yikes!:(
NMG wrote regarding IPG’s role: “Isn’t this part of what IPG was supposed to be doing for years? Would it not make more sense to just evaluate how they did? “
That evaluation was done in September. The link was provided on this site and I read it for the first time yesterday.
http://princegeorge.ca/cityhall/mayorcouncil/councilagendasminutes/agendas/2011/2011_10_03_430pm/documents/IPG_Services_Review_Report_Final_Sept_27.pdf
From that report the following are a couple of results of the survey.
What are the most ost important economic development services:
â¢Investment attraction90%+
â¢Business retention and attraction 85%+
â¢Downtown Development 60%+
â¢Community development 40%
â¢Workforce training 20%+
(seems to differ considerably with the above)
Customer and Market Focus
â¢IPG effectively communicates the communityâs competitive advantages to customers and stakeholder 90%
â¢IPG staff is known for being âcustomer friendlyâ 80%+
â¢IPG is effective at understanding and addressing the needs of prospects 75%
â¢IPG has an effective referral system with provincial, regional, and other partners 65%+
â¢IPG regularly solicits and incorporates input and feedback from its customers 55%+
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in comparing with peer organizations, I take particular interest in the one from Saskatoon since it appears to be privately, or considerably privately funded.
Here is the web site
http://sreda.com/about-sreda
– one of the first independent economic development agencies to be started in Canada.
– Today, it is one of the most successful.
I love it. Let business put its money where its mouth is. Take over responsibility and quit hitting the City. Beecome responsible for economic development in partnership with the city. Do the work the Chamber is not doing.
Learn how others are doing it.
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could’nt help but notice the tweets on their site
1. SREDA meets Gathers Strategies LLC in LA to discuss the Saskatoon story and to develop a multi-party strategy for Bio-Resource development
2. SREDA meets with both Canada-California and Canada-Nevada Business Councils to discuss Talent attraction and Investment Attraction opps
Final thoughts? The committee’s recommendations are the same olde same olde without substance.
The more often one feeds the same talent the same information, the more often one gets the same outcome.
This community needs help badly!!
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