The federal Liberals may have been the ones campaigning on "real change" but it was politicians on the local level who seemed determined to differentiate themselves from the administration of yore.
The dawn of 2015 brought the first full year of the new city council and with that, the group of nine embarked on a year of wiping the slate clean as the city celebrated its centennial.
Less than two weeks into the new year came the first move with the announcement that city manager Beth James was out the door. James had been with the city for 20 months - coming on board in May 2013 to fill the hole left by former chief administrative officer Derek Bates in the fall of 2012 - and with her went about $140,000 in severance pay.
In making the announcement, Mayor Lyn Hall said the "mutually agreed" upon decision for James to leave signaled an intention to set a new direction for Prince George.
That new direction became more apparent over the next couple of months following a city council sit down for its first strategic planning session and the announcement that 29-year employee and interim CAO Kathleen Soltis would be taking the city manager job on a permanent basis.
"Council wanted to ensure that we went through our due diligence process and we wanted to make sure we had stability, not only in the organization but also within the community," Hall said after news of Soltis's three-year contract with the city was made public in late March. "We've gone through a strategic session which (Soltis) was part of with the other directors, so that has really set the tone and set the path for council."
Soltis was already at the helm for staffing changes made to align the city's workforce with goals the new council said it wanted to reach.
Chris Bone, who had been let go as the city's communications and citizen engagement manager in 2014, was brought back into the fold as the manager of social planning and there were other shifts in the planning department to provide a focus on sustainable community development.
"Ultimately all the changes that have been made come about as a result of council's strategic planning session at the beginning of February," said Soltis, pointing to the four pillars of the city's myPG plan - city government, social development, economic development and environment. "For the next few years, we want to emphasize the environment and the social development more so than has occurred over the past few years."
Based on the results of the 2014 referendum, the new year began with what some believed to be cleaner water. Council ordered the shut off of the city's fluoride injection system on Dec. 15, 2014, after 60 years of operation.
By the middle of year, another long-standing P.G. institution was also turned off. On June 12, the mayor announced Initiatives Prince George wouldn't live to see the new year as the city's external economic development arm.
Instead, the city said it would be saving up to $500,000 annually by bringing the three-decade-old operation inside the walls of city hall and running it with their own team.
The new department, operating under the auspices of planning and development, officially began at the end of September with the start of the city's new economic development manager Melissa Barcellos.
It wasn't the smoothest of transitions, with a committee meant to advise the hand over never materializing and the IPG board of directors resigning en masse. When the initial announcement about IPG was made, the board and IPG CEO Heather Oland were caught off guard.
"IPG, like any organization, has been an evolving entity over time; organizations improve and develop. IPG - as far as having a high-functioning team, a very talented team - I think, from my point of view, is at their zenith of focus and ability right now," former board chair Steve Nycholat said. "So the decision of council, which is theirs to make, it sort of comes at a point where I'm worried it will interrupt some of the momentum."
As Barcellos told the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George board of directors at its December meeting, her job right now - with the two employees already hired - is to continue with the programs IPG was running.
Applications for a new economic development advisory committee, meant to "strengthen communication and collaboration between the city of Prince George and its respective economic development partners while informing the development of an economic development strategy" for the city, are being accepted until Jan. 12.
The purported new tone of council was set with the election of Lyn Hall as mayor, who, in response to a question posed during the municipal campaign by Coun. Garth Frizzell, identified himself as more likely to be a "council mayor" as opposed to a "CEO mayor" - big on teamwork - and promised more community interaction and accessibility.
That promise was fulfilled with a series of neighbourhood meetings, beginning with a session in the Hart in the summer and weekly meetings around the city throughout the month of October.
But a lack of community consultation on what proved to be the most-controversial action of the year had some calling for the new council's heads.
Coun. Murry Krause bore the brunt of that heat after city council backed his recommendation in an 8-1 vote (with Coun. Albert Koehler opposed) to change the name of Fort George Park to Lheildi T'enneh Memorial Park.
The decision was made in one fell swoop at a June 15 meeting, leading online commenters and letter writers to bemoan the change and lack of community input in the decision.
Prior to being a city space, the park was part of a Lheidli T'enneh village that was destroyed in 1913 after a fire was set to forcibly remove people from their homes.
Krause, who also chaired the city's 100th anniversary committee, said the decision grew from a few years of discussion about how to mark the 1915 incorporation, as well as his years as chair of the Union of B.C. Municipalities' committee on First Nations relations and the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report.
The city committee agreed early on that in celebrating the centennial, there was also a need to be sensitive to the fact it may not be a cause for celebration for everyone and that changing the name of a park isn't meant to smooth over years of injustice, Krause said.
"Renaming the park doesn't mean that all of a sudden we have the ultimate relationship we want to have with the Lheidli, but it's one indicator that we're walking the walk," he said.
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