Coun, Brian Skakun was right.
He wasn't completely right, but he was mostly right, about the snow removal problem last December and January. In this space, I accused him of "political grandstanding" and said he was throwing city workers under the snow plow to boost his popularity heading into an election year after he posted comments and photos on his Facebook page showing snow removal equipment sitting in city yards. .
I was wrong.
The $131,900 Mercury Associates report presented to city council last week largely vindicates Skakun for his views last winter, which also angered many of his council colleagues. The report is a shocking account of the state of disrepair of most of the city's snow removal equipment and the lack of coordinated planning based on current information to tackle problem areas quickly. When pressed at last Monday's council meeting by Coun. Cameron Stolz, Mercury president said 16 pieces of equipment are ready for the scrap heap immediately and half the fleet should be retired by the end of next year.
In other words, not enough time and money was put into maintaining the city's snow removal vehicles over many years. That lead to the "perfect storm," in Skakun's words, seen last December and January of multiple heavy snowfalls over a short period of time, a labour disruption, city equipment unfit to do the job, too many staff workers out on holidays and too little rental equipment available to pick up the slack.
Some of the city equipment is in such bad shape that Skakun rightfully asked how anyone could expect city workers to do their job. While the contents and recommendations of the Mercury report are solid, Skakun was also correct to question the need for the city to hire the consultant in the first place.
"I investigated what was going on, I talked to the workers," Skakun said in a fiery address to council last Monday. "Are we behind on capital? For sure. Are we behind in training? There's no doubt about that, but all you had to do was talk to the employees and you could find all of that out."
Skakun's comments expose a divide between management and staff, where not only are managers not talking to front-line employees about problems and how to fix them, but even if they were, the managers don't believe what they're hearing. As a result, a consultant was hired to explain what the problem is and how to fix it, even though Coun. Lyn Hall agreed that there was expertise at City Hall and in the community to get to the bottom of the snow removal problem.
In other words, the problem is bigger than snow removal but hopefully another consultant doesn't need to be hired to explore the management-employee divide at the City of Prince George and suggest solutions. That is a reasonable task for mayor and council to ask city manager Beth James to address and report back with action items. If that involves restructuring departments and removing managers who see their staff as the problem, not the solution, so be it.
Returning to snow removal, Skakun should also direct some of his righteous anger at the fellow looking back at him in the mirror. As Stolz went on to point out at last Monday's meeting, the Mercury report is not the first time the city has received outside advice on snow removal. Another consultant provided two reports, the first one back in 2009, that alerted city council to its aging and poorly maintained fleet. While some steps were taken to address the problems, based on the recommendations in the reports, last winter clearly demonstrated that they were inadequate.
Skakun (and Stolz) were on city council five years ago, so they do bear some of the responsibility for not recognizing the extent of the problem and addressing it with a greater sense of urgency when they had the opportunity. That's not the consultant's fault. The buck stops with the council of the day.
As Hall pointed out, city council has heard loud and clear that residents expect Grade A roads and Grade A service to maintain those roads. Hopefully, both administration and city council have learned a lesson that the bill always comes due and it's usually better to pay sooner, rather than later.
