Better training and professional development opportunities to help build greater capacity for city council ward office staff underpin recommendations in a report on improving councillors’ relationship with citizens.

The City of Calgary’s Ward Boundary Commission presented 16 recommendations earlier this week that will be reviewed at a full meeting of Calgary city council on Sept. 17.  The commission was tasked not with looking at ward boundaries or adding more councillors, but with making the current 14-ward system more effective.

The recommendations from the panel come after nine months of work, including interviews with city administration, councillors, ward staff, citizens, and other stakeholders through online surveys, an engagement portal and five pop-up events across Calgary. The report said it heard back from more than 1,000 people.

Five key themes house the 16 recommendations: Setting council members up for success, Maximizing impact, Mechanisms for democratic accountability, Knowing your ward, and Future Commission considerations (particularly around municipal political parties).

Jordan Pinkster, a former ward office staffer and chair of the Ward Boundary Commission, said that what was clear in talking with the various groups is that people want a stronger connection with city council. He said citizens want to know what councillors are doing, why they’re doing it and they want councillors to know what they care about, what they need funded and that someone is advocating for them.

“When you look at the job of a councillor, capacity is just so tight, and especially for new councillors that are coming into these jobs, it’s almost impossible for them to understand the breadth of the relationships and the magnitude of the job at every stage of their journey,” he said.

Part of the training the commission suggested centres on professional development and detailed onboarding so councillors and staff know the complexities of the job. Further, they want to be able to support staff with a mental health strategy.

“Turnover in any office is a destructive thing in terms of continuity, and being able to serve the people that you’re representing, that’s especially compounded in a political office,” Pinkster said.

Different allocations for ward offices

Recommendation #5 suggests that City of Calgary administration prepare ward budgets based on specific challenges that they have in each ward.

“In our interviews, many Councillors acknowledged that wards in the inner core faced challenges that placed a greater strain on their staff and office resources,” the report read.

Pinkster said they looked at a potential base budget with a potential sliding scale for wards that face more development or redevelopment issues, or have more community associations to work with.

“There are some modest investments for council to invest in themselves, and then there’s some suggestions on best practices that council could choose to accept or not that might help them be able to respond to the growing pressures of the job,” Pinkster said.

Along with professional development and training, Pinkster said the commission suggested a human resources strategy, along with the mental health and wellness component. That would include psychological health, crisis management and effective communication strategies.

“Burnout rates and morale are low in this kind of work,” he said.

“You are getting the worst of the worst in terms of emails and phone calls and people yelling at you.”

On the human resources side, ward staff are hired as contractors by the ward office and not incorporated into the City of Calgary’s operation. That leaves job security, protection and other benefits lacking compared with others in the organization, Pinkster said.

“As a recovering political staffer myself, I recognize we need to give councillors the utmost flexibility to make decisions that they want within their offices, the skill sets they need the management of those teams, etcetera,” he said.

“We thought there was a significant missing piece in terms of that human resource support that should be wrapped around councillor staff.”

Continuous improvement is important

Pinkster said they also looked at improving data access for citizens, like how councillors voted on certain issues. They wanted to address an accountability aspect of that interaction with citizens.  

Quite often citizens are forced to look through minutes of meetings to find councillor actions on topics important to them. Having it in an easy-to-read online dashboard could help citizens stay more informed, he said.  

“We wanted to create some space, create an opportunity for councillors that want to add that further context, have space within city of Calgary platform through the websites that are offered to them to be able to expand on those rationales,” Pinkster said.  

“Now, if that’s political spin, so be it. But I think them going through that communications exercise to justify their actions to their electorate is a very important part of this process.”

Pinkster also said they’d like to see more robust data collected by the city drilled down to the ward level to help inform councillors and their offices.

Ward 11 Coun. Kourtney Penner said there are some gaps in the way things are done at the ward level and opportunities to improve the system.

“I think we should always approach the job, both ours and our office councillor staff with continuous improvement,” she said.

Improved systems don’t always mean satisfied citizens, Coun. Penner said.

“I think that we have to sort of balance the services that we’re offering with the expectations of residents, and they may not always go hand in hand,” she said.