42 recommendations made to improve City of Lethbridge operations

The report, however, notes that the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly reduced the city’s revenues, so implementing all 42 recommendations in a short span might not be feasible.

The recommendations for each section are as follows:

Electric Utility:
- Expand the use of asset management practices, increase the adoption of standardized processes and systems
- Improve capital planning processes to target sustainable growth
- Increase the return on investment to better reflect the city’s capital investments and risks
- Revisit Developer’s Choice through another round of pilots
- Consider an alternative governance and operating model that would increase its independence from the city
Water and Wastewater:
- Transition stormwater services from a tax-supported model to one that is rate-supported
- Evaluate increasing potable water storage capacity
- Consider revising the provision of non-core services, particularly for sanitary sewer corrective maintenance with in-home water services
- Consider an alternative governance and operating model that would increase its independence from the city
Utility Services:
- Explore using other billing service providers that are better suited to small utilities and municipalities and are more cost-effective
- Consider replacing the meter data aggregation and dissemination function that was developed in-house with one that is already integrated with a billing system
- Provide better customer data and analytics services
Waste and Recycling Services:
- Expand the use of curbside collection to increase productivity
- Develop a cost of service model that accounts for the cost of delivering residential collection services
- Develop a cost of service pricing model to justify rates, understanding cost drivers like market rates and a return on investment
Transportation:
- Adjustments to snow removal and street sweeping methods, costs, and benefits of varying degrees of service delivery
- Consider alternate approaches to snow removal budgeting and reviving the Snow Removal Reserve to stabilize expenditures
- Evaluate cost recovery models for parking assets, which may increase rates and fees, and cessation of RV parking spots
- Actively enforce established policies and procedures to improve efficiency and continuity of service delivery
- Review the allocation of internal and external service delivery, which may help to improve cost while maintaining current service levels
Infrastructure Administration:
- Consider restructuring to improve collaboration, line of sight, and span of control to better align the infrastructure administration and services divisions
- Modernize capital program oversight, planning, and coordination activities to reduce waste, duplication of effort, and less productive labour
- Redesign the city’s approach to capital project oversight, including a more consistent mandate
- Internally identify potential improvements in operating efficiency and effectiveness across infrastructure units
Parks:
- Consider converting portions of maintained parkland to natural areas, which could save costs and water, and deliver environmental benefits
- Modestly reduce the frequency of maintenance on turf and dryland areas
- Consolidate parkland in future residential developments
- Consider sustaining the current tree canopy in developed areas rather than expand it
Fleet Services:
- Consider reducing the size of the city’s fleet and share vehicles with business units that have lower usage
- Use data analytics to provide insight into performance issues, bottlenecks, and cost drivers
- Streamline the process of prioritizing and scheduling work orders, as well as the delivery of maintenance needs
- Improve procurements by having longer-term contracts, provide procurement funding during capital planning, formalize procurement project charters and calendars by business unit
- Improve transparency and meet business units’ expectations by using service level agreements with targets
- Establish a policy to reduce the reserve to a much lower level
Galt Museum:
- Incrementally increase fund development through fundraising and planning giving activities, as well as increasing memberships, renewals, and engagement processes
- Reduce operating hours during slower times of the year
- Improve monitoring and communication of the museum’s community impact and for the city to implement a performance-based funding approach
- Consider reorganizing the governance structure to support clarity in its mandate with priorities, roles, responsibilities, and oversight
City-Wide Opportunities:
- Deliver more citizen-centric customer service that focuses on efficiency and simplicity
- Reorganize city departments and business units to encourage collaboration and information sharing
- Modestly reduce staffing levels in non-essential services through attrition and consolidation of some business units
- Review the typical workload and peak times across public operations

By implementing these recommendations, KPMG forecasts a potential positive financial impact of $40.1-million between 2020 and 2024.

The next steps for the city, as recommended by the consultants, as follows:

Assess, accept, and refine the opportunities presented
Validate and refine the expected benefits from the selected opportunities
Charter a program to implement the opportunities and allocate a budget
Establish a governance structure to oversee the program
Develop the action plan and target timelines

The full report on Phase 2 of the Operational Review can be accessed online here.

Our story on the findings of Phase 1 can be found here.

Phase 3, the final phase, should be completed by November 2020.

Financial impacts to the city for implementing the recommendations. (Supplied by City of Lethbridge)

Financial comparator of similarly-sized cities. (Supplied by City of Lethbridge)

Expenditures per capita in similarly-sized cities. (Supplied by City of Lethbridge)

Debt per capita and debt to revenues in similarily-sized cities. (Supplied by City of Lethbridge)

by David Opinko

42 recommendations made to improve City of Lethbridge operations

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