City of Powell River Mayor Dave Formosa has asked staff to be more responsive to questions and requests from the public.
Formosa’s comments came in the wake of a delegation at a recent committee-of-the-whole meeting about truck traffic on Glacier Street.
Paul LeBlanc spoke about the matter, saying it was a safety issue. “The hill is very steep and it has a dip at the bottom,” he said.
If one of the trucks lost its brakes coming down the hill, LeBlanc said, it would likely to crash into a house, an apartment building, Church of the Assumption or Assumption School.
Formosa thanked LeBlanc for coming to the meeting.
Council had directed staff at the beginning of March to start discussions with commercial trucking companies about a truck route in the city, Formosa said. He expressed some frustration over the lack of action on that direction.
Stan Westby, the city’s chief administrative officer, said that subsequent to that direction, he received a memo from the manager of engineering services asking where that sat in terms of priorities because of capital work that was on board. “I have not responded to that because I know he has gone ahead and worked on his capital issues instead,” said Westby. “Long story short, it hasn’t been moving forward but I think from what I’m hearing today I’ll be able to let him know where it sits in terms of priorities.”
Formosa noted that some time ago he brought up the suggestion of having staff trained through a Super Host program, in order to be able to respond to inquiries and requests from the public. The program teaches customer service skills. “I’m hearing from people that they call city hall and in some cases, they get great service, in other cases, they don’t even get return phone calls after three calls,” he said. “Or, they have an issue and it goes on for one year, two years, three years, still nothing done.”
There is always capital work going on, Formosa said. “But you have to create your day so that you have so much time for the public,” he said. “That’s just a direction, Stan, you are going to have to give your staff.”
Westby said that was noted. “I will heed the direction from the mayor and will bring this forward to staff and give them very hard direction on that,” he said.
Westby also said that the day before, he had received a report from Brian Cruise, acting manager of human resources, on Super Host training for city employees and he expected that report would be on the agenda for the next committee meeting.
