High turnover cost hamlets 'buckets of money'
16 communities replace senior administrative officers in one year
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Monday, July 3, 2017
NUNAVUT
Sixteen Nunavut communities replaced their senior administrative officers in 2016.
"I'm not sure why. There's a different story in every community," Brian Fleming told Iqaluit city council June 27
Fleming has been executive director of both the Nunavut Association of Municipalities (NAM) and the Nunavut Association of Municipal Administrators (NAMA) since 2015.
Prior to this position, he served as SAO for Sanikiluaq for almost 23 years, then Iglulik for 10 years.
"There's a very high turnover, and whenever an SAO turns over there's a good chance communities lose lots of money in transition. It costs them a bucket of money to bring someone in to keep the house in order while they're looking for a new SAO," said Fleming.
Fleming suggested one of the reasons for the high turnover is the lack of performance evaluations.
He went five years without an evaluation in Iglulik.
"It's not rocket science. It's a matter of getting your expectations clarified with the SAO, with council," he said.
Without evaluations, the process can be unclear.
"From things I've heard, you have a council meeting. Two days later you have a couple of councilors talking away at the Co-op or Northern. 'Did you hear what the SAO said at the last meeting?' 'Yeah, we should terminate him, that's terrible.' And then the SAO is gone, just like that," Fleming said.
He added NAM has a template for such evaluations from the Canadian Association of Municipal Administrators, but it needs to be "Nunavutized" a bit.
Coun. Kuthula Matshazi said he thinks it's important to have professionals running municipalities, and wondered if professional development like this could spread to municipality staff as well.
"It might improve the caliber of people that we have, and maybe, to some extent assist in retention," he said.
Fleming said the organization is not quite there.
"But I can envision we'll reach that point once we have the SAO situation stabilized," he said, adding the organization is trying to be more responsive to SAOs.
"They've been beat up at a council meeting or something. They give them a hard time and they just need someone to talk to," he said, adding that many SAOs aren't interested in bringing Community and Government Services (CGS) into issues, because that just adds another layer of complication.
"But they (SAOs) just need a sounding board to walk them through something or they may have an idea and they may not be too comfortable calling CGS about."
Fleming said issues which have arisen in past years led to mistrust at the municipal level toward the government department, but also led to NAM not being as responsive to communities as it should have been.
"CGS can't do everything and there is the mistrust at the municipal level ... It is what it is," he said.
