The towns of Midland and Penetanguishene and the townships of Tiny and Tay will be conducting a joint service delivery review in an effort to find efficiencies in combining services in North Simcoe.
All four municipalities have applied for a provincial grant to help complete Phase 1 of the study of 11 services that are delivered in the area.
"A $100,000 (fund) was approved by the provincial government with regards to this joint services review," said John Skorobohacz, acting chief administrative officer, Town of Midland.
"We made the joint application last year and to my understanding, pretty well any municipality that made a joint submission with neighbouring communities to the municipal government for this funding was pretty well approved. That's a good news," he said.
Currently, the four municipalities are seeking proposals from consultants with expertise in municipal service review.
"The RFP (request for proposal) itself provides a fair degree of flexibility for municipalities," said Skorobohacz. "We can accept a number of different proponents to do different reviews, subject to the speciality of the company that is making the submission."
He added this will help determine how many services can be reviewed by the first draft deadline of June 15 and eventually for the final draft submission at the end of June.
For the grant application, the CAOs from the four municipalities went through a number of sessions to determine which 11 services were priority for all, said Jeff Lees, CAO, Town of Penetanguishene.
"We have decided between the four municipalities what is priority for us," Lees said. "We will collectively review them and try and get some consensus on what's good for North Simcoe as a whole."
The services listed include human resources, health and safety, procurement, information technology, communications marketing and tourism, and legal services, Lees said, as well as land-use planning, fire and emergency services, and emergency management.
"We're already doing joint service delivery on building services between Penetanguishene and Midland," said Skorobohacz. "We're already sharing a building department between the two communities. Likewise, from a fire management perspective, we're already sharing a chief. Now we're casting the net a little broader, looking at our other neighbours to say, OK what can we do collectively among the four of us. (Are) there some synergies that we haven't really taken full advantage of."
He said, from Midland's perspective, he's hoping the firms are able to complete a review of 80% of the services listed.
"That still gives us some opportunities in the future to go look at some other services as well," said Skorobohacz. "From what I understand, this is going to be an ongoing provincial program for a number of years, because the province is trying to drive innovation and change in local government and I think it's going to remain their priority for a number of years."
A potential Phase 2 in the future will consider additional services or services listed above that were not selected for completion in the initial phase, said Daryl O'Shea, director of technology and communications, Township of Tay.
"Primarily, it's an opportunity for us to increase our organizational capacity as a group, potentially imrpove services and sort of decrease the increase in our costs," said Doug Luker, CAO, Tiny Township. "Our costs are always going up, but by collectively working together we can perhaps decrease that increase going forward."
This is the province's way of encouraging municipalities to work together, instead of prvincial government recommednation amalgamations, he said.
"They decided to provide funding to municipalities to see if they could improve their service delivery," Luker said.
The township, he said, already shares some of the services with its neighbours.
"Our economic development coroporation is shared," said Luker. "We are also joint owners of the airport. The fire department has a number of agreements for cooperative purchasing and mutual aid type of arrangements. There's lots of that going on already, so this is to look at services perhaps we're not sharing at the moment and perhaps we could."
Some of the other services that could be shared, he said, could be joint human resources, health and safety, coroporate buying, and technologies.
The deadline for proposals is 2 p.m. on March 3, and the proposals are to be submitted to the Town of Midland.
