Transcript: Special (Open) Council - 2026/07/27

Speaker A · It.

Speaker B · Okay. Good evening everyone. It's Monday, July 27, and we're starting with the special open council for this evening. I'll call the meeting to order. Acknowledging we have Councillor Newton online in the room. Councillor Graham Thompson and Riddle regrets until later this evening from Councilor Paltiel. And not sure where Councillor King is just yet, but we'll get underway. So we respectfully acknowledge that the land on which we gather is the traditional territory of the Hussainich people, which includes the Sartlip and Seyot first nations. And especially prescient as we celebrated 75 years on Saturday. And we're fortunate to have Seut elder Mavis Underwood, among others, representing and performing at that event.

Speaker B · Okay, so I'll ask for an approval of the agenda with an amendment to add the late report, revised appendix A and presentation to item 4. 2, please.

Speaker C · So moved.

Speaker B · Seconded by anybody? Thank you. Any discussion?

Speaker C · Any.

Speaker B · Any opposed? None that carries. Motion to convene committee of the whole. Moved. Seconded. Thank you. Acknowledging normally we call upon the acting mayor to chair, but the acting mayor doesn't appear to be present presently. So if council so wishes, I'll carry on. Okay, I'll call the question. Any opposed to convening committee of the whole? None. Motion carries. 4. 2 is Parks and Trail service review. And we look at for staff presentation, please.

Speaker D · Thank you. Through the mayor, I wanted to just introduce a few staff who are here and who will be presenting on parts of the Parks and Trails service review. This is Sarah Grant. Sarah Grant is our business analyst. And we also have Elliot. Elliot is our GIS Corp technician and he will also be doing a presentation a little bit later. And of course we have the manager of Parks, facilities and fleet, Kyle Modiak, and the directors of engineering and planning are here to answer questions as well. So we're happy to present to you today the Parks and Trails Service baseline. As council may be aware, we're undertaking a service review of all of our services in advance of the next election.

Speaker D · Similarly, we had done a workforce plan in the last term between 2024 and 2027. And so we wanted to make some improvements to that where we could maybe dig a little deeper and provide council with fulsome information in order to be able to make informed decisions. So as council's aware, we follow an integrated planning and reporting framework. And the purpose of integrated planning and reporting is to ensure that we're aligning strategic operational financial planning in order to make effective decision making, recognizing that all things are connected. And any decisions that we make have an impact elsewhere. So the service review framework provides a. It's an evidence based approach, multi dimensional approach to assess and improve municipal services by first collecting the baseline data.

Speaker D · And what's really important and what we're going to be presenting tonight is just the baseline evidence, which we documented, and it's objective information rather than interpretation. And then we're going to be coming back to council with the analysis of what we've learned and trying to look beyond just the symptoms that we see and really digging into what are the root causes of maybe some of the challenges and strengths of the service that we found.

Speaker D · And always it's in order to be able to improve the service and have a more effective and efficient service. And that goes beyond just parks and trails, but for all of our services. So when we're doing our service review, we want to make sure that we do a comprehensive review. And that means that we look at all aspects of a service. So the foundational is the legislation, bylaws, structural, how the service is organized, operational, how we deliver that service, cultural, how do people, the community, staff, council, how do we all interact with that service, and then financial. So how the service is funded and how is it sustained.

Speaker D · And what we're trying to achieve is by looking at all aspects that service from an evidence based perspective, that we're going to have a clearer understanding of where there are gaps in the service. And those gaps, of course, can create bottlenecks or misunderstandings. And we want to make sure that we are really clear before moving forward and completing the Parks and Trails Master plan. So just some examples and first we're going to just take a look at the foundational baseline of parks and trails. And I'm not going to go through all of this. It's in the report and so you'll have time to review that on its own. But we did do a very comprehensive review of what we call the hierarchy of legislation.

Speaker D · All of you are aware that we are creatures of the province. And so the legislation that allows us to have a park service is through the community charter and the Local Government act that allows us to provide, regulate, acquire, protect and manage parks. And it tells us how we're going to do that. Municipalities are not obligated to have parks, but once we do, then we are under certain obligations and different legislation is enacted and that we have to follow once that happens. So some of those are the Environmental Management Act, Fisheries Act, Species at Risk act, accessibility, Workman's compensation and so forth. And then we have our municipal bylaw and so the parks bylaw number 804, which has been amended recently, is the bylaw that speaks to what our parks, what we can do within our parks, what we can't do, how we can regulate them and how they're going to be used.

Speaker D · And on top of the parks, which was recently, if council remembers, there was a recent amendment where we now allow daycares in parks, and that was in order to facilitate a daycare in Centennial Park. So we had made an amendment to that bylaw, animal control bylaw, sign bylaw, and all of these bylaws impact how people engage within our parks and also our responsibilities to the public. And then we also have council policy and strategic direction. So we have the official community plan, asset management plan and so forth community wildfire resiliency plan. All of these plans also provide policy direction for parks and trails. And we will talk about that more towards the end of the presentation with respect to what changes have occurred through the development of those plans and their impacts to parks and trails.

Speaker D · And then we have our service planning and capital delivery. So we have corporate planning that then also impacts the way that we do our services, the way we do our capital planning, the way we do our strategic implementation planning, which of course are all approved through council. And then internally we have procedures and standards that we follow, and much of those are legislated. And therefore. But then we also have internal standards that we apply to our parks and operating standards. So then I'm going to talk about structural. So when we're talking about a structural baseline, that's when we're talking about how does our organization, how does it, how do we organize the corporate structure in order to be able to provide parks?

Speaker D · And we look at things like organizational accountabilities, service classification, scope of service, what are the assets that are owned by that service. And that shapes the way that we do our work, which is separate from the operational. It really just creates the structure for the way that we deliver our work. So our department for parks is engineering. Our division is parks, facilities and fleet. And then we have parks and trails. And then we have service functions within that, and activities. It breaks down into each of those service functions, breaks down into activities, and those activities then break into individual work activities that are completed by staff.

Speaker D · And this forms what we do, who's responsible for doing it, and whether or not it sits with this department or sits within this service or sits within another service. Then we break it down into service classifications. So for the parks and trails, we have specific service classifications. And that's really the way in which we organize our assets in order to better understand and define them, both for our staff and for the public. And when we're looking at our service levels and our investment into our assets, we're looking at it both from a classification as well as a service level perspective. Our scope of service for the parks and trails system.

Speaker D · Oh, and I want to go back to. Whoops, I'm going forwards for some reason. Why? Every time I push this, it's going forward, even if I push backwards. Thanks. Yeah. No, to the next one. Thanks. So when we're looking at the service classifications, you can see that the parks and trails service takes care of more than just parks and trails. They also take care of the landscaping and boulevards, the municipal facility grounds, as well as the municipal docks. So their mandate is beyond just the parks and trails service. And this is important because of who's responsible for developing it, but also who's responsible for the strategy around it.

Speaker D · And really, knowing the ownership of a service, of a function within a service is important to know who's responsible for the future service that's going to be provided there being able to delegate that work. Okay, so we have 71 park and public space sites, which. And could you move that, Pamela? Just the. No, sorry. The zoom. Yeah. Thanks, Emily. So our current parks and trail System, we have 71 park and public space sites representing 103. 33 hectares of municipal parkland, 55 developed sites, and 16 undeveloped sites. And that is the scope of our parks and trails system. Okay. And we have. Not only do we have the assets of the parks, so the 103 acres of parks, but we also have 561 unique amenities and facilities within our parks that are also managed by that service.

Speaker D · So those include park buildings, washrooms, hard services, sports fields, irrigation, lighting, benches, picnic tables, waste receptacles, drinking fountains, public docks, and all of those have to be maintained and they have to be replaced within the parks and trails system. So that is. And it's distributed across the asset inventory and also is based on. There's a standard of amenities based on the classification and the service level that we provide to each of our parks and trails. Service relationships. So we have both internal relationships. So we work on an integrated system within our district and many services are provided to parks and trails as well as parks and trail service providing services internally to other departments, as mentioned.

Speaker D · So parks and trails supports, roads and drains with respect to the landscaping of boulevards, supports facilities with respect to the maintenance of our grounds fleet obviously provides the equipment and the vehicles required to do the parks and trail service, and so on.

Speaker D · So we're continuously. And this is where our integrated planning has to come in. Because we have to make sure that the right hand is speaking to the left hand in order for us to be able to move forward and have a really clear understanding of what our requirements are. As the service is going to grow. Each change that happens to the parks and trails service or to the roads department or something that is developed through planning is going to have incremental impact to the work of the other areas. And so having a really clear understanding of who our relationships are. Also, we work with a significant amount of external relationships.

Speaker D · So of course, our first nations neighbors, the crd, community association, sports organizations, environmental stewardship groups, schools, volunteers, contractors, and we also have leases and license holders, as well as agreements for the use of the space in our parks and trail service, making it a pretty complex service.

Speaker D · And this is our staffing baseline. So when we're looking at, if we remember what our organizational structure is within our parks and trails service, the engineering department, we have a director of engineering. And our calculations are that, you know, our director of engineering provides about 7. 5% of his time to the parks and trail service. The manager of parks, facilities and fleet spends about 55% of his time providing support to the parks and Trails Service. Oversight and support. We have an administrator who provides 33% of her time, our arborist about 10% of his time. And then we have a parks supervisor, a parks lead hand, and we have seven, actually seven parks laborers.

Speaker D · I don't know why I have eight there, but we have seven parks laborers. So in total, we have about 10 full time staff who are providing all of those services within our, within the district. So operationally is, you know, when we were talking about structure, it's how we structure it within the district. But for operational baseline, we are talking more about how is it delivered in practice. So what do we do? How do we spend our time managing our parks? And so it's an integrated model, as I said. So Parks and trails is supported by many internal services to support them in doing their work.

Speaker D · However, most of the work, of course, operationally is done by our parks and trails laborers. When we're talking about the care and maintenance of our parks and trails. So it combines proactive maintenance with reactive response. We have a reactive response, especially with inspections. And I'll talk about that a little bit more. Weather, vandalism and unforeseen needs. So we also, you know, we have to Be able to build in some resiliency, that is to the service so that we can respond when requests come. However, mostly it's on a planned, cyclical, preventative and seasonal operational system. Right now we don't have a dedicated work order system, so it's mostly paper based tracking around the way that we do our work.

Speaker D · And we will be talking about that in a few minutes with Sarah and Elliot about the documentation of our resources within the parks and trail service. So, service levels. So we're looking at the categories of parks and now the categories are directly attached to the service levels. Service level A is Centennial park and service level B is Romnot and Helhelic Park. So those are community parks and they have the highest level of service. Now, we don't have the same number of community parks as we do to neighborhood parks. However, those parks, when we look at it, and if you have time to look at our appendix, it lists all of the hours and the costs associated with each of the parks and the attention that's placed to.

Speaker D · So level A and B apply to higher use and more intensively maintained parks. Again, that also speaks to the number of amenities and facilities that are within those parks, which also increases the service level that's required in order to ensure that we maintain a level of safety within our responsibilities in the public spaces.

Speaker D · Level C and D applied to regular and low intensity maintained parks. So that would be neighborhood parks, pathways and linkages, trails, Pathways and linkages and beaches. Then when we would be looking at level D, we're looking at, yeah, green spaces and shoreline access. And the distinction between those is really around what amenities we provide and how much care is required for those. And again, there's a detailed list of the efforts that are put to each of the assets that we have in the appendix. Level E applies to irregular or infrequently maintained parkland with limited amenities. And level F applies to the inaccessible or low use or what we said was undeveloped parkland, which is really more.

Speaker D · The services that we provide to that are more on an inspection basis just to make sure that they continue to be safe and are not going to cause any damage to our district. And so, and I won't go into more detail, but these are the types of, of services that we have. And then we also have a description of all of the activities. And this allows us also to look at based on the type of park, the service applied to it, the amenities applied to it, as to what the average costs are for delivering these different levels of parks. So risk management is Mostly done on a proactive inspection basis. So that is built into the service our staff regularly inspect.

Speaker D · And again, the inspections are based on the level of use by the community and the risks associated with that. We want to make sure, of course, that our most used parks are inspected more frequently. And because our staff are in there more frequently, they are doing that on a continuous basis. And then that also can drive work, because when they're in the parks and they are doing those inspections, they are going to create work orders as required that will be followed up on depending on the risk of the condition. So we do the condition monitoring as well as stewardship. And so when we're looking at our natural assets and invasive species as an example, it's not necessarily one of the activities that we have, but it is something that we do more on a risk basis.

Speaker D · We do have some volunteer organizations that support us in that work, but it isn't something that's fully integrated as work that we do at this time. So I'm going to now turn it over to Sarah and Elliot. Here you are. So I'm going to turn my mic off and they're going to talk about our asset condition baseline.

Speaker E · Thanks. Building on that overview, I will introduce the Parks and Trails Asset Condition baseline. So before the District conducted the Parks and Trails Service review, information about park assets was held in several different locations. And in some cases, this information information existed primarily through staff knowledge and operational experience. There was no centralized source that clearly identified what assets existed, where they were located, or what condition they were in. And this created difficulty for determining replacement schedules or when asset renewal may be required. This was a gap in the District's overall understanding of the Parks and Trail Service. And to address this, a comprehensive inventory was completed to establish and document the current asset baseline. The process for documenting current Parks and Trails assets required two key areas of expertise.

Speaker E · That first area was an internal parks subject matter expert who had detailed operational knowledge of the assets. And the second was the district's GIS technician who developed the GIS Parks asset management system. During the summer of 2025, field information was collected and entered into the GIS system and for each asset. So staff documented the location within the park, a photograph of the asset so it could be easily found, a condition assessment, an estimated replacement value, asset characteristics such as materials and construction notes, and where required, notes regarding repairs, refinishment, refinishing requirements, or replacement needs. This information was uploaded into the GIS asset inventory, allowing both the asset information and the geographic location to be viewed together.

Speaker E · The final product is an interactive inventory that allows staff to see what assets exist, where they are located and what condition they are in. Instead of relying on separate spreadsheets, photographs or institutional knowledge, the information is now stored in one centralized system. Staff can view an asset on the map, open its records, see photographs, review condition information and access supporting notes. This gives the district a consistent foundation for asset management, planning, life cycle and replacement forecasting, capital budgeting, condition monitoring over time, service level analysis, and future park planning and improvement projects. I will turn it over to the district's GIS technician who will walk through the development of the GIS inventory methodology, explain how the information is captured and maintained within the system and demonstrate the final asset inventory map and associated asset records.

Speaker F · Thank you, Sarah. Through the Mayor I'd like to go on and add a little more detail on the parks asset inventory database application. So follow me through while I share my screen here. So here we're looking at Centennial Park. As you can see, there's a lot of assets that have been collected. So let's take a look at a couple of them. Starting off here, let's look at the information sign that's outside. So like Sarah was saying, we collected a bunch of different attributes to be able to give us a more well rounded idea of the condition and all these other parameters around it so we can better plan for the future.

Speaker F · So you can see here we have the asset ID which is auto generated based on the parameters filled in by the field staff that is out there. So as soon as they're in the field they can bring up field maps, log onto here and then start collecting all the data and filling it out. So we have the replacement value and then we also have the equipment type. So that's one of the key ones there. And then every asset also has a photo along with it so you can see that. So real time you'll be able to, as soon as you hit submit it gets uploaded to the web map here and then all the managers and anyone else can be able to view it.

Speaker F · So this one's as you can see, I think it was fair, we had a fair condition there. So we have that and then if we go over to maybe the splash pad, oh it's a bike rack, sorry. If we go over to the splash pad here, there, this one has a different asset id. So the first of it we have the park name. So when you look at the asset ID you'll be able get to to get some information right off the bat. So you'll see that it's Centennial and then it's the short form for splash pad and then it's the number one because we only have one of them.

Speaker F · And so based on the automation, there's no duplicates that are created inside of that asset ID or the asset numbering. So that's also really important help for data maintenance and integrity throughout the life cycle of this. And then you can scroll down here and see a photo as well too. So there's some certain fields that, that the field operator has to enter in order for it to be submitted and photos. And like I said, the park and the furniture, the asset type is one of the key ones that have to be entered in. And then if you want, there's a table here, so you can also search by the park name or you can come over here and search by asset type.

Speaker F · So just for example, if we want to check out the benches, then all of the benches in Central Sanich come up and you can click on any of them and then they'll also take you to the area and provide you with more information. So we're back at the fire hall here and same thing. So just even more assets with more attributes. But I think this is pretty cool. And then also it shows we have timestamped as well too. So that's great. So you can see that John Law was the person that created this, the creation date. And then you can see that also I updated it and the updated date as well too.

Speaker F · So just for more integrity, it's great to be able to do quality control and quality assurance on this. And so this is all hosted internally on our portal and yeah, I think

Speaker G · that's sort of everything.

Speaker F · Unless you guys have any questions,

Speaker B · don't see any hands.

Speaker F · Thank you, thank you.

Speaker D · Presentation. And just with the. We also looked at our level of accessibility as well as natural assets baseline. So there was new legislation with respect to accessibility. And we had a plan from 2024 to 2026 which we will be reporting on sometime soon. And so that the expectations and the priorities that we had identified in the 23 to 26 accessibility plan were more around communication, human resources. And so staff will be proposing that we look at accessibility of our public spaces, outdoor public spaces, potentially as the next iteration of the plan, which we're going to have to, which we're responsible for for 2027 to 2029 is the next plan.

Speaker D · Also our natural assets baseline. So currently we are collecting natural assets inventory that's also going to be available as well as a tree canopy study and we are going to have an inventory of both our natural assets as well as our tree canopy for both district assets as well as there's a larger scope to that.

Speaker D · But with that it's going to give us significant information with respect to our parks, specifically where we'll have a greater understanding of our trails and the grading of our trails and we'll be able to access that information more readily, which will be very helpful for planning for our, our staff and of course for council to be able to make decisions as they move forward.

Speaker D · So we.

Speaker B · Yes, sorry, Councillor, I will. Are you wanting to take questions?

Speaker D · I'm not sure however you want to do it. It's totally, it's up to.

Speaker B · I wonder where you were in your presentation.

Speaker D · We're getting towards the end.

Speaker B · Do you want to hold? Okay.

Speaker D · So also, as I said at the beginning, we want to make sure that this is comprehensive. So we also look at our cultural baseline and with that we're looking at our workforce, customer service, our community relationships, how we engage and how people are feeling about the way that we're delivering our service and the feedback that we're receiving.

Speaker D · And we don't have measurements for all aspects. However, we did do significant engagement during the parks and trails master plan and we did our citizen Satisfaction survey in 2023 and also recently we have done an employee engagement survey. And so as we continue to collect that data, we'll be able to provide information about how a service is doing and how from a measurable perspective. So organizational culture, as I mentioned before, we use the guiding principles from the integrated planning, which is community centered and collaborative, transparent, accountable and focusing on continuous improvement. We have a strategic focus and we want to make sure that we're aligning across the district as well as with our community partners and other government organizations.

Speaker D · And then of course, sustainability and risk management, which are values of the district. And we have a lot of strategic direction around sustainability and risk management and then also being able to be flexible, responsive and using evidence based decision making from a department perspective. And this was through conversations with individuals within the department. It's the engineering department. And so teamwork, compliance, customer service planning, continuous improvement, operational excellence as well as safety. And those are some of the values that have been that were discussed when we were speaking with staff recently. We undertook employee engagement, which we will be presenting the Folsom Report to council in the fall.

Speaker D · We were, we did the engagement, we did present it to our staff and we had a all staff meeting on the employee engagement. And then we were also doing departmental goals and initiatives. And so we wanted to do that. So that we could come back and report to council not only on the survey, but also what we were going to be doing. And so we plan on doing that in September. But you'll get a little bit of a taste within this report because it's very important around the way employees are engaging with their work and with the district, and that impacts the performance of a service as well.

Speaker D · So within the. And these are at the department level, not at the service level. So this is for the engineering department. However, managers are going to be working with their staff to be developing their own based on the themes and based on things that the staff want to work on that we're going to be doing at the management level as well.

Speaker D · So 77% response rate and then 70% engaged or almost engaged. Engaged is different than satisfaction. Engaged means that they're interacting and that they're feeling like they are a part of the work that they're doing. And it's how they're invested in the work that they're doing within the district. And the strengths were inclusion, workplace safety, coworker relationships, empowerment, manager relationships, and improvement areas where collaboration, leadership, communication, recognition and organizational alignment. And there's a lot of consistency with these results, as with the results that we saw across the organization. So integrated service delivery. So we have many different partners that we work with. Not only are we working with them, and we have users in our parks on a daily basis, but we also have formal agreements with many different organizations who are using our park, and they are managing different areas of our park based on the agreement.

Speaker D · So sometimes they're operating, sometimes they're managing. And it depends on the level of the agreement, whether it's a service agreement, a lease, or a license, which gives them more authority and obligation over the property. And all of these are managed by the manager of the parks facilities in fleet and have to be renewed on a regular basis as well. And then we are, you know, and these provide significant benefit to the community.

Speaker H · And

Speaker D · many of these relationships have been long standing. So financial. So the services supported through operating funding, capital investment. We have dedicated staff, shared corporate services, fleet equipment and technology. So all of the things that we've been talking about and the service levels all feed in to our funding model that we have at the district. So our operating funding. And this does not include our director, our manager, our administrative assistant, or our arborist. So these are the supervisor, the lead hand, and the seven parks laborers. And it does include contractors and our fleet and all of the. All of the supplies required to provide the parks and trails service. So most of our service, 98. 8% is tax funded and our fees and charges are about 18,000.

Speaker D · And that mostly has to do with our tennis and pickleball courts. Aside from that, because we do not charge for youth sports. So the utilization of our parks is very accessible to the community. But because of that it's primarily tax funded. So there are 16,800 productive annual hours. Productive means that we have of course our staff have access to entitlements such as vacation leave, also sick leave or family leave. And so productive hours is different from total hours. And all of those numbers can be found in the, in the report. And then we again with the total hours of the other staff that we had spoken about, we have about 1,460 hours.

Speaker D · And so all of the other services apart from the maintenance and the maintenance and operations are done within those hours. So capital investment and asset life cycle funding. So I'll stop here a little bit. Our standard replacement amount that we've had in our budget for a significant amount of time and is about $30,000 a year. Part of that of course is because we, we only had accounted for playground replacements within our capital budget and not all of the amenities that we also had. And that is actually quite standard within organizations when items, individual items are under a certain amount that we don't necessarily account for them.

Speaker D · But of course with our asset management plan, if we don't account for things, then we're not necessarily going to be putting them in and doing our. When we do our asset management plan and we're doing our long term forecasting, were not looking at those assets and when we did account for them, they actually are worth about $7. 5 million. So it's not insignificant. And as you can see over the next five years, we have $150,000 for replacement, there's 240,000 for new investment or improvements to assets. But we actually have about $710,000 that would be in the poor category or poor and fair that may. And again, we're always going to go out and look and do the inspection and see if they need to be replaced.

Speaker D · But if we're looking at it from a current condition or life cycle perspective, we have 103amenities or facilities that need to be replaced or needs significant maintenance in order to be able to, for us to be able to sustain that asset.

Speaker D · And so that is a benefit that we're now able to actually and especially in advance of the update to our asset management plan, be able to account for the, the amenities that, that we have within our park system. But currently we, we are not investing what we should, what we should be in our amenities. So that is the end of the baseline. And then we also look at change drivers. So when we're looking at what's happened over the last five years and that window, we're going to look at what legislative changes happened, what governance and council decisions have been made, corporate planning and policy direction, community expectations, climate and environmental change, asset management and life cycle, and all of these.

Speaker D · And then we have a register that is in the, in the appendix as well of all of the changes that have occurred through policy direction or through council resolution or through legislative and regulatory requirements that have a cumulative impact on the service.

Speaker D · It's much easier for us to quantify an addition of an asset compared to other things that occur and the impact to a service. But they are part of the story. But this is where we're going to stop today.

Speaker D · And again, it's just us documenting it at this point, not necessarily analyzing that information and the impact. And that's really where we want to stop today and leave it to council, but the next steps that we're going to do. And I had said we were going to come back August 10th, but because of some, I think some meetings that we are, we're going to have that we require prior to not having meetings for the rest of August. We, we may defer that second part until September just so that we can make sure that other important priorities are coming forward. So we will be coming back. Latest is the first meeting in September.

Speaker D · And what we want to do next

Speaker C · is

Speaker D · look at what the problems that we've identified, any problems that have been identified. And so by problem, I don't mean that it's a serious problem, but problems that we've identified similar to the assets. The fact that we hadn't documented our assets, that would have been considered a problem. But we managed to do that throughout the service review. And then we want to look at, you know, how do we group those together and see where there are themes in the, in the, you know, root cause for why we're, why we're experiencing those issues within the Parks and Trails service. And that's what we're going to do when we come back to Council is bring that information to you.

Speaker D · And we will also incorporate information that we gathered through the Parks and Trails master plan process so that council can see everything together. And then it will be really looking at prioritizing what we have, what has been proposed over the last few years and seeing what we want to advance, what we can incorporate. And also maybe some things we're going to say, hey, that's not a priority yet, and we want to push them down the road and we're going to defer that. So we want to have that conversation with council and then of course, with the community to see what the next steps are for the Parks and Trail Service. And so that is the end of our presentation.

Speaker D · And thank you for your patience and attention. We appreciate it. Thank you. And we're available for questions.

Speaker B · Thank you. Councilor King, I think you had a question.

Speaker H · Oh, yes, thank you very much. I have a few questions. Hopefully I've captured the information correctly. I guess I'd start with that. I briefly heard the explanation of difference between the 33% and the 55% for the parks and Trails managers.

Speaker D · So we have to know.

Speaker H · Yeah, because I think the first was planned. 33%.

Speaker D · No, it's that we have. Well, maybe. But no, the numbers were that our manager is putting about 55% of his effort towards parks and trails and the administrative assistant is putting approximately 33% of her time towards parks and trails. When we imagined the role, perhaps we thought it would be more evenly split across facilities, Fleet and parks and trails, but it currently isn't. And of course, we haven't done the service reviews yet or finalized them for the facilities in fleet. We're in the midst of doing them, so we don't know what the impact to those services are by that time being spent primarily in parks and trails. But it's something that we do want to review.

Speaker H · So it's not that the 55% is the current, but now it's planned to be 33%.

Speaker D · No, it's not that.

Speaker H · No, no. Can't misunderstand.

Speaker D · This is just what it is. So we're not deciding what we're going to do. We're just looking at what the need currently is and what the experience of our manager currently is based on the service requirements.

Speaker H · Okay. And on August 10th, are we. Well, maybe not August 10th, maybe a little bit later. We'll be expecting approval by then. Or anything.

Speaker E · Anything.

Speaker D · No, not necessarily. Because we do want to look at. There are some things that we may be coming forward with and it'll be really a decision of council if there's going to be an approval. But we are currently doing service reviews of all of our other services, Councillor, and so we want to make sure that we're looking at everything together so that we can see if there are common themes across the district and be able to group everything according to if there are things that we want to, if there are initiatives or that we would like to bring forward or that we want to recommend or just even identify that it already has come forward but may need resourcing, we'd prefer to look at that altogether so that council can see it and it would be the new council that will be doing that so that they can look at it holistically and understand what the risks are across the whole district based on what we've learned.

Speaker H · Okay. And. And my other question was with regards to the coding, if I've got it correct, 530 assets and I think they're 561 assets. I don't usually use these terms, but am I correct? There's one is the ratings of the item, the asset. The other is with regards to replacement.

Speaker D · So yeah, I understand where you're going. So some of them are in good condition and because of the life cycle they wouldn't have been included because we were only looking up to a certain time frame. And so there are 561 assets but only 530 of them will need to be replaced within a 25 year period. Yeah. And that's because of life cycle age and when the replacement is required. So if they're in excellent condition, they're not going to need to be replaced and therefore they weren't identified. But we also had 17 assets that we didn't have enough information on and we had a note for those that we are going are.

Speaker D · Some of them are under, are being assessed currently and we'll have more information about those. So there is, there are some gaps still in information.

Speaker H · Understood. Thank you.

Speaker D · Councillor Riddle.

Speaker B · Oh, Councillor Newton, online.

Speaker A · Thank you Chair. Thank you to staff for the work that went into this and compiling all of this data. It's pretty impressive. What was just laid out by 30 minutes of sort of an executive summary. I have a number of questions or comments and the first one, I guess two of them are tied together is just when we looked at this, what was broken for us to try and go through all of this work to put it all together. And I can see having an inventory of assets is probably a pretty good thing. But as we compile the data and it's something that I'm learning in my business, that becomes a point about how much work is actually required to then manage the data and how that is undertaken and what that looks like going forward.

Speaker A · So two first questions to start with.

Speaker D · Sure. Thank you. Those are excellent questions. So it's kind of like a painting. When do you stop? Right. That is something that we've been going through. But I think that number one, and it's just, you know, where we are as an organization, there's a lot of information that isn't documented. So, you know, you can have too much information and where are you going to store it and what are you going to do with it. And then we don't have any information on where there's a real gap. And that's a risk. But if we, we're also in the midst of doing an IT master plan. And as we said, for example, not only parks and trails, many of our field departments don't have a work order system that they can use in the field.

Speaker D · And having a data management system and having all of this data that we can feed into one actually puts us in a very good position if we determine that we do want to move forward with that. And so we are hopeful that we could feed that in because it's true if you don't update information, it can become stale pretty quickly. But also it's around being able to provide if we have a new manager come in where they have a really clear understanding of what their service is. And right now we weren't able to do that. And so there isn't a clear record of what the asset inventory is. And it's something that we have to continuously learn. We also, and I could maybe ask Mr.

Speaker D · Puskas to speak to this, but we've had several significant retirements and because a lot of our information is stored in people's minds and not within our system, that's a significant loss of information. I don't know. Do you want to speak to that at all?

Speaker I · Yes. Thank you. Through the chair, last year we had about 100 years of district knowledge retirement. This year we had 70 years of district knowledge retire. We've lost a lot of knowledge that was in people's head heads. We've done a fairly good job of trying to document all of the processes, all of the history that they have. However, even if we're trying to do it over a six month period, there's always a little bit that's lost. So we're trying to be proactive about that because we're again, we're looking at some future retirements over the next few years with some additional leadership coming in for our supervisors and our lead hands with a lot younger staff, our water and sewer staff.

Speaker I · I think our average age is probably the lowest of our average age. I Think we're down to like the mid-20s in that group. So we're doing pretty good in terms of recruiting, but they're all fairly young, and so we're having to train them up on our district and our. The information that our district needs to operate. So going through this exercise of documenting tasks in number of hours is really important to make sure that we maintain an operating system. Thank you.

Speaker D · And so our understanding, our hope is to transfer that into an actual operating system. And so the way we're collecting the information could feed directly into that. And we're trying to be consistent across the organization also in the way we collect information, which wasn't consistent. You know, I don't think that we ever used terminology like department, division, service. We called them all different things. Everybody called their area a department, but that isn't actually what they were. So trying to use all of the same language and really understand it. It's also around functions. Functions can be lost if they're not documented. And so we want to make sure that we're not losing and the unintended consequence of a function just dropping off, and we don't have knowledge that it's been dropped off because the decision has been made at the service level rather than us making a really clearly understanding why we might stop doing something.

Speaker D · And that has occurred, you know, and those create gaps. And it also creates pressures for other people because they have to pick that up. The work doesn't go away, it just moves. And so by us having all of that documented in a consistent way, we'll be very clear as to. I'll use an example. Boulevards, right. Parks does the maintenance, but roads owns them. But roads is really primarily, you know, their function is doing roads. So if we're talking about planning, and we often talk about the beautification of Keating, but it isn't something that's on anybody's mind right now, like who owns that function? Who owns the function of determining where we should beautify our roads? And it's not a. I've said this throughout the whole process. These are not criticisms of our staff. They're not.

Speaker D · They're structural issues within our system where, when no one owns it or if they don't know they own it, they're not going to be doing that work. It's just that simple. And so by putting structure to this, we're going to be able to really understand who's responsible for what. And it may sound too simple that it should just be known, but it's not. And it isn't. And so really trying to put some rigor to that.

Speaker A · Thank you. You brought up boulevards, and it was referenced in the diagram about sort of some of the tasks and responsibilities about the parks. But yet in the Appendix a on page 33 of Table 6. 2 in the report, when it talked about funding boulevards, wasn't incorporated into that. So I didn't know if that was missed because there has been comments around boulevards, whether it's in Brentwood or in Sandstone, about how they seem to be falling behind and sort of on the service gap a bit. So I don't want to get into the specifics of that, but just maybe a gap in that side of it. And especially since you brought it up, I'm a bit cognizant of time.

Speaker D · Mr. Puskas is going to answer that.

Speaker I · Thank you very much. Because a lot of the work that we have done has not historically been documented. There have been some, we'll call them handshake agreements between the different divisions, so between our parks and our roads and drains, where our parks has the equipment and has the expertise in maintaining boulevards, when it comes to grass and comes to horticulture, they typically will maintain them for our roads and they get a portion of that operating budget to maintain that.

Speaker I · So that's where that comes from.

Speaker D · But again, because of the split, it just wouldn't have maybe been thought about in a budget or accounted for for as to what would be needed to replace it or to improve upon it.

Speaker A · During the report around the gis, and it was talked about accessibility and sort of tagging features or assets from an accessibility perspective into this, and this is something the San Peninsula Accessibility Advisory Committee is quite interested in, is trying to create an inventory of accessible features, parks, benches, picnic tables, playground, and try to have it coordinated across Central Saanich, North Saanich and Sydney.

Speaker A · And again, I'm only flagging this to try and pass on information. And there was a discussion at SPAC about this, and I believe someone from the Panorama was looking at trying to maybe take on the coordination of trying to compile an inventory. So just for information for staff on that, I had a bunch of other questions, but the last one, and I think we can all agree that the parks that we have in Central Saanich are cherished by our community and greatly appreciated and nowhere in sort of the capital planning for this.

Speaker A · And we talked about the assets, but it didn't talk about acquisition from a new park or improving or growing the park base. Currently I did a quick number and parks and trails and connected corridors account for roughly 2 1/2% of the land mass of central Saanich at 103 acres. And so I'm just curious if any consideration of that is part of this process.

Speaker D · Yes, we will be looking at that and we will be bringing that forward to council at the next meeting, a discussion about it.

Speaker A · Thank you,

Speaker B · Councilor Riddle.

Speaker C · Thank you. And thank you very much for the presentation and for all of the work that you did on this. I really appreciate, you know, at the outset of a long term strategic planning process that's going to be really, really important to our community, that we take the time to level set and get our arms around everything that's happening right now. I know just this term we've added parkland, we've added trails, we've asked for exploration of new ones. And sometimes it's hard to catch all those things and rein them in. So I really, really appreciate this work. I think from the perspective of someone sitting at the council table, it's actually quite empowering for us to have this information, even just that classification system.

Speaker C · So saying like, what level of Park Service, making that transparent and having agreement on it like that now gives us a tool if we disagree that we can point to something, we can say exactly what we mean and we can bring forward those motions to elevate them or downgrade them, depending on what the case may be.

Speaker C · I know that's something I've struggled with because we do hear about parks a lot and just trying to articulate the change can be tough. So thank you for that and I'm also grateful just come budget time, having numbers to look to, having costs that we can then prioritize if we so choose. So just.

Speaker B · Thank you, Councillor Paltiel,

Speaker G · thank you very much. And I appreciate, I think, I see that the key goal for us here this evening is really to determine the baseline and decide if it's adequate for what we're building on and how we move forward. Given that we're newer to this mapping and at this detailed level, and given that the previous, you know, organizational infrastructure capacity was, you know, with a lot of former institutional knowledge from staff and, and not quite detailed to the organizational level we may expect today, I'm just curious, in the, in the $700,000 replacement gap identified within the capacity or in the state status of those 103 assets, how confident are you in that number?

Speaker G · And what's the, what's the play, I guess, on that or the, the level of assurance you have within that budget?

Speaker D · So I think I can answer that in two. There are two things I'm confident in the asset condition and we are. It's a, a very high level estimate of replacement. So we would before putting it into a budget, so it would go into an asset management plan, but before we put it into a capital budget we would put more rigor around the costing now.

Speaker G · Oh, go ahead sir.

Speaker I · Thank you. Through the, through Mayor, the cost estimate would be like an order of magnitude costing. Right. So it's not like a class D, it's not a class C, it's a. Hey. Based upon our experience, based upon what we know trending, this is kind of about what it's going to cost to do that. And this is approximately where it's going to be before we put it in a budget. We definitely do a little bit more effort in actually getting a class D estimate together.

Speaker G · That kind of answers my question in that sense. Is that, would you say that in that case, is it what about a 30%?

Speaker I · So an order of magnitude is plus or minus 50%.

Speaker G · Okay, thank you.

Speaker D · And I think the. Maybe, maybe, I'm not sure. But it also depends on the features. Like the Councillor Newton brought up accessibility as an example and we don't have the costing or a standard on that right now, but they are smaller amenities and so it was really. And also the costing is current, not five years from now. As well

Speaker G · as a follow up, we have seven phases. This is phase one. You're working on phase two, which is the driver analysis. Is it possible to have staff or should this be a motion coming from committee to council requesting that when the phase two gets raised that staff come back as well with a kind of a timeline matrix for when council and the public can expect key decision making.

Speaker G · Because I know there's still a lot of data and analysis that we need to go through before we're at the capital prioritization sequence here through the mayor.

Speaker D · The phase one is the 80% of the work and then the rest of the phases, although you have to do it in a structured way. So I want to say you can't, you know, you can't skip a phase. You have to, you can't just go right to recommendations because we have to do the analysis that happens more quickly. And so we will be bringing back quite significant information for council to start making decisions. But again we do want to refer a lot of this to when we do, when all of the other service reviews are completed, because it really should be in, we should be looking at it comprehensively again looking at the trends looking at the risks so that Council can make those decisions.

Speaker D · And so our goal is that this would then feed into the strategic planning process for the new council, that they would have all of this information in advance of that, so that they, as Councillor Riddle said, can make informed decision making by knowing what our current. Current state is, knowing what maybe some risks are within our current organization, then make those decisions while they're also looking at what their priorities are.

Speaker B · To put a fine point on it, then I'm hearing that at this juncture a motion isn't likely necessary. There is at least one more touch point for this Council. Other touch points would be expected at a future Council strategic planning being one which presumably would occur some month or so after the election.

Speaker D · I'm not going to advise Council whether they want to make a motion, but I will say that we do have a plan.

Speaker B · What I'm hearing based on the question and the response is that a motion at this point is not strictly necessary.

Speaker A · I'm not going to stop.

Speaker D · We haven't made any recommendations at this point.

Speaker G · Just to weigh in and I'll be cheeky for a minute. I'm aware that there will be a start, a middle and an end and one comes after two and then three. My point though is basically more of like a implementation roadmap that could be provided so that we know how these fix with other plans and budgets and everything else and when that's absolutely.

Speaker D · We will bring that back to the next.

Speaker I · Thank you.

Speaker D · Yeah.

Speaker B · Okay, so again, emotional. The suggestion is that that would be additional information to inform Council. Okay. I'm not seeing any other hands. So I'm going to suggest that we move that the committee of the whole meeting be adjourned and that the special open Council meeting be reconvened. Please. You have moved it because it's committee of the whole. Any discussion? Any opposed?

Speaker H · Any?

Speaker B · None carried. We'll then adjourn the special open Council meeting. Please. This does require a mover and a seconder. Moved and seconded. Any opposition? None carried. All right, we'll take a moment here just to switch.