Message from the CAO On the verge of growth and positive change, the City strives to find innovative and creative ways to deliver better services to our customers, and to maintain and improve quality of life for all residents. The past year has had a significant impact on our future direction and was truly the year of aligning ourselves to sustainable change. I would like to thank all of Council and City staff for the significant support and contributions to bring the budget to where it is now. These accomplishments were only possible with your continued dedication and teamwork. The key priorities in my first year as CAO were a change to our development approval process, innovative and sustainable community infrastructure development and delivery while changing our corporate culture to a customer focused approach, to name a few. As I write this reflecting back on 2016, we have made significant strides forward but still have work to do. Our approval process now is much more collaborative and customer-focused across the corporation, helping our citizens, businesses and industries achieve their economic goals. We have increased our infrastructure capability by securing alternative capital funding ($10M) and by planning in-house engineering, an innovative road-procurement procedure, and using city wide project prioritization. The proposed 2017 budget was developed in collaboration with all departments across the corporation using their accumulated experience and technical coordination. Our departmental priorities are ranked based on the importance to our corporate-wide priorities and the ability to bundle department priorities together to create synergy. Three major principles guided the development of the budget heading into 2017. The first principle is aligning priorities among citizens, council and the administration, so that the citizens’ needs are captured, and administration will be delivering direct benefit to the citizens. The second principle is maximizing the benefits and values for dollars we spend. Given that our financial means are limited; our investment needs to be prioritized for the projects and operations that will bring the best bang for the buck. And finally, the third principle is innovation through risk management. Administration has reviewed various innovative ways to deliver our services where we could not have been able to do so in conventional ways. Strategic investments are in the cue for the coming year that will set us up for a long term success, accommodating growth in our local economy; suggesting solutions to our aging infrastructure; moving towards technology & innovation-based operation; providing ways to better-connect the City operation with our citizens, and investing in our staff for capacity building & quality service. We will continue to use our efforts and resources wisely and innovatively by increasing capacity of existing resources, while keeping focused on best-value-added priorities and putting you, our customers first.
David Kim, P.Eng., M.Sc. Chief Administrative Officer City of Cranbrook
“ We will continue to use our efforts and resources wisely and innovatively City of Cranbrook 2016 Annual Report
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by increasing capacity of existing resources...
