qathet Regional District (qRD) will consider an informal review of its social planning service.
At the August 2 committee of the whole meeting, Electoral Area B director Mark Gisborne brought forward the recommendation for the service review. He said the social planning service has been causing some challenges.
Gisborne said the service was created for a purpose, and one of the first items it was created for was the social planner position initiated by City of Powell River. The qRD social planning service provided 30 per cent funding for the planner, said Gisborne, but the city no longer has a social planner in its employ.
“I have been hearing that there doesn’t seem to be much appetite to replace that position,” said Gisborne. “What that leaves us with is a service serving as a grant-in-aid service from just the electoral areas. After last month’s finance committee meeting, it seemed to be causing more strain.”
Gisborne said he talked to some elected officials from other jurisdictions about the matter and they suggested a review to see if the service is actually meeting objectives that work for the regional district.
He said his motion was for an informal service review because a statutory service review was more involved.
“The concerns I’m having now with the social planning service is it is just the electoral areas that participate,” said Gisborne. “If it was a truly regional service, which had all members of the region participating, maybe that would be a different story, but it doesn’t seem to be meeting the objectives.”
Electoral Area E director Andrew Fall said he had no problem with an informal review. He asked about timing, given qRD human resources, to conduct the review.
“This would add another task on the job list for staff,” said Fall.
Chief administrative officer Al Radke said when there had been discussion about grants-in-aid from the social planning service, there had been talk about looking at the matter during the budget season.
“Timing-wise, staff could have a report to you in time for budget deliberations so you could ensure that if there were to be any changes, they could be incorporated for the coming new fiscal year,” said Radke.
City director George Doubt said spending some time during budget season to work out what should go where in terms of grants-in-aid from each service makes sense.
“I’m not going to say what the city thinks about the social planner position because the city will discuss that when they do,” said Doubt. “I’m not in a position to guess what all the people on city council might think appropriate.
“Having an informal review is a good idea because it might save us hours of meeting time debating which file to take funds out of. I think the review will save staff time in the long run.”
The committee voted to send the matter of a review of the social planning service to the regional board.
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