City planners hire outside help
Development Consulting company will help clear up backlog of applications
Dave MacLean
Telegraph-Journal C4
Published Friday August 8th, 2008
Cindy Wilson/Telegraph-Journal
Holly McMackin, a planner for Dillon Consulting, is happy to lend a hand to the city’s overloaded planning department.
SAINT JOHN - The city's planning department is using the services of outside consultants to help clear up a backlog of applications.
Ken Forrest, commissioner of planning and development, says a combination of factors has led to the increased workload his staff is facing, so the city will use Dillon Consulting to help alleviate the situation.
Forrest noted that a combination of summer holidays and increased development activity prompted the decision to seek assistance from Dillon's Saint John office.
"It's a short-term solution to provide some additional capacity on an as-needed basis to keep things moving," said Forrest.
"We had so much current stuff that I was worried we were going to start introducing some delays for people. At the cutting edge of a boom, is that what you want to do?"
Forrest said contracting out the work was the quickest solution and that he would take some time to assess whether it's necessary for the city to add permanent positions to the payroll.
"We need the commercial development and we need the houses. Two or three months of additional caseload doesn't necessarily establish a permanent trend and we don't want to overreact. For now we simply don't want to hold people up - we want to provide good customer service and deal with people as quickly as we can."
An added bonus is that Dillon's principal liaison with the city is planner Holly McMackin, a Rothesay native who is very familiar with the city.
"We have offices across Canada and we're pretty broad in terms of what we do," said McMackin. "But one of our focuses is planning and within our planning group we have about 50 planners across the country. Within our planning group we have three focuses and one of those is municipal planning, as opposed to land development and the environmental assessment side of things.
"This type of situation is fairly common. We do it for a couple of municipalities in Ontario. It generally happens when the flow of applications that are coming just becomes so great."
McMackin said her firm would take on some of the "smaller" issues, allowing the city staff to deal with major applications and policy issues.
"It's always a struggle to balance the day-to-day processing side - dealing with all those applications, writing the reports, dealing with the public inquiries - with the more long-term strategic planning processes that are going on," she said. "If anything, those are really crucial, but it's one of those things where you have to sit down and spend four or five hours doing it and if you're constantly getting phone calls from the public and dealing with smaller-scale items, it's easy for those bigger policy items to get pushed to the side.
"With Ken coming in, he's got lots of great strategic policy planning things that he wants to tackle. It's just unfortunate that at the same time as he wants to get those files rolling, he's also got this crazy amount of applications coming in.
"They're starting to see more of a mix of applications - they still have a bunch of the smaller ones that eat up time - but now they're starting to get bigger and more complex applications, which really do require a lot more staff time and focus.
"At least for now, we're trying to take over some of the simpler applications, take those off their plate, so that they can focus their attention on the more complex applications."
McMackin said a bustling economy that creates an abundance of development is a great work environment for her profession.
"From a planning perspective, you couldn't be in a more interesting spot right now," she said.
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