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By Mel Rothenburger

Armchair Mayor

ROTHENBURGER: In days of old, before Kamloops City Hall became a fortress…

Apr 13, 2024 | 8:20 AM

CONTRARY TO PREVAILING public opinion, City Hall has not always been a place of discontent between councils and administrators.

While there have been times when administration has bullied council, and times when administration has happily stepped into the gap when leadership from elected representatives was lacking, in large part they have co-existed quite well and quite productively.

My own experience, with the exception of an initial rough spot or two when both administration and incumbent councillors struggled against a more transparent and active approach to governance, was by and large very positive.

I’ll tell you how it was, not out of braggadocio but because it was reality, one that I’m pretty sure was the case with most of the councils and administrators who followed as well. It was as it should be.

City Hall wasn’t the fortress it is today, where council members are banned by staff from moving freely around municipal facilities, with bastions erected between those who are elected and those who are hired.

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During the ‘90s, though, the place was dysfunctional, as is the case again.

Not long after my first day as mayor when I was told administration was in charge, things fortunately changed for the better with some voluntary departures and retirements that created a new corporate order within 7 Victoria Street West.

A top-notch new CAO brought in some new blood in several key departments, people with good experience and a willingness to work with council as colleagues with different responsibilities but similar objectives.

I can certainly tell you I was never locked out of any staff areas or restricted in who I could talk to. Quite the contrary. A free flow of communication and ideas became encouraged instead of stifled. Our new CAO radically altered the culture in administration while I was adjusting some of the old thinking around the council table. A sense of pride and teamwork took hold that wouldn’t have been possible without everyone knowing their roles, with council in charge but not meddling.

Before I get into it, if you’ve never been in the mayor’s office, I’ll paint a picture for you.

Typically, when the mayor arrives for work and parks in his spot just off First Avenue alongside City Hall, he (or she, though we’ve only had one female mayor) enters the building by a side entrance. The door opens to a short hallway that runs between the council chambers and the office area of the executive assistant to mayor and council. That’s where the all-important coffee machine resides.

If you go past the EA’s desk you are now in front of the door to the mayor’s office. If you pull right and exit the EA’s area, you have a choice of heading out into the lobby (there’s a small office on the way that’s available to councillors), going downstairs to the washrooms or availing yourself of vending-machine opportunities in the lunch room, or staying on the main floor and taking another left into the legislative services area.

The latter is now off limits to the mayor and council and so, apparently, are the washroom and lunch room. In the recent past, anyone who had an appointment with the mayor would enter the building through the front entrance and tell the receptionist, who would phone the mayor,

who would come out and show the visitor back to his office. That’s what happened with me when I went in to interview him a few days ago.

Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson says that as of this week he can’t even do that anymore.

In the good old days, there was no gatekeeper in the lobby. There were no locked doors between the mayor’s and councillors’ offices and “staff areas.” In fact, there weren’t even any doors. A member of the public could enter, hang a left and go straight down to the EA’s area and announce themselves right there in the inner sanctum.

When I held no-appointment talk-to-the-mayor days once a week, there would usually be several folks in the EA area with a coffee and cookies while they waited for their turn.

Over the years, lives, attitudes, faces and society in general changed, and a swinging half-door was installed just off the lobby to deter the hoi polloi from thinking they could go in to see the mayor any time they wanted.

But doors, locks and key fobs, no. Certainly not between council members and staff. Until now.

The relationship between council members and staffers involves some natural tension. Mayor and councillors have to be careful not to get too reliant on administration to the point of accepting every single thing they say at face value. That’s the kind of thing that can deteriorate into administration running the show instead of council. Administration starts setting policy instead of council. The old “who’s in charge” thing.

On the other hand, administration is always wary about council members who become overly involved in minutia. Council members are very capable of thinking they’re the boss of every single employee in the place, and making nuisances of themselves.

The way to deal with that is through effective orientation programs, reminders about boundaries as needed, and constant attention to communication. The way not to deal with it is with doors and locks and policies and bylaws and bans that try to legislate behaviour.

But I digress. More often than not, my typical day as mayor would wrap up with a visit next door to corporate services director Wayne Vollrath’s office, or CAO Randy Diehl’s office, or vice versa, where we’d brief and debrief each other, talk about things we agreed on and disagreed on, and toss around ideas and how to make them happen.

Those talks — that respectful communication — were incredibly valuable. I never felt as though administration was trying to boss me around and I don’t think administration felt I was trying to inappropriately intrude on its turf. And we got stuff done.

I even convinced Randy to let me sit in on pre-agenda meetings of department heads so I could be as well prepared as possible for meetings and have a better understanding of how the City worked. He was reluctant at first because of that natural concern about interference but it worked out great. It was an example of his willingness to try something new even if he wasn’t necessarily keen on it.

In fact, Randy was so good at creating an environment of respect and co-operation within City Hall that he wrote a book about it called Serving With Pride in the Public Eye that became the bible for many CAOs — and quite a few council members — in other cities.

One quote is quite interesting in today’s context: “An external negative perception of how the mayor is treated by the organization, reflects poorly on the whole organization.”

So, no, negative relationships between staff and council aren’t inevitable. One of Randy’s prevailing themes in his book is about breaking down silos (“silos” being a popular and appropriate descriptor at the time) in the City Hall workplace.

Of late, there are a lot more silos being built than there are being torn down.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.