NIPAWIN — Nipawin council is interested in starting a community safety officer program, but it decided to wait until the fall to see how effective recent bylaw enforcement reforms are before acting.
A community safety officer, which would be hired by the town, would be able to deal with low-risk police work like traffic and liquor enforcement, allowing local RCMP officers to focus their time on higher impact criminal activities. The program would also let the town access a greater share of fines based on provincial statutes.
Barry Elliott, the town’s administrator, said council has made a number of improvements made to different elements of bylaw enforcement services over the past few months, like increasing fine amount and improving the reporting structure so that council has more information about the impact bylaw enforcement is making.
“With all of those things put together, council has been also speaking for some time about the concept of the new community safety officer program,” he said. “They wanted administration to take a look at that to see if that’s something that would make sense here.”
The estimated cost of starting the community safety officer program is around $83,000, with annual costs estimated at around $100,000.
“I did the research into it and at the end of the day, with the recent changes to our bylaw enforcement services and the linkage there could be to the safety officer program, council resolved to put the safety officer concept aside until later this fall,” Elliott said.
That decision was made at the May 14 council meeting.
The administrator said in the meantime, he’ll monitor and analyze the new bylaw enforcement changes to see how effective they are.
Pay for non-unionized staff
The Town of Nipawin is hiring a consultant to determine how much its non-unionized out-of-scope staff should be compensated.
Barry Elliott, the town’s administrator, said a previous council decided they didn’t want the compensation plan for out-of-scope staff to mirror the changes in the unionized workers’ collective agreement, instead basing it on market conditions and performance.
“That decision was made to change the process for out-of-scopes, but there was no plan presented at that time on how they were going to do that, so up to this point we’ve been internally, myself and Michelle [Sorensen, his assistant], had been trying to develop a plan.”
None of the plans Elliott came up with were well-received by council, so he recommended a consultant take up the task.
“It’s a lot of work to do it and it’s pretty difficult for internal resources to do it when we are limited in terms of our resources,” he said. “Because of the time element and the complexity of it, I requested they put money into the capital budget to have an outside firm do that work for developing a compensation strategy.”
A request for proposal was sent out, due May 16. Elliott said he would review the submissions and pass them on to be reviewed by a council committee before ultimately coming before council.
The successful bidder is expected to submit a final copy of their report by the end of September.
Vacations
New town employees will have to earn their vacation time before spending it.
Current employees are able to spend vacation time they will earn by the end of the calendar year earlier that year.
“It’s more consistent with other industries and certainly it complies more directly with the Employment Act,” Elliott said when explaining the rationale for the change.
