COURTENAY’S ASSET MANAGEMENT BYLAW DECISION: “Once the City committed to ‘uprating’ our Policy to a Bylaw, it was critical to carefully draft the content so it would rest upon a solid legal foundation,” stated David Love, the City’s Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives
Note to Reader:
The Comox Valley as an ‘incubator region’ for putting fresh ideas and approaches into practice. Continue reading and you will learn about City of Courtenay leadership in adopting a bylaw that requires consideration of full life-cycle costs in its decision-making!
Step by step, Courtenay has operationalized asset management (AM) organization-wide. In so doing, Courtenay has created the foundation for a corporate culture that would achieve the goals of Sustainable Service Delivery.
Courtenay’s Asset Management Bylaw Decision
In the Winter 2020 edition of Asset Management BC’s Newsletter, David Love described the process that guided Courtenay’s Asset Management Decision. “In Spring 2019,” he wrote, “Courtenay’s City Council directed staff to:
…draft an Asset Management Bylaw which incorporates the existing Asset Management Policy and which would require taking into account full life-cycle costs when making decisions regarding renewal, upgrade and acquisition of Tangible Capital Assets; and,
That full life-cycle costs are considered to include the planning, procurement, creation, operation, maintenance, renewal and decommissioning of Tangible Capital Assets.
The Bylaw was adopted by Council in December – just in time for ‘budget season’.”
The Story Behind the Story
“We heard Duane Nicol speak at the 2018 AMBC Conference,” continued David Love. “He’s CAO of Selkirk, MB and he told us of their newly adopted Asset Management Bylaw which all present agreed was a first in Canada.
“Duane went on to explain that when they initially pursued the idea their R&D efforts (Rip-off and Duplicate) failed miserably, so they just had to actually research and write one of their own.
“Their accomplishment caused a bit of a buzz at the conference, and the audience of mostly local government staffers seemed to quickly conclude as one, ‘Ah, R&D’! But sadly it was not that simple.
“To us in Courtenay, this intriguing idea made us realize that our AM Policy was inadequate because it described practices and processes aligned with Operations rather than an exercise of Council’s statutory authority.
“So, once committed to ‘uprating’ our Policy to a Bylaw, the first step was to identify the distinction between the two. By doing this we verified a policy is a general statement of objectives to guide decisions on a particular matter. A policy may be readily altered by Resolution or at Council’s discretion, or even disregarded in decision-making with little or no legal or political consequence.
“If Courtenay was to become one of the few local governments to adopt an AM Bylaw in Canada, and possibly the first in BC, some staff work had to be done. Therefore, it was critical to carefully draft the content so it would rest upon a solid legal foundation, stay within Council’s authority, and be consistent with existing legislation and our own bylaws and policies.
Progression from Policy to Bylaw
Download the following documents:
City of Courtenay Asset Management Policy
City of Courtenay Staff Report for Asset Management Bylaw
City of Courtenay Asset Management Bylaw
City of Courtenay Announcement of Asset Management Bylaw
To Learn More:
To read the complete article by David Love, plus all the other articles, download a copy of the Winter 2020 edition of the Asset Management BC Newsletter.
BC’s First Asset Management Bylaw: A Vision with a Task
Looking back, the arrival of David Allen in 2013 as Courtenay’s Chief Administrative Officer created the momentum necessary to move from awareness to action. A champion of Sustainable Service Delivery, David Allen presented a vision of what could be. Successive Councils embraced the vision. It has been a five year journey for Council and staff.
David Allen has served as Co-Chair of the Asset Management BC Community of Practice since 2011, He has played a leadership role in advancing the vision and implementation program for Asset Management for Sustainable Service Delivery: A Framework for BC, released in December 2014, and updated in 2019. Therefore, it is no surprise that Courtenay is leading by example.
Sustainable Service Delivery is the Singular Aim
Step by step, Courtenay has operationalized asset management (AM) organization-wide. In so doing, Courtenay has created the foundation for a corporate culture that would achieve the goals of Sustainable Service Delivery.
In setting out to create an AM culture, the City discovered that a ‘Condition Assessment’ of its staff was necessary, too. The City’s ‘Condition Assessment’ of their people (the who, where, what, how, etc.) proved to be achievable using conventional human resources practices. The process also required thinking broadly to imagine some new form of organizational structure that would support the singular aim of Sustainable Service Delivery. Under the new structure, working groups are organized in terms of future, present and past tenses. Courtenay implemented the new structure en masse in 2016.
The City of Courtenay’s sustained commitment to taking a transformational idea and bringing it to fruition in the form of the AM bylaw personifies what this saying means in practice: A vision with a task is the hope of the world.
To Learn More:
To read the full story published on the Vancouver Island community-of-interest, click on BC’S FIRST ASSET MANAGEMENT BYLAW: “A strong corporate culture creates the foundation for asset management that achieves the goals of Sustainable Service Delivery,” states CAO David Allen, City of Courtenay
