By Cecilia Nasmith
One recent county-wide innovation is the periodic meetings being arranged between Northumberland Chief Executive Officers and the seven CAOs of the county's member municipalities.
At county council's June meeting, Moore gave a verbal report on their latest session, which took place last month.
Their first item of discussion was the innovation Northumberland Director of Economic Development and Tourism Dan Borowec and filmmaker Albert Botha are working on, to set up a film office and the required policies and directions to get it established as a single point of contact for the film industry.
They also spent some time talking about surface treatment of roads.
“County staff are doing an analysis of opportunities and potential expansion, and if there's a cost-benefit analysis for that,” Moore said.
“We also talked about some information and communications shared around homelessness in our community, helping to train and educate staff in all our programs so they understand what resources are available – and that has now been completed.”
Moore reported that housing is on every municipality's radar, “primarily affordable housing and deeply affordable housing. Our member municipalities are very involved in attainable housing.”
Another topic all are concerned about is staff attraction and retention.
“Again, this is not a new topic – we are all very well aware of those challenges,” she said.
“Each of us are experiencing challenges, looking at ways we can work together and complement our organization to try to retain staff, to ensure more of our work can be performed in an uninterrupted fashion in what is becoming a tight labour market.”
Other items of discussion included broadband and the expansion of Go services into the area.
Meeting every couple of months, the group's focus is working collaboratively as a broader county. Discussing shared services is a standing item for every meeting, each of which ends with an informal round-table session that offers the chance to learn from each other, discuss challenges they are experiencing.
“That's really when we have the most benefit from those meetings, when we get to network and help each other go forward with our challenges,” Moore said.
“I think this has been a valuable exercise for our CAOs to do that,” Councillor Bob Sanderson commented.
“Collaborating, working together to make Northumberland County the best it can be,” Warden Bob Crate agreed.
