High school and university students may not be back in school yet but Saskatchewan municipal mayors and councillors were back in class for the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association (SUMA) Summer School.
Thirty communities were represented at the summer school, including St. Brieux, LeRoy, and Lanigan.
Mayors and councillors are often asking for help and guidance when it comes to procedure and dealing with municipal issues, says Gordon Barnhart, president of the Saskatchewan organization.
As well as sharing solutions to common problems faced by many municipalities, the three-day school is also a way for councillors to network and take in workshops and speakers to educate them on different aspects of municipal politics.
The level of experience varies, he says, with some people making the step from councillor to mayor, which does prepare the mayors for the new position. Often municipalities have councillors who have little to no knowledge of the system before becoming a councillor, says Barnhart, but ran and won on the basis of one issue that they cared about.
Council can be a rude awakening to the depth of issues that councillors have to deal with.
“They go into council with that one-point agenda and then all of the sudden they realize this is more complex than that. There are budgets and expenses that exceed the amount of money coming in.”
Money is an issue for municipalities, says Barnhart, who is also a councillor in Saltcoats, Sask. Becoming councillor means finding creative solutions to problems such as replacing and maintaining infrastructure and learning about the resources that are available.
Everyone shares that as a challenge, says Barnhart, from the largest Saskatchewan cities to the smallest of villages and rural municipalities.
“The only difference in the budgets between a village and a city is the number of zeros…we’ve really only got two sources of revenue; property taxes from our citizens and grants from the provincial government.”
Summer school allows councillors and mayors to share some of these solutions with other municipalities.
As a municipal councillor in LeRoy, Don Brown finds that he needs more training to speak with media. SUMA is providing that through their summer school, he says.
How councillors interact with office staff and handling complaints from the community were other aspects of the summer school that interested Brown.
All of these talks gave Brown a better idea on his role as a councillor as well as his role within the community, he says.
