CHANGE IS ‘THE ONE CONSTANT’
StarPhoenix city hall reporter spoke with Murray Totland ahead of the former city manger’s retirement about past accomplishments and new challenges.
What will you miss most about your job?
A lot of things, actually. I’m really going to miss not being part of, kind of, all the excitement going on in the city. In particular, in all the time I’ve worked here, these last 10 years and the time I’ve been city manager, Saskatoon has been really transitioning and there’s a real buzz and excitement about Saskatoon. And being part of that, part of building this city that we live in, that’s pretty exciting.
And that’s one of the things about being city manager or being a city employee, period, just being part of building that city. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss it a lot, actually.
QAWhat is your advice for your successor?
I think where I’ve been successful and hopefully I’ve had at least a little bit of success in my job, you know, a lot of people look to the city manager for leadership and, you know, they’re expecting kind of a steady hand at the tiller and a bit of inspirational leadership. And so, you know, I think that’s important.
The city manager needs to be a bit of a calm in the storm sometimes, and people look to the city manager internally, but I’ve noticed even externally, a lot of people look to the city manager for a bit of assurance and reassurance that, hey, things are
QAmoving forward and progressing.
Be a good coach. That’s important in this game. I’ve always viewed myself as a bit of the conductor of the orchestra, if you will. It’s been my job to make sure all my musicians are playing the same tune, so to speak. I hope I’ve been a little successful at that and I think that’ll be key to the new city manager.
And, you know, this whole change thing — that’s not going away. The one constant we are going to have as a city and I foresee that forever, to be honest, is change. We’ve had a lot of change in my time as city manager, but I can tell you, what’s coming looks like it’s even more. The pace of that change is increasing. The complexity of that change, a lot of the disruptive technologies and things that are coming along now, I think are going to fundamentally reshape civic governments. I’m not sure what that looks like right now exactly. It’s going to be pretty exciting, I think, pretty different, too, over the next 10 years.
What is toughest task that lies ahead for the city?
When I presented the budget this year, I talked about some headwinds we’re facing and some challenges that we’ll face as a city.
I think certainly the city will continue to face financial headwinds, in particular our revenue
QAsituation as a city. And when I talk about revenues, I’m not talking necessarily about property taxes. I’m actually talking about the other part of our revenue stream that’s not property tax. We’ve seen a decline and a flattening of those revenues over, particularly, the last two, three years. That trend is concerning — I mean they’re declining. We’re not seeing some of that revenue growth that I think we need to see as a city. So I think that’s going to be a pretty big challenge for the city to tackle, because it’s tough. To keep going to the property tax as the increasing source of our revenues is pretty tough. People have a general resistance to property tax increases or larger property tax increases. So these alternative revenue sources are pretty important to the city. Figuring that out I think is going to be a pretty big challenge for the city.
What was the most important decision made during your time as city manager?
We had a difficult decision in how we were going to tackle the
QAsituation we were facing with the pension deficit in the city. That was a big issue and I think we all know that it was a difficult time with some of the labour difficulty we had there.
But that was a $100-million problem the city was facing. And we were able to eventually solve that, essentially, and, you know, put that behind us. That was a really important moment for us. That was a pretty big risk the city was facing and a pretty big liability the city was facing. So we got that one behind us and that was a very positive thing. But that was a pretty big decision to make.
You were city manager under two mayors. What are some of the differences between former mayor Don Atchison and Mayor Charlie Clark?
I think their interest and vision for the city is very consistent, but they certainly are two different individuals.
I would see our current mayor as more thinking about the evidence and all of the surrounding information pertaining to an issue and he likes the research
QAand all the supporting factual evidence and then the background to it.
Whereas mayor Atchison, he probably had more of a gut instinct on some things and kind of just had a good understanding. Not that he didn’t pay attention to what the data and the facts were telling him, but I think in a lot of cases he relied more on his instincts. And that would probably be the big difference I see in the two. I think they both ended up making great decisions. It’s just a different approach and I think both were effective.
What was the worst decision you’ve seen at city hall or a regret you have?
The labour disruption that we had in 2014, that was a very difficult time for everyone and I never wanted to see that get to the point that it got to, where we had our employees on the picket line.
QA