McBride reflects on first 12 months
By Brad Herron
The Eagle
A year in office has taught Mayor Truper McBride a few things: town staff isn’t as bad as advertised and leading a rookie council is challenging.
The mayor sat down for a lengthy interview Oct. 23 and explained the experience.
When McBride put his name up for the job after six years on council, he expected to be defeated. Often brash in council chambers, the 31-year-old admits his image among many community residents wasn’t one of mayoral qualities.
But after six years of frustration with a fractured council, McBride put his name on the ballot against Ken Bech, the incumbent. After toppling Bech by 231 votes in the 2007 municipal election, McBride established an ambitious agenda that included a corporate audit, pursuing commuter rail service to Calgary, and working on consensus building with council instead of divisive exchanges that defined the last six years.
“We haven’t had that head-butting we had before where the mayor’s office had a different agenda than council did. The frustration that’s existed, that’s existing, is that council wants to move faster on affecting change on certain areas like social issues, like the environment, like developing an economic base than what we are actually able to do,” McBride said.
For nearly an hour, McBride stickhandled around the issue of leadership without once mentioning Bech’s name, but often indicated the past council’s agenda was established in the mayor’s office without any consultation of councillors. During his tenure as councillor, McBride was often surprised by agenda items sprung onto council and disapointed by block voting by councillors who followed the mayor on nearly every significant issue.
He admits he blamed town staff for the disconnect, but now says it came directly from the mayor’s office. Now “when we say jump, they’ll jump,” McBride said of staff.
With the support of council, McBride launched an audit of community and protective services, the first of a three-year process that will analyze the entire town operation, including council. Although the report showed leadership problems within the organization, it reinforced the message that the department is well run.
“There has always been that notion in the public in Cochrane that there has been issues in administration and one of the reasons, one of the good things in doing this is we can now point to an independent third party that has done this review and say they are doing a good job,” McBride said.
With an established agenda before taking office, McBride has attempted to lead a more or less novice council through cohesion. Although a few initiatives have been advanced, council, himself included, is still climbing a steep “learning curve” that has limited their productivity in the past year.
One thing that holds council back, the mayor said, is an inability to take ideas beyond talk and into action. Currently, “there is a frustration level on council, where we are not able to get everything we want done immediately.”
“There is an education process that is taking place in showing people, here is what we want to do, here is a budget and these are the constraints. There are a lot of people on council, myself included, that really just want to get things done,” he said.
For years, McBride has pushed wetlands protection in council chambers but little action has resulted. Even as mayor, McBride has been unable to put teeth into the policy currently on the town’s books. With council’s backing — McBride said “like never before that I have seen, this council is interested in protecting environmentally-sensitive lands” — those lands will be saved.
“The ideology on council now, and if you listen to the questions at public hearings and things, wetlands are important and if the developer isn’t able to show they are protecting them in a more meaningful way I think than what we have seen, then the developer stands the risk of having that area structure plan defeated,” McBride said.
He added the town cannot, and will not, protect every wetland or puddle as some have very vocally suggested.
In a year that has gone quite well by his own calculation, there have been mistakes along the way. When selecting a consultant to conduct the initial audit, McBride and Chief Administrative Officer Julian deCocq did not consult with council and during the summer he criticized the former council and ordered an investigation of the town’s subdivision process without council’s consent. Since then, McBride has taken steps to include councillors in similar decisions.
“There is a shared understanding in what needs to be done in Cochrane right now. There is a lot of social infrastructure that we need to begin providing, there is a lot of environmental infrastructure protection that hasn’t been in place in the past that we are trying to put into place, there is a strong feeling that council has to be able to communicate better with the public. We have to communicate better internally and we have to have better tools to do that,” he said of council’s “common agenda.”
Even though his first year has been busy — McBride still works in Calgary and became a father for the second time — he expects to run for a second term in 2010.
RSS SUBSCRIBE