AUMA Conference

The Town of Peace River and every other city, town, village and summer village in Alberta are members of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) (http://www.munilink.net/live/). This association was founded in 1905, the same year that Alberta became a province, to represent the interests of urban municipalities.

This year's conference, held in Calgary, was quite an experience for the rookie Town of Peace River councillors. I don't have official numbers, but heard a rough estimate of around 1300+ in attendance. The huge number of people from smaller places compared with the small numbers from the cities helps me understand why the mayors of Edmonton and Calgary feel outnumbered when resolutions come before the assembly.

Three of the four new councillors (Heinen, Laurin and I) attended a pre-conference session geared towards newcomers. The packed room heard high-level speakers on a variety of topics that will assist us in becoming effective councillors:

• Municipal law with an overview of the legislation that affects municipalities (primarily the Municipal Government Act, but there are a number of others).
• Robert's Rules and meeting decorum in general.
• Two sessions dealing with governance and achieving excellence in municipal governance. Some of what leads to excellence includes having vision and direction, making decisions consistent with Council's aims and goals, letting management achieve these aims, and overseeing to ensure that mandate is achieved. One speaker recommended that we all download the 20 Questions for Directors series of booklets from the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA). These are on topics like privacy, risk, management discussion and analysis, and strategy. They were primarily written for the directors of corporations, but can be applicable to municipal officials as well. The booklets are available in PDF format at: http://www.cica.ca/
• Teamwork. It's an important topic, particularly in today's time of needing to consider partnerships and collaboration, but this session was too cursory for my needs.
  
• Infrastructure. This is an important topic these days when we speak about sustainable communities as Canada's infrastructure reaches critical stages of decay. A recent report from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) estimated that there is a $123 billion deficit in infrastructure without even accounting for new infrastructure that needs to be built in response to growth (that report can be found at http://www.fcm.ca/english/advocacy/deficit.html Councillors were encouraged to ask administration six questions about infrastructure: What do we own? What is it worth? What is its condition? What is the deferred maintenance? What is the remaining service life? What do you need to fix first? I also attended another session later in the conference entitled Paved With Good Intentions: Planning for Sustainable Community Infrastructure.
  

One other session that I attended was on affordable housing, but since it was primarily about the way in which Canmore has tackled the problem using what is called perpetual affordable housing (PAH), it was interesting and there may be applications locally, but I 'd have liked to hear about other kinds of approaches as well.

During the meeting portions of the conference I learned how resolutions come forward and are voted on. I spent hours at the trade fair looking at products and services.

Premier Stelmach attended the conference to receive an award and he gave a short speech. There were a host of provincial Ministers in attendance for a Q&A session and at a luncheon.

The three days left me with pages and pages of notes, handouts and business cards to catalogue and plenty to think about. The learning ahead is tremendous and the conference was a good introduction.