Various departments at Barrie City Hall are undergoing substantial restructuring ahead of the city's impending population boom.
Four department heads have been let go as part of the restructuring.
BarrieToday has confirmed them to be Zvi Lifshiz from Invest Barrie, Rhonda Bunn from Innovate Barrie, Karen Dubeau from Creative Economy, and manager of construction Stew Patterson.
In a memo to Mayor Jeff Lehman and members of council, City of Barrie chief administrative officer Michael Prowse outlines those changes and the reasons behind them.
Earlier this year, council approved its strategic priorities for this term of council.
Those priorities include growing the city's economy, fostering a safe and healthy city, building strong neighbourhoods, offering innovative and citizen-driven services, and improving the ability to get around.
"These are staff’s guiding principles as we prepare to grow to 210,000 people by 2031," Prowse said in the memo, obtained by BarrieToday. "The future is bright and exciting for Barrie, but in order for us to achieve all these plans, we have to ensure we are structured properly."
The city last undertook a "broad" restructuring in 2013 with some modifications in 2016, the CAO added.
Prowse says the main changes to the city's structure include:
• Business development realignment within the Infrastucture and Growth Management division, allowing for businesses to grow in a seamless manner with our other approval functions creating a "concierge approach."
• Creative Economy will align under business development, while theatre and events functions will move to be aligned with services delivered by the recreation department. The Invest Barrie and Creative Barrie departments will remain.
• Information technology, Centre for Continuous Improvement (CCI), and Innovation to Access Barrie to better align with customer service and communications. "This will allow for a seamless delivery of citizen-driven services through new websites, apps and customer-focused technology," Prowse said.
• The S.A.P. team — which stands for systems, applications and products, handling data management — will move under finance allowing for our financial management system to best meet the financial needs of the corporation.
• Prosecution staff moving to Legislative and Court Services to allow for more efficient service delivery.
"These changes focus on our residents and taxpayers, and allow the city to be better positioned to serve our community," Prowse said. "It will create more streamlined service delivery, improved business performance, process improvement, risk management and legislated compliance.
"This new organizational structure will allows city hall to be able to be agile, responsive, and customer focused," he added.
