The City of North Battleford is a regional service centre for Northwest Saskatchewan, with a population of 13,567.  The City has a hospital, school, shopping and recreation, and has a range of assets to consider, some of which are nearing the end of their life cycle. Since its launch in 2017, the Municipal Asset Management Program (MAMP) has played an important role in advancing asset management in Saskatchewan, with over 400 municipalities in the province participating in asset management training activities offered by the program’s partner organizations. North Battleford, with a staff of 130, has been an early pioneer, aided, in part, through an initiative offered by Asset Management Saskatchewan and NAMS Canada, and funded through MAMP.

The clock tower located in North Battleford’s Central Park, in front of the library. Photo courtesy of the City of North Battleford.

The challenge

Corporate memory and culture change

Like other municipalities in Saskatchewan, North Battleford was sending one or two people at a time for asset management training. When those individuals moved on, corporate knowledge and momentum were lost. This challenge came to a head in 2018 when the city lost several key staff members at once and recognized the need for a more long-term and sustainable culture change.

Capital planning and levels of service

Council has struggled with a lack of clarity around how capital planning was impacting each year’s budget, how far ahead the municipality was forecasting, and what its actual needs were as a community. To better communicate with citizens about levels of service, councillors wanted a deeper understanding of all the associated costs, including the cost of sustaining the city’s existing and future assets.

"The city took a ‘building the house’ approach: the foundation is only as strong as the number of pillars supporting it. We put a large number of pillars in our foundation for asset management."
– Steve Brown, Director of Finance

The solution/approach

Municipal assessment

In a leap forward to anchor in a culture shift and strengthen corporate capacity for asset management, North Battleford took the initiative in April 2019 to send a cross-functional team of 13 staff and two elected officials for NAMS Canada training, offered by Asset Management Saskatchewan. After this training, which introduced them to asset management and walked them through how to develop an asset management plan, staff and council immediately began incorporating what they learned into the way the city does business. One of the first steps was to evaluate the city on FCM’s Asset Management Readiness Scale. This provided clarity that helped get council buy-in and bring staff up to speed. Council and staff then began discussing the levels of service currently being provided and identifying the more costly levels of service.

Dedicated asset management staff

The city hired a full-time asset management coordinator in summer 2019, who completed the NAMS Canada professional certificate training with funding from FCM. A new corporate asset management committee now guides present and future asset management processes within the city. The committee includes department representatives, front-line staff and representation from the RCMP and fire services.

Staff are developing asset management plans for one group of assets at a time. Asset management discussions are now part of the regular public council meetings. At the city’s monthly planning meetings, council considers the draft asset management plans. When making decisions, they focus on ensuring that levels of service are appropriate, affordable and managed efficiently.

Ongoing collaboration

North Battleford’s foray into asset management is not just an accounting or engineering exercise, says Director of Finance Steve Brown. It involves collaboration at all levels. The city is involving front-line staff in the process in a two-way exchange—to learn from them about the assets and also to educate them on asset management. For its first asset management plan, on grass (which focused on the city’s green spaces) the city consulted the grass maintenance crew as part of an “eye-opening” inventory and cost analysis that caught a number of inefficiencies.

The city next turned its lens to the waste management system, and realized they could defer the need for an expensive new landfill cell (originally forecast for 2026) by increasing waste diversion.

The next asset group to be tackled will be the two water treatment plants, which are about 80 years old.

In 2020, the city adopted an asset management policy. It is currently finalizing its asset management plan, which has three core areas: building capacity and developing resources internally; gathering data; and communication.

"We are focusing on building small—not revolutionizing the entire organization overnight. We will grow through small wins as we build capacity."
– Steve Brown, Director of Finance

An eastward view of the North Battleford’s skyline. Photo courtesy of the City of North Battleford.

Lessons learned

• Don’t try to do this “off the side of your desk” in addition to other work. Allocate resources in order to integrate asset management into your organization’s way of working.
• Create a cross-functional team to get multiple perspectives and build leadership and communication on asset management across the municipality.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Take advantage of the tools by putting staff through training, talking to other communities and taking advantage of available resources.
• Recognize that changing corporate culture will take time. Introducing asset management is not like flipping a switch. While it may seem simple and obvious at first, developing the processes and systems will take many years.

Next steps

A major focus for the municipality in 2020 will be to build capacity throughout the rest of the organization. The city will continue taking advantage of the training opportunities offered through FCM, and also plans to develop an internal training program that provides 1–2 hours of training for every staff member.  

The city plans to adapt its 2019 annual reports to include a scorecard based on FCM’s Asset Management Readiness Scale, to track its evolving asset management readiness. This analysis will be included in the city’s strategic plans going forward.

To communicate to the public about asset management, Mayor Ryan Bater will make presentations at the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club and the State of the City address. “We want the community to understand what this is and why it’s important, and to make it relevant to specific systems within the city,” says Mayor Bater.

Contact

Steve Brown
Director of Finance
T: 306-445-1700

Related resources

• Find North Battleford’s 2019 Annual Report on their website, once published

Transcript

Homeowners in Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), NS, can take advantage of municipal financing through the Solar City program to install solar-powered water heating systems, lower their energy bills, and reduce water consumption. The municipality arranged over 300 system installations in the program's first 14 months — more than the rest of Canada that year — and aims to finance 700 systems within the first two years. Designed to be simple and create economies of scale, Solar City improves purchasing power and reliability, and offers quality assurance to citizens. The program includes education, free water conservation retrofits, an optional performance tracking system, and the first city-level solar "energy potential" map in Canada — an online resource that calculates annual solar energy potential for individual homes based on data collected through Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), a remote sensing technology.

Solar City's pioneering funding mechanism puts a new spin on Local Improvement Charge financing by offering Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) loans to individual homeowners to pay for equipment and installation. The loans are tied to the property and are paid back over time, while homeowners benefit right away from the energy savings. HRM is the first Canadian municipality to employ the PACE user-pay model to create a budget-neutral program that covers administrative and financing costs.

This initiative received support through FCM's Green Municipal Fund (GMF 12028).

Results

Challenges

• The project took two and a half years to launch, during which time there were municipal elections and senior management changes. Delays resulted in challenges with procurement and administration.  
• There was no blueprint for the program's most innovative aspects, including its unique financing mechanism.
• When setting up contracts and managing legal risks, the municipality had to balance taxpayer and community interests (economic and environmental) with homeowner concerns, while keeping the paperwork simple and easy to understand.

Lessons learned

• Keep the program as simple as possible for homeowners and use a comprehensive approach that accounts for quality control, achieves economies of scale, and encourages high participation rates.
• Engage the public, municipal council and provincial departments early to create a shared program vision.
• Develop and implement the program within 18 months to capitalize on momentum and prevent barriers that may arise with an extended timeline.

Resources

• Halifax Solar City

Partners and Collaborators

• Thermo Dynamics Ltd.
• Doctor Solar
• Nova Scotia Department of Energy
• Dalhousie University
• Nova Scotia Community College

Project Contact

Canadian communities face twin challenges of declining infrastructure quality and diminishing health and resilience of many ecosystems. Natural assets such as forests, foreshores and riparian areas can provide many vital services to local governments including stormwater management and drinking water filtration. However, few local governments measure natural resources and ecosystems, and there are many who need assistance to better manage and understand these assets beyond providing a range of ‘green’ amenities.

To address this issue, the Natural Asset Initiative (NAI), funded by FCM’s Municipalities for Climate Innovation Program’s Climate Adaptation Partner Grants initiative, provided a methodology, hands on support, training and peer learning opportunities for six communities in three provinces to help them integrate natural assets into core asset management and financial processes to address this challenge. Participating local governments learned about the value of and how to manage natural assets to meet service levels (e.g. localized or downstream flood management). The approach also prepared municipalities for how those services may be affected by climate change.

Participating communities:

• City of Courteney, BC
• City of Oshawa, ON
• Southeast Regional Service Commission (Town of Riverview, NB, Village of Riverside-Albert, NB)
• Western Valley Regional Service Commission (Town of Florenceville-Bristol, NB)
• District of Sparwood, BC

About integrating natural assets into core municipal processes

Participating communities learned about the value of its natural assets, how to integrate them into the strategic level of local government decision-making and how to test and refine new approaches to sustainable service delivery.

In each community, the assessment results demonstrated that conservation and proper management of natural assets would help the local governments deliver core services to their residents. Communities saw tangible benefits, one example is with stormwater conveyance, drinking water supply and water treatment, where a natural asset approach reduced cost, compared to traditional engineered or grey infrastructure assets.

"FCM’s funding has helped NAI bring to a number of completed natural asset management projects in communities across Canada. The evidence and experience we gathered from all each projects is available for any local government to access as they make informed decisions about sustainable service delivery." 

– Roy Brooke, NAI Executive Director

Protecting the ecosystem

Municipalities can use the data from these projects to identify and account for the natural assets in their communities, place a value on the services they’re providing, determine how they compare or work with engineered assets and make informed planning decisions for current and future climate scenarios.

Additional resource

Read more about this initiative to learn how it supports participating municipalities and find strategies for integrating natural assets into your community’s decision-making processes.  

Contact

Roy Brooke
Executive Director

This resource was developed by the Municipalities for Climate Innovation Program (2017-2022). This program was delivered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and funded by the Government of Canada.

Climate change is significantly impacting communities across Canada. Recognizing that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are driving these climate disruptions, municipalities are leading the way in developing ambitious plans to reduce emissions.

Unfortunately, reducing the GHGs emitted from homes is not only difficult and expensive, but also requires the participation of many homeowners to complete energy efficiency retrofit projects. To help municipalities reach emissions reduction targets, Clean Air Partnership, with funding from FCM’s Municipalities for Climate Innovation Program’s Transition 2050 initiative, developed the Local Improvement Charge Financing for Retrofits Toolkit with support from participating municipalities. This toolkit will help municipalities design residential energy efficiency retrofit programs, like local improvement charge (LIC) financing, also known as property-assessed clean energy (PACE) financing.

About the Local Improvement Charge Financing for Retrofits Toolkit

To create the toolkit, CAP hosted monthly webinars and worked with a group of nine municipalities in Ontario:

• Burlington
• Guelph
• Halton Hills
• London
• Newmarket
• Peterborough
• Toronto
• Vaughan
• Whitby

This toolkit focuses on single-family home residential buildings, which includes townhouses, condominiums, and single detached homes. This toolkit aims to help municipalities reach their climate goals though local improvement charge (LIC) financing, also known as property-assessed clean energy (PACE) financing.

"The high upfront cost of home energy efficiency retrofits is often a significant barrier to implementation. With LIC/PACE programs, these costs are covered by the loans and repaid over 5-20 years. This can make whole home retrofits affordable to a larger population of homeowners."

– Vanessa Cipriani, Program Manager, Clean Air Partnership

Reduce GHG emissions in your community

Use the toolkit to:

• Design residential energy efficiency retrofit programs in your community to achieve deep GHG reductions from homes
• Learn how retrofits programs can benefit homeowners, the environment and the economy
• Understand the benefits and potential challenges of these programs
• Discover key program design elements and internal operational process flows
• Access templates for LIC bylaws and sample marketing materials for home energy retrofit programs.

Use the toolkit to learn how to get started on creating meaningful residential energy efficiency retrofit programs for your citizens.

Who is this toolkit for?

Municipal practitioners working in your community’s climate change, environment, energy and sustainability departments will find the toolkit most useful.

Measuring the success of an LIC/PACE program

An accompanying monitoring and evaluation framework was created to support municipalities in understanding the success and improving the delivery of their single family home LIC pilot programs. The framework can also aid in reporting results to Council and program funders. 

Contact

Vanessa Cipriani
Project Coordinator
vcipriani@cleanairpartnership.org

Kevin Behan
Deputy Director
kbehan@cleanairpartnership.org