It is our honour to recognize amazing businesses and leaders within our community through the Mayor’s Innovation Awards. As we approach the ceremony, we would like to introduce the nominees.
Introduced in 2023 by Mayor Alex Nuttall, the Municipal Innovation Award demonstrates the City of Barrie’s commitment to continuous improvement and excellence in public service. It recognizes the individuals, teams, and departments within our organization that have gone above and beyond to drive innovation, streamline processes, and deliver more effective and efficient services to our community.
Countless projects have been completed by City of Barrie staff that have improved efficiencies, showcased incredible innovation and improved the life of our internal departments as well as our residents. Public nominations are not accepted for this category; projects are brought forward through a separate submission process.
This year’s Municipal Innovation nominees include:
Automated Distribution of Building Inspection Reports – Building Services Department & Information Technology Department
City of Barrie Building and Information Technology staff created a templated email in APLI that automatically populates based on inspection comments created in the field. Once complete, the system automatically emails the Inspection Report to the pre-determined project contacts on the record. This removes the manual effort previously required of Inspectors to generate a report from the comments, attach that report to an email themselves, and compose a new email to new contacts every time. 3 to 5 minutes of staff time are saved per inspection. With 31,003 inspections in 2023, this equates to 1,550 hours, allowing staff time to perform additional inspections.
Bus Exchange with Durham Region Transit – Transit & Parking Department
When Durham Region Transit lost some of their buses due to a fire, Barrie Transit & Parking agreed to trade three conventional buses for three cutaways that have been added to the City of Barrie’s fleet to support the expansion of the Transit on Demand (ToD) service. This exchange avoided 12–16-month lead time for new cutaways and had various cost benefits as well.
In-Sourcing Property Maintenance – Corporate Facilities Department
The City of Barrie’s Corporate Facilities team undertook an in-sourcing outdoor property maintenance program including grass cutting, snow clearing, window washing, and overall property appearance. This required additional staff in the Corporate Facilities department and has still resulted in significant savings and other benefits over out-sourcing, including increased service levels.
Moving Water Billing Reports to SAP BI – Finance Department
The City of Barrie’s Finance department moved existing Water Billing reports from an old system to SAP BI that helped save licensing and maintenance costs and facilitated new requirements and reporting capabilities for staff. This project saves city staff over 1,000 hours per year, as well as licensing costs.
Online RecPASS Membership Sales – Recreation & Culture Services Department
The City of Barrie’s Recreation & Culture Services began offering RecPASS Membership online, allowing participants to purchase their pass without coming to City Hall or lining up at a recreation centre. Automatic renewals save the need for continued administration and participants can cancel at any time by simply turning off the automatic renewal function. This program has shown a large increase in membership sales since its implementation in September of 2023.
Parking Money Collection Improvements – Transit & Parking Department
City of Barrie Transit & Parking staff were collecting pay station cash boxes with little to no coin in them daily strictly out of habit from when the industry was dominated as coin only. Not only was this not necessary anymore due to the uptick in credit card payments, the launch of the digital Hotspot parking platform, and customer spending habits (i.e. not carrying cash as often); it was needlessly creating a downstream effect of additional work for vault staff and created a backup redundancy issue for several cash boxes waiting to be processed with minimal revenue in them. Backoffice software allows staff to see how much coin is in a parking device in real time. Staff are utilizing this feature to collect revenue on an as needed basis with a new process and revenue threshold being set for when a device should be collected. This significantly reduced wasted staff time and labour, while saving gas as well.
Congratulations to all the nominees in the Municipal Innovation category! Keep up the great work to continuing striving to make the City of Barrie a welcome home for residents and businesses alike.
Stay tuned for the announcement of the winners following the Mayor’s Innovation Awards ceremony on November 28th!
Thank you to the sponsors of the 6th Mayor’s Innovation Awards, Adams Hamilton, Ain Whitehead LLP, Meridian Business Banking and Innovative Automation, for recognizing the importance of these local businesses.