Rural Municipal Management Poses Its Own Challenges

Trish Fraser was born and raised in the Westman area, finding a passion for administration through her earlier work experiences and settling into legal admin before moving into municipal work. She worked her way up from administrative assistant to the position of Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) of the Municipality of North-Cypress Langford, both pursuing formal education in municipal administration but also learning on the job about the challenges and quirks of running a rural area.

Fundamentally, the role of the CAO is to take the decisions of Council and implement them. In the chain of command, the CAO is directly below the Council, and in charge of everything that happens at the administrative level including all other staffing. However, the reality of how the process functions is much more of a two-way street than that.

The CAO is also responsible for researching and preparing all issues that come before the Council, and making recommendations where appropriate. So as much as the Council is elected to make the final decisions about how the municipality is run, the CAO contributes a great deal to that decision-making process right from the ground up.

That’s especially true in a rural area that relies on a very lean staff to manage a very large area. The North Cypress-Langford Office runs on just three full-time staff, with seven more employees in public works plus seasonal staff as needed. That reflects the small population of the area compared to larger centres, but a smaller population does not decrease the number of different areas a municipality is responsible for, just the size of them. Fraser has a lot of autonomy to run the day-to-day operations of the municipality, though items that have not been budgeted for always go back to Council.

Manitoba went through a streamlining process of its municipalities a few years ago, including amalgamating several of them. North Cypress-Langford was one of those, combining the former municipalities of North Cypress and Langford. The total geographic footprint was increased tremendously and put under one administrative umbrella. Functionally, each of the six Councillors is elected for and represents a separate Ward within the municipality, which differs from a rural town such as Neepawa or Carberry, in which the North Cypress-Langford offices are located, where the Councillors are all elected from the population as a whole.

Fraser indicates they’re still in the process of combining the municipalities in some areas, even years after the amalgamation. For instance, the 2022 tax year is the first year the entire municipality will be under one mill rate instead of two. As well, older policies are still coming to light in areas such as infrastructure and development that were originally written for one municipality or the other and require revision.

When summing up her responsibilities within the municipality, especially in such a public-facing job, Fraser says, "If you want to work in the public sector, you have to have a very strong backbone." Challenges will always arise and people will always have opinions, but so far they’ve been successful in meeting and handling anything that comes up.