Chestermere City Council created a five-person transition team to review council’s selected options for the transition of Chestermere Utilities Inc (CUI) at the Nov. 20 council meeting.
The Transition team is made up of CUI Transition Manager Rick Quail, City CAO Bernie Morton, the city’s legal advisor Richard Jones, City Councillor and CUI Board Director Ritesh Narayan, and City Human Resources Lead Tracey Radloff.
The purpose of the transition team will be to conduct a detailed review of council’s chosen restructuring options: municipalization both with, and without, consideration of outsourcing some of the operations, retaining CUI as a shell corporation for the purpose of holding the existing CUI debt separate from the city, with the provision that the shell company won’t incur new debt, and a private sector partnerships for utilities.
The transition team will analyse and report on the options, looking at how each will affect, the cost of service, the cost of transition, service delivery, human resources, legal processes, customer services, potential operational efficiencies and each option’s transition timeline.
“It’s expected that for your December meeting of council we will have a formal recommendation and options for you to decide,” said CAO Morton during the meeting.
Once council has the report and chooses the future direction for CUI, implementation of the transition will begin in early 2019.
To date, the cost of the review of CUI has cost $65025.94 which has been spent on consultants KPMG and McMillian LLP for the creation of the CUI restructuring options report.
