With the dissolving of the Shared Services agreement between North Huron and Morris-Turnberry later this month, a unique pilot project will come to an end.
Initially thought to be a way to save both municipalities money, it showed after just one year those savings would not pan out.
North Huron CAO Sharon Chambers says the initial reports indicated strong savings for both sides.
"The original concept report anticipated savings toward the end of 2018, and within that report, it projected up to $600,000 in savings. That was based on a full merger of all the public works, the building department, and eventually the administration."
Chambers says a large amount of that estimate hinged on the administration merger, which never came to be. She also says the municipality learned a lot, and is still interested in some form of future shared services.
"We certainly don’t think that it’s a lost venture, we learned a lot about ourselves as an organization," says Chambers. "We are able now to refocus on what we need to do as North Huron to position ourselves perhaps to do shared services more efficiently in the future."
This merger was unique in that both municipalities retained their staffs, and were billing each other back and forth for services on a near daily basis.
Chambers noted it was a different approach that hadn’t really been tried before, and took an enormous amount of staff energy and time to try and pull off, and it eventually showed not to be very effective in the end.
The shared services between North Huron and Morris-Turnberry will cease February 17. The building services project between the two municipalities will continue.