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Cash Handling

From: Kelvin Seow, Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:29:19 -0400
To: Belinda Cole
CC: <aboutus@dufferinpark.ca>, <Jutta Mason, "Ana Bailao" , "Braden Root-McCaig" , "Janie Romoff" , "Susan Lewis" , "Wendy Jang"

Hi Belinda, thank you for your email. I am copying Jutta on this email because she has made the same request a few weeks back.

PFR has received advice on a number of unique operating approaches at Dufferin Grove. The following are some of the issues raised that we would like to resolve:

1. Formal agreement between City and CELOS ( Accountability Framework) - The City requires all partnership agreements have clear terms conditions, defined roles and responsibilities.

Issues arising from lack of clarity -

- Conflict of Interest with staff who work in dual roles, as CELOS staff and as City of Toronto staff. .

- Contract staff from CELOS providing services in the park. (This work is also assigned to local 79 staff and the Union can make a case that the work of their members is being contracted out)

- Staff working under the City and CELOS may violate ESA working standards when combining shifts in a single day. (example - maximum daily hours, rest periods between shifts, )

- The Site requires a City staff lead at the park for Health and Safety. Coverage for CELOS contracts under the Occupational Health and Safety act.

- Risk and Liability coverage for products provided to park patrons where the products may be delivered or produce by a combination of CELOS contracts and City staff.

If there was a formal partnership agreement and/or clear operating model between CELOS and the City of Toronto that clarified roles, responsibilities and accountability it would alleviate this confusion.

2. Cash Handling Procedures, cash storage and reconciliation of cash received.

- Processes and controls over revenues earned must be managed using City approved standards and practices · Procedures must be established for cash control including the timely investigation of inventory and cash shortages · Daily reconciliation of closing cash accounts to cash receipts

3. Pricing of food and services

- City has an obligation to provide services in a fair and equitable manner. Discretionary pricing does not meet with this duty.

· City Fees must be transparent and equitable (non-discretionary) · Annual monitoring and adjustment of fees is a normal activity within the City operation · Procedures should be established to protect employees against potential risk of or perception of mismanagement or misappropriation of funds · City Fees are submitted in the annual budget submission for Council approval

4. Reconciliation of Purchases to Inventory and Inventory to Sales

· Process to verify the purchase of goods to inventory and to sales or other usages

· Physical controls must be established to manage inventory - e.g. lockable cabinets for food stock

· Procedures established to investigate inventory shortages.

5. CUPE Local 79 Collective Agreement: The City of Toronto must follow clear rules and regulations as agreed to in the Collective Agreement.

(Examples- Employment Scheduling Project and use of consistent pay codes that matches job responsibilities.)

We are making arrangements to use only City staff to deliver the programs and activities at Dufferin Grove. This may resolve a number of items in # 1 and 5. Wendy is meeting with staff to make these arrangements. Staff direction is to maintain all schedules until we can get staff hired to operate completely with City staff.

We will also be setting up meetings with staff and Jutta to work on a pilot to move Wallace and Campbell food activities over to City control. We hope to use this pilot as a learning experience. We will also like to build an action/ work plan to transition the food and skate activities at Dufferin Grove over to the City. It is also our intent to consult the community, staff and CELOS as we build this plan and move forward in resolving these matters to the City's satisfaction and not affecting the unique programming at Dufferin Grove.

I hope you can make the meeting we are setting up with staff and Jutta to discuss the Wallace and Campbell transfer. We can discuss and clarify any questions you have about the above items in that meeting or please just give me a call.

Thank you

Kelvin Seow

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Belinda Cole wrote, August 25, 2011

Hello,

I count myself very lucky to have raised my kids so close to the Dufferin-hub parks for the past 7 years.

Aside from enjoying the park, I have also worked for a long time as a part-time contract researcher for CELOS, looking at the laws and policies that get in the way of the parks running so well. From this position, I'd like to throw out a few brainstorming suggestions to add to the discussion about where to go from here.

I’m responding to the situation that Kelvin has detailed in his very helpful letter above – the fact that local city staff cannot continue to do what they do so well to run our four parks - in the face of specific policies passed by City Councils since amalgamation.

For some time now, CELOS has been urging Toronto’s Parks, Forestry, and Recreation Division to take over the food and skate lending programs at Dufferin, Wallace, Campbell and MacGregor parks. However, it is becoming clear that under the existing city policies the parks department cannot run the parks in the flexible, innovative ways that local parks staff have continually adapted over the last 20 years. The policies are “one size fits all” and designed for large institutional contexts. They simply don't fit in our neighbourhood-based, small-scale context.

So, I think what we need now is to ask our city councillors and Mayor to enter into an agreement to launch a 2 - 3 year local governance pilot project.

The aim of the agreement would be to suspend the city policies Kelvin describes, as they are applied to these four parks, during the period of the pilot project. Many of these policies have been added fairly recently; they are themselves an experiment. Suspending them for the project area would allow CELOS and local city staff at the four parks to demonstrate how to meet the aims of these city policies in an alternative, small-scale, inexpensive, constantly innovative ways.

Perhaps CUPE Union locals 79 and 416 would have an interest in the pilot - to look at win-win situations of keeping competent, resourceful employees – while bringing the missing third party – the public for whom the city provides services – into the discussions.

University of Indiana political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for her work on “Governing the Commons,” has lots to say about the factors that make groups like the park work. This pilot in local governance would draw on her knowledge and experience. http://celos.ca/wiki/wiki.php?n=OstromWorkbook.ListOfPrinciples

Some initial thoughts about some of the key elements we might like to see in the agreement:

Principles:

• build on the long-time track record of how the four parks work so well for the people who use them - the welcoming, neighbourly focus, broad competence, resourcefulness and versatility of local city staff, and Elinor Ostrom's list of criteria about what makes these kinds of arrangements work
• leave space to continue to adapt the practical arrangements that make the parks work while addressing the requirements set out in applicable laws and honouring the spirit of city policies (park safety for park users and city staff, respecting employment standards, proven small-scale, flexible, transparent, accountable cash handling arrangements, minimizing city liability, etc)
• document the experience of the pilot as a model for:
  • 1) running other city parks and public amenities,
  • 2) accessible, publicly transparent and accountable local governance and city budgeting on a small-scale

Goals: To reach an agreement to launch a local governance pilot that:

- reflects and makes space for local staff to continue the actual arrangements and local budgeting decisions (within the existing city allocated budget) that have worked so well in the four parks

- showcases CELOS' “third way” of fundraising to fund enhanced park programming, far beyond what is offered in most city parks

- provides the city with the real costs of running each of the four parks as a model for accessible, publicly transparent and accountable local government and city budgeting

- opts out of the city policies that make it impossible to do what works at the four Ward 18 parks – instead, we go with our proven local accountability measures that meet the purposes and objects of the City of Toronto Act

- provides direct City oversight from subset of city councillors and supervisory staff chosen on their track record of flexibility, innovation and working with local neighbourhoods

- continues to respond in practical ways to address actual and reasonably foreseeable harms and liability based on documented hard evidence available for public evaluation and discussion

- is written in clear, everyday language

Hopefully, we'll have a chance to talk to one another about some of these ideas and all of the others that neighbours and parks friends have written about - maybe at Friday's sleep-in and other Friday night suppers in Dufferin Park. I look forward to seeing you there.

Belinda Cole
The Centre for Local Research into Public Space (CELOS)

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