Top city official says splitting up water utility didn't change feeder main response

Calgary's top bureaucrat is satisfied that a major reorganization had no negative impacts on how the city responded to last summer's catastrophic failure of a key water main.

The Bearspaw south feeder main ruptured last June, sparking months of water restrictions and a major repair effort.

The incident has also sparked several investigations into what happened and how the city handled the situation.

A little known fact is that the city's water utility, which was a single entity until a couple of years ago, was split up into three distinct departments.

That happened as part of a major reorganization directed by David Duckworth, the city's chief administrative officer.

Prior to the reorganization, nearly 1,100 employees were part of the city's water utility.

About 80 per cent of them are now in the operational services department, while 10 per cent work in infrastructure services and another 10 per cent work in planning and development services.

Duckworth recently sat down with CBC News to talk about the water utility and the reorganization. Here is some of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.

CBC: Can you explain in broad strokes what happened to the city's water utility in that reorganization?

David Duckworth: Our new structure is made up of like functions. Our previous structure was very siloed and I was at one point a general manager, a department head. We had really strong departments but did we work across departments as well as we could have? No. We were very siloed. The water utility, which, as a general manager, I was responsible for, actually had a functional structure in a way that we have right now. And so I wanted to kind of take that approach and expand it across the city. But it's not just me, it's my entire team. And so when you look at the water utility, the planning functions are in a department with all the other planning functions of the city. The infrastructure delivery is all within one department. So it's not just water utility, it's road infrastructure, it's recreation infrastructure, it's all the infrastructure all together now. And the water utility operations is together with the other operations of the city, whether it's waste or recycling, our parks operations, our roads, our mobility operations, those are all in one department. They work across departments now much more effectively than they did before.

Can you give an example of how things are working better, more efficiently?

DD: In the previous structure, think of a water main break on a street. You would have had a water utility department that came in and repaired the water main, backfilled it to the top and there's gravel on the road. At some point in time, our roads and transportation team would come by and repair the road. You now have [that] all in one department. So there's much more improved collaboration. There's no perfect structure, but better collaborating together and understanding what each other is doing and sharing better should lead — will lead — to better outcomes for Calgarians.

Is there any change to where people are physically? Are their desks in the same place where they were?

DD: Many people didn't move locations. So before, you maybe worked in the department up and down. Now you're expected to work in a department up and down, but also across other departments. And so while there's an increased effort to collaborate together, at the end of the day the whole objective of our new structure was to have better outcomes for Calgarians, improve collaboration, reduce redundancies where they existed, be as efficient and as effective as possible. We still have a ways to go, but when I compare ourselves to other municipalities — and I've worked in other municipalities — the City of Calgary does really, really well and I'm really impressed with the changes we've made.