Dauphin’s new city council is through the first 100 days of its mandate and for freshman mayor David Bosiak, the last three-plus months in office has confirmed a lot of what he expected heading in, but there have been a few surprises along the way.

“Some of the things that I anticipated, or expected, are absolutely as I thought,” Bosiak said, citing the quality of the people employed by the City as an example. “Staff at city hall, at the shop, at the water treatment plant are all doing a great job. They’re stellar employees and I think the City is very fortunate to have such a combination of enthusiastic, dedicated and experienced staff members. That’s been very, very clear to me and other members of council, how competent the staff is.”

Associated with that realization is one of surprises, a pleasant one, that surfaced for Bosiak.

“I’m surprised a little bit by actually how much preparation staff does for the mayor and members of council,” he said. “I was anticipating having to be doing more homework to be ready for having council meetings and other committee meetings and the homework is pretty simple in that we are so well prepared.”

That support has allowed Bosiak and new councillors Randy Daley, Ted Rea and Steve Sobering to settle quickly into their roles and get up to speed with returning councillors Christian Laughland, Kathy Bellemare and Devin Shtykalo.

“I’m very pleased, generally, with the tone and tenor of council. They all seem to be on a the same page, or a very similar page, that we all have, I think, very similar outlooks on what we expect and why we ran for election and are on municipal council,” Bosiak said.

That has allowed council and City staff to advance one of Bosiak’s priorities heading into his tenure as mayor, looking at the structure of committees the City is involved with and gauging the work being done by those committees.

“Sort of doing a bit of a check, a sense of, is this an appropriate level of City involvement. Should there be more, should there be less,” he said. “And in those situations where we fund external agencies, I’ve asked council to really look carefully at, are we funding these organizations to the appropriate level? Meaning might some need more funding from the City based on what they’re doing and what they’re trying to accomplish, and might some needed a lower level of funding based on what they are supposed to be doing and what they may actually be doing?”

As they attend meetings, councillors are bringing reports back to council as a whole.

“And we’re having very thoughtful discussions on that,” Bosiak said.

In terms of getting council better organized, a planning session is set for early March during which a facilitator experienced in municipal governance will spend a half day with councillors and the City’s senior management team.

“Just to help us understand how do we incorporate the next four years of what each of us thought we could do as we got elected and bring that to some sort of fruition,” Bosiak said.

Tempering those expectations are plans and projects put in place by previous councils that the current edition of City government must fulfill. Bosiak did not fully appreciate the amount of work that was already on the table and quickly came to realize council needs to allow staff to continue to work on those projects.

“That does have an impact on what we intended to do in our first year of our mandate,” Bosiak said. “But we have our own objectives to put into place for the three years, so that’s one thing that we’ll be talking about.”

Going forward, a focus will be on the City’s relationships with other levels of government. In particular, Bosiak would like to maintain and hopefully improve Dauphin’s relationship with the provincial government, an important relationship given the major infrastructure projects the province is helping fund in the city.

However, those efforts have been hampered by recent resignations and restructuring at the cabinet level, he said.

“I was hopeful that we could have more of an ongoing dialogue with the provincial government and we’re attempting to do that from the City’s end and it’s just been a little bit slower than I was hoping,” Bosiak said.

For the most part, however, Bosiak’s time since the Oct. 26, 2022, municipal election has gone pretty much as he thought and he is looking forward to the remainder of his four years in the mayor’s chair.

“We’re just busy doing the regular business of municipal government,” he said. “There is lots of positive stuff, mostly positive stuff and it’s been a pretty decent first hundred days.”