The 'other' State of the City address

When Mayor Christian Provenzano presented his State of the City address earlier this month, there was a second significant speech that media outlets largely ignored in the crush of news that week.

After the mayor's 23-minute, wide-ranging, widely reported speech, chief administrative officer Malcolm White took over the podium and delivered his first major speech.

The following is SooToday's transcript of White's remarks, which contain insights into his leadership style and reading of the current municipal mood:

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Thank you very much, Christian.

I know after that, you're all sitting here wondering what else could someone say?

I know after reading the mayor's remarks yesterday, I wondered the same thing.

But I do have a couple of things to share with you.

First of all, the mayor has covered a lot of the ground. I'm not going to repeat that tonight.

I would just add a couple of things from a staff point of view.

One is that when you've been around working for the city as long as I have, you've been through a lot of cycles in our community.

We've been through some difficult economic times and through some more successful economic times.

We've seemed to have gone through those cycles again and again.

One thing I can say to you is this time it feels a little different.

When I started with the city back in the fall of 1988, the next time someone was hired into the non-union ranks was seven years later.

Most of my peer group had to leave Sault Ste. Marie in order to find their way.

Now, we've got a thriving urban community, and the excitement is something you feel.

In the city [government], when I started, we had one, maybe two generations in the workplace.

Now, we have about five generations in the workplace, and the creativity and the enthusiasm in the organization is palpable.

We feel the same sort of thing in our community.

We can see our community growing and changing.

If any of you were downtown this summer and saw the events going on, you felt the difference in the community.

This time it feels different, and that's why we're so fortunate to be able to work with you to build a new next chapter in Sault Ste. Marie.

For our town hall session tonight, we wanted to get away from the format of the past where we just had some remarks and then opened the floor to people.

A lot of people who maybe had a lot of strong opinions would hold sway for a while, but it didn't really lend itself to a give-and-take and sharing of information.

That's very important for us because the way we interact with members of the community is more complex than you would imagine at first.

Certainly, we interact with you as customers, as we provide services to the community.

We interact with you as clients when we have to offer more professional integrated services to people like the development community.

We interact with you as in your role as citizens. You have rights as citizens and we have to do the things that are necessary to assist you with the exercise of those rights.

And finally, sometimes we have to help guide you to be able to comply with the regulations of the city or government.

That's a long way of saying, our interactions with you are more complex than sometimes you first realize.

We really feel the best opportunity for you to give us your input, and for us to talk with you about what we do and why we do it, is in this trade-show format.

We have a ton of staff here tonight.

There's more staff than I would bore you with introductions, but they cover all aspects of the city operations.

So we're got that opportunity now for you to wander around and share your views with them.

Feel free to ask them any sort of question.

If there are answers we can't get for you tonight, we will follow up with you.

There's a lot of opportunity to go around to share ideas.

At our finance table, there's a small card. If you want to share your ideas in an online survey at a later date once you've got more information, you've got a card which gives you information to access that.

We also have a great showing tonight of City Council.

They will be around in different ward areas and be able to talk to you about specific issues.

That's all we have tonight as far as a formal program.

Thank you all for coming and please take the opportunity to discuss things with our staff.

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