{"id":11636,"date":"2015-08-19T14:21:11","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T18:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=11636"},"modified":"2015-08-26T11:35:43","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T15:35:43","slug":"moyle-takes-the-helm-as-auroras-interim-cao","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/moyle-takes-the-helm-as-auroras-interim-cao\/","title":{"rendered":"Moyle takes the helm as Aurora’s interim CAO"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir
\n<\/strong>
\nPatrick Moyle sees himself as something of an hourglass \u2013 not necessarily in terms of a Marilyn Monroe-like figure, but how he sees himself fitting in at the Town of Aurora.<\/p>\n

Mr. Moyle took the helm as Aurora\u2019s interim Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) earlier this month. In this capacity, one of his primary responsibilities will be to helm the process to find a permanent replacement for Neil Garbe, who left Aurora this summer for the same job in Richmond Hill. But Mr. Moyle will also be tasked with a wholesale review of how things operate at Town Hall.<\/p>\n

\u201cI firmly believe in an approach that was developed by Dr. David Siegel where he describes the role of a CAO as the pinch point between an hourglass,\u201d says Mr. Moyle. \u201cThe top part of the glass has the elected officials and their jobs are to make policy and make decisions. The job of the bottom part of the hourglass is staff and their job is to provide advice and implement the decisions and policies of Council. The pinch point is the CAO and his or her job is to make sure Council\u2019s will and Council\u2019s decisions are implemented through staff.\u201d
\nIt is a formula that has evidently served Mr. Moyle well.<\/p>\n

An urban and regional planner early in his career, he served as Planning Director in Huntsville where he was eventually appointed CAO when the municipality changed the structure of their government. From there, he spent time working in the private sector before returning to the municipal sphere as CAO of Orangeville, Caledon, Halton and, in an interim capacity, in the City of Burlington.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really believe municipal government is where the action is,\u201d says Mr. Moyle, who also served as Executive Director for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) for nearly six years. \u201cIt is closest to the people, it is open, it is transparent, and it is accountable much more so than the other two orders of government. It is pretty rare if you decided to walk up University Avenue into Queen\u2019s Park to sit in on a caucus or cabinet meeting. In fact, the security would march you out of the building. In the municipal world, you are encouraged to be involved in the budget process.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is this sense of being close to the action through municipal government that keeps Mr. Moyle coming back for more, particularly in an interim capacity. From his time at AMO, he came to see Aurora as a well-run organization within a community with very engaged residents. Aurora, he says, does not have the same level of social problems faced by other municipalities, and \u201chas a reasonably healthy financial situation\u201d compared to many others.
\nWhen the opportunity to replace Mr. Garbe presented itself, Mr. Moyle says he saw a chance to provide some value.<\/p>\n

\u201cI jumped at it for three reasons: to serve in an interim capacity, to help find the permanent CAO, and to provide advice for the organizational structure and those are tasks I just completed in the City of Burlington,\u201d says Mr. Moyle.<\/p>\n

Over the next several weeks, Mr. Moyle will be working with Council to develop a candidate profile for the ideal CAO, qualities which will then be agreed to by Council. Good candidates need to have a \u201cgood and thorough\u201d understanding of municipal government, have leadership and communication ability in spades, and being a strategic thinker is also important. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy job will also be to provide some advice to Council and the incoming CAO on what the structure should look like,\u201d he adds. \u201cThe new CAO should have a significant amount of say in what the structure might look like if, in fact, there are some changes to be made. We haven\u2019t begun that exercise yet. From what I have been able to assess so far is Aurora is blessed with good quality staff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although a fan of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, he is not a fan of applying a \u201cBig Bang\u201d principle when looking at change. In a place where changes aren\u2019t necessarily obvious, incremental change is the way forward and it is generally accepted by staff, he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cHaving said that, if an organization was in free fall and there was significant structural problems with how services were being delivered and how staff were doing their jobs, then you can take much more direct action to correct those through structural improvements,\u201d he says. \u201cI always ask this one question: What is the problem we\u2019re trying to solve?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is human nature to immediately find a solution, but the problem itself hasn\u2019t been identified yet. You need clear definition of the problem you are trying to solve, consensus from the decision-makers it is a problem, and you go about solving it. Many things go sideways if you don\u2019t have a good problem definition at the beginning for overriding obvious reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Moyle and his wife are residents of Caledon. They have a daughter who works for Public Health Ontario, a son who is \u201ca recently minted civil engineer\u201d, and they are the proud grandparents of a new little boy.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Municipal government is “where all the action is,” according to Aurora’s new Chief Administrative Officer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/2015-08-20-03.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-31G","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 05:17:40","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}