Rick Butler reflects

DENISE RIDEOUT

Rick Butler has seen Iqaluit grow from a town to a city.

He has run the cash-strapped municipality for three years, and in his time here he has helped city council repeatedly lobby for more infrastructure money, he has faced an angry, four-month-long municipal labour dispute and he has drafted the city’s five-year capital plan.

Butler, who started work as the city’s chief administrative officer in July 2000, has one of the most demanding jobs in Iqaluit. But when he steps down in March, he will leave a lifetime of memories and a legacy that will last long after he is gone.

“When I came in, there were about 100 things to do,” Butler recalls. “There were just lots of projects, lots of needs and lots of demands. The big question was ‘Where are we going to get all the money and the capacity to do all these things?’”

But he’s tackled the big to-do list and he’s ready to move on. In a little more than a month he will head to Cochrane, Alberta, where he, his wife and their two children will carry out the family’s dream of running a ranch. Butler will also work for the Developers’ Association of Alberta.

When he signed on as chief administrative officer, Butler was scheduled to stay for three years. He is leaving Iqaluit three months before his planned departure date, but he’s not exactly leaving his job early. Instead, he is taking a handful of not-yet-finished projects with him to Alberta.

“I’m definitely going to slow it down a bit,” Butler said of his new life. It’s something he is looking forward to after 33 often hectic months in Iqaluit.

One of his more trying times was the municipal labour dispute.

In April 2001, 80 employees — including water, sewage and garbage workers — threatened to go on strike for better wages. The city’s administration then locked out the employees, resulting in a four-month dispute.

It’s a time Butler won’t — and can’t — discuss.

“I promised the staff that I’d never talk about it again in the media. We’ve really made an agreement that we’re going to put it behind us,” he said. Then he offered this short comment: “I will say just this: it affected me very much personally, very deeply.”

Despite those rough months, Butler’s describes his time here as a good northern adventure for his family. “We had a lot of good family time out snowmobiling and travelling,” he said.

From day one he began working on a financial strategy — a plan for how the city would get the resources for all the projects Iqaluit needs.

“He’s the guy who originally recognized the difficulties we were in,” John Matthews, Iqaluit’s mayor, said of Butler’s work. “He, with the help of many staff members, organized the financial strategy.”

This December, all that work paid off. Butler presented Iqaluit city council with a five-year, $51-million budget for capital projects. Included in that plan was a $31-million contribution agreement that the city administrators and city council negotiated with the Nunavut government.

Butler describes the capital plan as his greatest accomplishment as Iqaluit’s CAO.

“That allowed us to get the dollars and get the capacity and get every project lined up — and it’s a really long list. That list would swamp a community four times the size of Iqaluit. There’s every piece of infrastructure, from water, sewer, paving roads, solid waste, transit,” Butler said.

With that, Butler thinks things will run more smoothly.

“Now there’s some certainty. Now, we can take a deep breath and relax a little bit.”

But there’s still an abundance of projects for the next CAO to tackle: drafting the city’s general plan, introducing the no-smoking bylaw, starting up a public transit system, increasing the number of Inuit staff and seeing major projects completed, such as the sewage treatment plant.

The city’s new chief administrative officer, Ian Fremantle, who is currently the CAO for Powell River, B.C., will take over in mid-March.