By James Dunn

reducing red tape

City seeks business feedback through survey

Feb 14, 2020 | 3:50 PM

The City of Red Deer is launching a new survey geared towards business owners in Red Deer and their dealings with city hall.

“Doing Business with The City” is a five-question survey all about how The City of Red Deer works with businesses, and are looking for ways to “help us remove unnecessary red-tape and work better for you.”

The questions focus on what business barriers the city should consider removing, what they’re doing well with, economic and industry trends, and what other similar-sized cities are doing well that Red Deer could look into adopting.

In September, city council was delivered an Economic Leader Report with eight recommended initiatives which included financial incentives for downtown, red tape reduction, and customer service.

Jason Taylor, a divisional strategist with the city, says this survey isn’t just meant for downtown business owners, but city-wide.

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“While the other seven initiatives (of the economic report) are focused on economic development and promoting positive activity in the downtown, the eighth initiative is really kind of city-wide in terms of how we do business in all areas of our operations for all of our customers and stakeholders.”

Taylor also says this is the first specific survey geared towards red-tape reduction.

“The survey is related to council’s strategic goal of establishing Red Deer as an economic leader, as well as in recognition of not only the provincial economy, but provincial efforts. We see an opportunity for us to take advantage of the feedback from the community and improve the way we do business, to serve our customers and citizens better.”

Taylor adds, “Hopefully, we will be gaining a lot of good feedback in terms of the effectiveness of our current outreach activities and opportunities to improve, or various avenues we might be able to engage the business community further.”

If you are a business owner and would like to share your thoughts, you can complete the survey here.