Waiting for a report on how they can move forward, Moose Jaw Mayor Fraser Tolmie is pleased with a planning session that council had earlier this month with the author of "13 Ways to Kill Your Community."

The best seller describes some of the major contributing factors to the demise of communities and met with council following a public event earlier this month. Tolmie is anxiously awaiting Doug Griffiths' take on our city.

"We want to start looking long term for this city, we know the challenges that we've been facing and we wanted to come up with some action items as a result of that meeting," explained Tolmie.

Like many cities that have Griffiths has been to as a guest speaker, Moose Jaw checks off nearly all thirteen of the boxes described in the book and that's something Tolmie wants to address. Things like attracting business, promoting a shop local aspect in the community and better engagement of the residents.

In fact, local residents have been pushing back against items that city hall has been trying to implement in recent years, such as some aspects of cast iron water line replacement, front street garbage collection and the work on High Street West that saw the area named the Worst Road in the province through CAA Saskatchewan voting.

"We've hired a new city manager and the city manager is very customer service focused and we're looking to communicate more with the community," said Tolmie when asked about that section of the book and how it applies to Moose Jaw. "Those are things that we're working on and changing the process so that we communicate some of the things that we're looking to do, earlier on."

Griffiths is expected to formalize a list of action items for the city, based on his observations and meeting with council.