We need some hustle in our buzz

BLOG #540: The City of London has lots of good ideas which seem to take forever to make it to the decision stage. Yesterday we got caught flat-footed on two issues we should have been far better prepared to move on quickly.

Thursday, Oct. 20, 2011 – London

City council’s has a fiduciary responsibility, Mayor Joe Fontana reminded his colleagues yesterday, to ensure London taxpayers are getting full value for their assets. Doing so properly and adequately would position our elected officials to evaluate opportunities which often arise unexpectedly.

He could have added that over the years council has done a relatively poor job on this score, something for which the collection of mayors over the years should shoulder some of the blame. It’s the mayor’s job to prod people to get cracking.

The consequences of not being fully prepared were rudely and woefully laid bare at a meeting of council’s finance and administration committee as opportunities to exploit the potential of two different civic assets suddenly emerged.

On the one hand this was an illustration of how slow and cumbersome government can be in responding; on the other hand it was a lesson in how quickly the world of commerce turns these days.

In the first case, a 20-year unresolved argument about whether the city should properly organize its parking operations into a more businesslike arrangement left council dithering over how to evaluate offers from Tricar Group and Farhi Holdings for partnership parking garages downtown.

There has long been agreement the lack of long-term parking downtown is a serious barrier to London’s ability to attract top-drawer commercial clients into the office towers in the core. Where other cities have created stand-alone civic parking authorities to plan, finance, built and profitably operate above- or below-ground parking facilities at strategic locations, London continues to debate whether we should even be in that business – although we are – or whether the money should go to public transit instead – as if there was an either / or model anywhere in North America.

The fact is, however excellent the transit system, many people want to drive downtown and have an expectation of leaving their vehicles somewhere safe. That expectation is a civic asset, the exploitation of which by London barely scratches the surface. We have meters for on-street parking and underground parking at City Hall and Covent Garden Market. What we don’t have is a point of view about the direction this business should take – toward dominating the market, as many cities do, or finding a way to maximize our exit.

In the second case, our leisurely approach to information gathering on one of the key issues of the day appears to have blindsided us. Three years ago when council decided London Hydro wasn’t for sale – a decision most residents probably support – it asked to be kept aware of any new offers. We apparently didn’t think to ask London Hydro to keep us apprised of the strategic moves by utility companies big enough to buy us or to develop some scenarios about how the evolution of the power business across the continent might impact us.

A month ago council did consider a proposal to spin off its water and sewer, its garbage and indeed maybe even its parking utilities, into businesses run on the London Hydro model. More study of the idea was requested and the city administration, we learned yesterday, is still deciding how to get started on this.

Meantime, though, top officials of a rather large energy company from Edmonton arrived in town Tuesday night to meet with the finance and administration committee yesterday. Led by Don Lowry, president and CEO, the officials represents EPCOR, which runs power, water and sewer utilities in Alberta, British Columbia, Arizona and New Mexico, commands $4.5 billion worth of assets and is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the City of Edmonton.

EPCOR apparently figured out the answers to London’s questions before we’ve figured out the questions. Right now the company has $1 billion to invest. Mr. Lowry said they would like to pursue a partnership with London to grow the capacity of our power, water and sewer utilities. They don’t want to own us; they’d just like to help us with some seed capital and show us how to return about $138 million in dividends to the shareholder in a year – which is what EPCOR did for Edmonton in 2010.

Well as you can imagine the councillors in attendance had a lot of questions about that. Here are a couple that struck me that didn’t get asked.

When city council was wondering, three years ago, what to do with London Hydro, didn’t anyone happen to notice what the City of Edmonton was doing and wonder why we couldn’t copy them? And didn’t anyone think to ask in the past year or so what EPCOR was going to do with the $1 billion it had to invest or start wondering (worrying even) whether we might be a target of their ‘good intentions’?

Mayor Fontana is right about council’s fiduciary responsibility. He’s even right council’s responsibility now is let the discussions with EPCOR proceed – as he put it, “ surely this council can walk and chew gum at the same time” – even though the motion to sign a “cooperative agreement to talk to each other on an exclusive, confidential, non-binding basis” passed the committee narrowly, by a 3-2 vote.

But as well, council has a responsibility to get on with these things, to dig up the information far more quickly than it does, to make decisions for or against in a shorter time frame and live with them. We are exhausting too much creative energy by endlessly debating interesting ideas. And we are out of sync with a world which is moving much faster than us.

London wants to be a city with buzz. We need to put some – well, actually quite a lot of hustle into that too.