Council’s faltering pace and style

BLOG #541: The mayor says council needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We say they need to be able to grasp the far-reaching and interconnected social and financial implications of nearly a dozen urgent major items on which so far there have been few decisions.

Friday, Oct. 21, 2011

A woman of my acquaintance was once called on the carpet by her employer and criticized for her “pace and style” of work. Translation, she discovered: They wanted her to work harder and talk less.

As I wrote in this space yesterday, that’s the advice we need to give to city council members. Their talk-talk-talk list as they approach the end of the first year of a four-year term is considerably longer than their done-done-done list.

But an equally important issue with this group is the ever lengthening list of things they’ve now got on the table as priorities. There are whispers council’s inability to focus is causing frayed nerves around City Hall.

Joe Fontana certainly was elected on a promise to change things. And as he so eloquently put it Wednesday at the meeting of the finance and administration committee, “Surely this council can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

We’d hope so, but can they grasp the far-reaching and interconnected social and financial implications of nearly a dozen major items they are now considering? Some members of council, as we know from the questions they ask, have trouble absorbing the information in their printed agendas.

There is so much going on right now that nothing is getting done. Mayor Fontana has surely proven himself a man of action, but just as often he’s more like the kid in the candy store.

Here are the major files open right now; council has yet to decide any of them but most will require a significant milestone decision within the next six months:

     -- Property tax freeze (year two) – Mayor Fontana promised four years of no tax increases during his election campaign. The first year was relatively easy to accomplish; the second year is proving considerably more difficult and is likely to be accomplished only with cuts in service or staff. The debate is likely to sap council’s energy, not to mention the impact it will have on collegiality.

     -- Downtown renewal – This is a very big file with three potentially divisive issues. Let’s start with the Downtown Master Plan, which will arrive in late December or early January and is supposed to recommend a land use and financial plan to redevelop the downtown over the next 20 years. Then there is push for a new city hall, tied to which like it or not are decisions about ancillary facilities such as a civic centre or a parking garage. Finally let’s throw in how we’re going to encourage Western’s goal of a downtown education centre – which right now is pencilled in on the City Hall site.

     -- Transportation Master Plan – If London wants to become a big city that works, it will need to take a large step forward in support of a dramatic expansion of public transit. Such a recommendation is rumoured in this report coming soon. Ahead of the report, council is sharply divided on cars vs. buses. Council’s strategy to move people around London in the future is critical to deciding how we grow, and there are huge implications to this – which is surely to cause furious lobbying by both developers and environmentalists.

     -- Growth strategies – Mayor Fontana says he has made creating jobs his Job One. So far, though, this council has articulated no cohesive growth strategy beyond declaring ‘London is a City of Opportunity’. That’s really Job One. But you can’t just let a city like London grow willy nilly. It needs a blueprint for growth called the Official Plan. Ours is about to be reviewed by council – a process, we’ve been promised, which will include a concerted effort to engage the public because there are some critical and far-reaching decisions to be made about the kind of city we all want our kids to grow up in. Meantime, however, the mayor wants to jump-start the process by figuring out how to open up the 401 / 402 highway corridors for development within months. The huge Southwest Area Plan (SWAP for short) is pushing towards a final decision and looming just over the horizon is the need to start planning for a southside sewage treatment plant.

     -- Utilities bundle – It started as a whimsical suggestion to generate some extra revenue but suddenly this week the whole future of London Hydro and the other utilities the city operates itself – the water system, the sewer system, the garbage collection system and public parking – is on the table. Council clearly is unprepared to respond to a potential suitor with money to burn who’d like to ‘partner’ the corporatization of these city assets. In the absence of knowing what to do council in the past has often done nothing – often not the worst decision. In this case we’ve not only invited the suitor for dinner but to stay awhile in the guest room too; getting EPCOR to move out may prove difficult unless we have a clear plan.

     -- Smaller issues – There are a number waving for attention. Things such as completion of the new service model and the related 311 concept; Green Bin organic waste collection; a new animal welfare policy including deciding whether to continue contracting out dealing with stray and unwanted pets. Oh yes, and a governance model for council that works.

Now just to get an idea how urgent council has allowed all of these issues to become, every single one of them was somewhere on a committee agenda this month. On the other hand not a single one of them was on council’s agenda for a milestone approval. Ideas are being generated, information is being gathered, there’s lots of talk-talk-talk.  But what have we done???