Miss Vicky's Offhand Remarks

Strategic directions: reading between the lines

I have had a look at the 10 pages of the council's draft "Strategic Directions". This is the result of 17 sessions with a professional consultant (and buddy of Mayor Larry) at the Pineview Golf Course and elsewhere. The strategic directions are supposed to guide municipal decision-making for the next 3 years. Aside from an online survey and a grudging few chairs at the back of the room for citizen observers,there has been no public input into these priorities. The document was released last Friday, public delegations will be heard by council members of July 9, and they are voting on this thing on July 11.

My first impression: it reads like exactly what it is, a corporate planning document put together by a facilitator who knows little about the functioning of a democratic entity and has no understanding of the public realm. It is about opaque as a document can get, full of vague statements and corporatespeak. And as far as directions go, some are hardly strategic and a few are downright dangerous.

At first I thought to myself: Miss Vicky, maybe you're overreacting. Your literary training has taught you to read texts too closely, and read too much into them. Then I went to Imagine Ottawa's forum on Monday and had all of my suspicions confirmed - and a few more added to boot.

It's difficult to disagree with much of the document: "Finish the Transitway by 2015", "Close the gap in sidewalks, street signals and stop sign renewal by 2010"..... Fair enough. But a lot of it fails to outline how certain objectives are to be achieved: "Reduce residential dependence on landfill/dumps by 30% within 1000 days." What does this mean? Will we be burning garbage? Composting? More nice, ineffective posters? "Become the leading edge in community and urban design". Sounds great, but how? Where? And who gets to determine what "leading edge" means? Some directions are just dreaming in technicolour: "Upload social services, social housing and public health". Even with a provincial election coming up, I highly doubt this is going to happen any time soon (even though it needs to). "In cooperation with federal and provincial partners, end homelessness in Ottawa in 10 years". Ummmm, OK. 'Cause we've been making such great strides so far, like all those affordable housing units on Lebreton Flats. Oh wait, there are no affordable housing units on Lebreton Flats.

And then there are the statements that are just simply wishy-washy: "Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 20% by 2012". UP TO? I put the laundry out to dry yesterday instead of putting it in the dryer; I guess we've met that target now. Or "Meet the intent of the LEED standard by 2020". The intent? And which standard? Gold, Silver, Platinum? And who's meeting it - the private developers, the city buildings?

But it's the governance and service delivery sections where things get disturbing. Because from the looks of this process so far, "Develop a more effective process to maximize input from citizens at large and ensure the right tools are in place to encourage broader participation in policy development" does not mean participatory budgeting or meaningful public engagement. I'm guessing more on-line surveys. And what exactly does "increase the appropriate delegation of authority to Steering Committees, ward councillors and staff to improve Council's ability to provide strategic direction and reduce transactional approvals" mean? The words "transparency", "accountability" and "inclusiveness" are strangely absent.

The Service Delivery section begins with an objective to "Create a client service culture". In one brief sentence we are no longer citizens, with a democratic right to engage in our city. We're clients. Speaks volumes, doesn't it? The next objective promises to "Establish an outcome-based management approach to service delivery". But some outcomes and some services are difficult to quantify, like day care for example. The next two directions are "establish an agreed-upon [by whom, I wonder?] set of flexible and appropriate service standards (one size does not fit all) across the corporation" [corporation?] and "deliver agreed-to level of service at the lowest possible cost." So we determine a bottom line, and get the lowest bid to deliver services? This is the "it's OK to outsource" section. We should be very wary of this, as outsourcing almost universally leads to diminished quality and higher long term costs.

The final directive in service delivery, "improve staff engagement", is just a joke. Especially when you consider the way staff were talked about during the election, how they become the scapegoats for the crisis that inevitable occurs every budget cycle, how many are overloaded because of cutbacks in staffing over the last several years on one hand, and prevented from being creative and innovative on the other (witness the length of time it has taken to get the Neighbourhood Planning Initiative going, and how lame it has been so far). Or how the years of work on the light rail was thrown away after the election. Yeah, that's really motivating. What they are engaged in, in my opinion, is pure survival.

Especially disappointing is the lack of real information about how all of this is going to be achieved financially. Because no matter how the city "Campaign[s] by October 2007 to upload provincial services" and they "seek out new sources of funding (like gas tax revenue)" and "achieve efficiencies in City operations", the fact remains that this city has a revenue problem. We are stuck with a profoundly unfair property tax system that sees no net increase in revenue for the city despite increasing property values. We are stuck with having responsibility for all kinds of social services, for which the provincial government frequently reneges on their share of the financing. We are stuck with increasing costs for equipment, supplies, fuel and labour. And we are stuck with the inability to look beyond property taxes for other sources of revenue, unless the provincial government decides to get real about municipal financing.

So, for all of this we paid $100,000 to consultants who happen to have worked with Mayor Larry in the past. Hell, I would have facilitated planning sessions and written a report for a lot less than that! I guess Miss Vicky just doesn't have the right connections.... I cannot really see how taxpayers are getting value for money with this process. And with this we seem to have forgotten that the city has already set out a strategic, long-term vision with Ottawa 20/20, a process which did engage the public and which represents a real consensus about the future of our city. Unfortunately there is very little of 20/20 in these strategic directions. In my opinion, they should be strategically ditched and council should return to the commitments it has already made in that document, in the Transportation Master Plan, in the Air Quality and Climate Change Master plan, and others.

Imagine Ottawa is encouraging people to register to speak to Council when they hear public delegations on July 9. There are plenty of resources on their site, and you can register by calling (613)580-2424 ext 28136.

Care to add a comment?