Slides. Selby Street @woonerf pic.twitter.com/uGIsR4m8kW
— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) December 14, 2021
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Monday, December 6, 2021
The rear view mirror 2021
Time to look in the rear view mirror, have a look back. And, make no mistake, at my age a guy can look a long way back (said in a George Burns voice).
Early summer 1993 we, a family of three, arrive from North Vancouver. Our daughter is enrolled in Grade 7 at Hammond Bay Elementary, we'll spend the summer exploring the Island in a camper van.
We’d been here only a few days, still living out of boxes, when a long time family friend who had lived here for years invited us to the Civic Arena for Canada Day festivities. Here, our friend introduced us to her friend the Mayor, Joy Leach.
I was to learn later that Mayor Leach’s Council had created Nanaimo’s first Official Community Plan (OCP), the focus of which was “managing urban growth.” The plan included an Urban Containment Boundary. It was to guide Nanaimo in a new direction from the one set by the Wild West real estate development of the “pirate” years of Frank Ney Councils. More on this later…
It’s almost 20 years ago now that, our daughter finishing her studies at VIU and about to move to Victoria, we moved our home and business downtown. We were able to do a renovation on a condo in a great neighbourhood and downtown living still suits us just fine.
Recent years, retirement and COVID restrictions created opportunities to do lots of reading and to start or continue online courses. Standouts over the last year online Planetizen courses on books taught by their authors : Defining Neighbourhoods, University of Chicago Professor of Urbanism Emily Talen and Missing Middle Housing by architect and New Urbanist Dan Parolek.
The most-read blog post this year was Silos, Organized Complexity, Complex Adaptive Systems. The 21st Century city. And related, this popular thread from my Economic Garden Twitter on former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto Roger L Martin’s book When More is not Better / Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency
Scanning the years since moving downtown: over these years citizen activism saved Colliery Dams Park from destruction; saved Georgia Park on the waterfront from commercial development; forced the Port Authority to abandon plans to privatize the harbour marina; stopped a large, wasteful and risky arena/events centre from being built on publicly owned downtown waterfront land. Wisdom and leadership over these years came more often from civil society than it did from City Hall.
But civil society was unable to save Nanaimo from one poor decision, the unfolding consequences of which are continuing to do harm.
Mayor Leach’s Official Community Plan and its Urban Containment Boundary were under threat 15 years ago, about to begin its first review. At the same time Mayor Gary Korpan's Council was proposing building a conference centre on Commercial Street and new recreation facilities near VIU. Financing these would require a public referendum. The proposals were controversial and they energized a fully engaged public.
The referendum to finance the conference centre and recreation facilities passed by a narrow margin and these projects went ahead.
The Official Community Plan review was under the leadership of the Director of Planning, Andrew Tucker. He was City Hall’s public point person, you would know his name and engage with him often as, for instance, he hosted public discussions on the future of the civic arena and the foundry building on the downtown waterfront. He brought in speakers and held public working charrettes related to decisions to be made in the OCP review including the retention of the Urban Containment Boundary. A well organized local group, The Friends of Plan Nanaimo, added its voice to such groups as the Smart Growth organization and broad public opinion in support of retaining the UCB to better “manage urban growth.”
Behind-the-scenes forces pressuring Council and staff to open for development the southernmost rural lands, then protected by the UCB, included a shopping mall developer working with the Snuneymuxw First Nation and businessmen from Alberta who had been banned by the Alberta Securities Commission for boiler room practices who proposed a golf course resort.
Neither of these projects proceeded but the Council of the day eliminated the Urban Containment Boundary, resulting in, as Planner Tucker agreed it would, a disincentive to develop sites in the city centre and south end neighbourhoods.
There was another consequence, as bad or perhaps even worse. The Director of Planning, Andrew Tucker was, there’s no other way to explain it, gagged then eventually squeezed out not to be replaced.
We may be the only medium-sized city in the country without a chief planner. With the position and—importantly—the role of the chief planner, the point person between citizens and City Hall eliminated, power was consolidated within our City Hall to a small group of men, senior managers, who play with our city like it was their private board game. The public’s business as a consequence is no longer done in, well, public.
This consolidation is now so entrenched I fear that our current Council and most citizens have come to see it as the norm, as just “how things are.” But as I’ve tried to sketch here the current situation is the result of specific decisions made by powerful but unelected men. It was ideological in nature, Neo-conservative if you like.
Public institutions have survival instincts, they tend to the conservative, they self-protect. This is as it should be, we need our public institutons to be sturdy, but a tipping point was reached here over these years, a point where not the city but City Hall itself, the institution, became dominant.
Local government should be able to bring a countervailing force to this power dynamic. How can a small group of people (generally, and as currently, good, well-meaning people) confront and moderate the powerful complex technocracy of City Hall?
Councillors have to recognize that senior staff are not their colleagues. We’ve assigned them a very difficult task: demand on our behalf that this multi-layered complex institution be responsive, innovative and creative and able to pivot quickly to citizens’ needs when circumstances change. And be prepared to force needed organizational changes if it falls short. This organizational and cultural change in our City Hall, difficult as it may be, is what we require this Council to demand of its City Manager. History will determine the success or failure of this Council by whether or not they find the courage.
And with that, Nanaimo, as the last month of 2021 counts down, and in the voice Edward R. Murrow I say to you, “Good night and good luck."
Early summer 1993 we, a family of three, arrive from North Vancouver. Our daughter is enrolled in Grade 7 at Hammond Bay Elementary, we'll spend the summer exploring the Island in a camper van.
We’d been here only a few days, still living out of boxes, when a long time family friend who had lived here for years invited us to the Civic Arena for Canada Day festivities. Here, our friend introduced us to her friend the Mayor, Joy Leach.
I was to learn later that Mayor Leach’s Council had created Nanaimo’s first Official Community Plan (OCP), the focus of which was “managing urban growth.” The plan included an Urban Containment Boundary. It was to guide Nanaimo in a new direction from the one set by the Wild West real estate development of the “pirate” years of Frank Ney Councils. More on this later…
It’s almost 20 years ago now that, our daughter finishing her studies at VIU and about to move to Victoria, we moved our home and business downtown. We were able to do a renovation on a condo in a great neighbourhood and downtown living still suits us just fine.
Recent years, retirement and COVID restrictions created opportunities to do lots of reading and to start or continue online courses. Standouts over the last year online Planetizen courses on books taught by their authors : Defining Neighbourhoods, University of Chicago Professor of Urbanism Emily Talen and Missing Middle Housing by architect and New Urbanist Dan Parolek.
The most-read blog post this year was Silos, Organized Complexity, Complex Adaptive Systems. The 21st Century city. And related, this popular thread from my Economic Garden Twitter on former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto Roger L Martin’s book When More is not Better / Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency
Scanning the years since moving downtown: over these years citizen activism saved Colliery Dams Park from destruction; saved Georgia Park on the waterfront from commercial development; forced the Port Authority to abandon plans to privatize the harbour marina; stopped a large, wasteful and risky arena/events centre from being built on publicly owned downtown waterfront land. Wisdom and leadership over these years came more often from civil society than it did from City Hall.
But civil society was unable to save Nanaimo from one poor decision, the unfolding consequences of which are continuing to do harm.
Mayor Leach’s Official Community Plan and its Urban Containment Boundary were under threat 15 years ago, about to begin its first review. At the same time Mayor Gary Korpan's Council was proposing building a conference centre on Commercial Street and new recreation facilities near VIU. Financing these would require a public referendum. The proposals were controversial and they energized a fully engaged public.
The referendum to finance the conference centre and recreation facilities passed by a narrow margin and these projects went ahead.
The Official Community Plan review was under the leadership of the Director of Planning, Andrew Tucker. He was City Hall’s public point person, you would know his name and engage with him often as, for instance, he hosted public discussions on the future of the civic arena and the foundry building on the downtown waterfront. He brought in speakers and held public working charrettes related to decisions to be made in the OCP review including the retention of the Urban Containment Boundary. A well organized local group, The Friends of Plan Nanaimo, added its voice to such groups as the Smart Growth organization and broad public opinion in support of retaining the UCB to better “manage urban growth.”
Behind-the-scenes forces pressuring Council and staff to open for development the southernmost rural lands, then protected by the UCB, included a shopping mall developer working with the Snuneymuxw First Nation and businessmen from Alberta who had been banned by the Alberta Securities Commission for boiler room practices who proposed a golf course resort.
Neither of these projects proceeded but the Council of the day eliminated the Urban Containment Boundary, resulting in, as Planner Tucker agreed it would, a disincentive to develop sites in the city centre and south end neighbourhoods.
There was another consequence, as bad or perhaps even worse. The Director of Planning, Andrew Tucker was, there’s no other way to explain it, gagged then eventually squeezed out not to be replaced.
We may be the only medium-sized city in the country without a chief planner. With the position and—importantly—the role of the chief planner, the point person between citizens and City Hall eliminated, power was consolidated within our City Hall to a small group of men, senior managers, who play with our city like it was their private board game. The public’s business as a consequence is no longer done in, well, public.
This consolidation is now so entrenched I fear that our current Council and most citizens have come to see it as the norm, as just “how things are.” But as I’ve tried to sketch here the current situation is the result of specific decisions made by powerful but unelected men. It was ideological in nature, Neo-conservative if you like.
Public institutions have survival instincts, they tend to the conservative, they self-protect. This is as it should be, we need our public institutons to be sturdy, but a tipping point was reached here over these years, a point where not the city but City Hall itself, the institution, became dominant.
Local government should be able to bring a countervailing force to this power dynamic. How can a small group of people (generally, and as currently, good, well-meaning people) confront and moderate the powerful complex technocracy of City Hall?
Councillors have to recognize that senior staff are not their colleagues. We’ve assigned them a very difficult task: demand on our behalf that this multi-layered complex institution be responsive, innovative and creative and able to pivot quickly to citizens’ needs when circumstances change. And be prepared to force needed organizational changes if it falls short. This organizational and cultural change in our City Hall, difficult as it may be, is what we require this Council to demand of its City Manager. History will determine the success or failure of this Council by whether or not they find the courage.
And with that, Nanaimo, as the last month of 2021 counts down, and in the voice Edward R. Murrow I say to you, “Good night and good luck."
"Very often when new city councillors are first elected they post a picture of the stack of technical reports and comprehensive plans that they’ve been given to read by city staff…"
— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) May 5, 2021
New blog post https://t.co/KAx2SBihKW pic.twitter.com/9QLHUSu4fj
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