Subject: Downtown Mobility Hub Project
To: Bill Sims, Director of Engineering & Public Works bill.sims@nanaimo.ca
Cc: Mayor&Council@nanaimo.ca, DowntownMobility@nanaimo.ca
Bill, great news that the
Downtown Mobility Hub Project is underway. Downtown, more than other neighbourhoods, belongs, to a great degree, to everyone in the city. At the same time it's home and place of work to thousands of Nanaimo-ites.
I want to register a concern about the process being employed. It is one that we have used several times and includes contracting citizen engagement to a consultant. I don’t believe a City Hall can outsource citizen engagement. This process results in my experience in the unintended consequence of the consultant, clearly a skilled and dedicated professional, being a buffer between city staff and Council. The lead on the project, its public face, in my view has to be a city staff person.
We have used different processes and I see different approaches in other cities. It’s increasingly common for city heads of transportation to take a proactive and very public role.
Dale Bracewell in Vancouver and
Dongho Chang in Seattle spring to mind. In Victoria
Mayor Helps seems to be impressively taking the lead!
Locally another approach we’ve used as you know is rather than contract an engagement specialist we outsourced, if you like, the lead role itself. Victoria architect Franc D’Ambrosio’s award winning Downtown Urban Plan and Guidelines and former VIU VP Dave Witty’s South Downtown Waterfront Vision and Guiding Principles. I believe Dr Witty’s approach is one we should adopt.
A couple of weeks ago I was walking through the Vancouver Central Library atrium and there was a City of Vancouver pop-up display about the Granville Bridge Connector. Occurs to me that while we take a broad overview of the downtown hub, it would be beneficial to focus on its smaller components, as Vancouver has done focusing on the bridge. As our earlier exchange, a tactical approach on Front Street over the summer would be an ideal focal point for this project.
Thanks for the chance to run this by you. I look forward to the creation of downtown Nanaimo’s "multimodal transportation network – one that is safe, inclusive, accessible, and interconnected to all the places we love.”
Frank Murphy
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