As one of the Editorial Board members, I had an opportunity this week to meet with someone I consider to be a very wise and practical man. For many years he has quietly served our Township in a volunteer capacity and with little recognition. He has no special interests, and is TRULY only concerned with our community. He has been distressed at our state of affairs and the fact that our community pride has been tarnished with the current political climate.
At one point during our conversations we talked about public open houses and public input sessions. We agreed that public input is necessary and good for our community. But it seems that our current system is flawed in a BIG way. Lately some political leaders are using "public input" as a divisive tool that seeks nothing but to advance their political agendas. The results of these sessions create an "us and them" mentality in the minds of the participants. Even though the groups that turn out represent a minuscule fraction of the real population of a neighbourhood or the ToL as a whole, these people feel they are the majority. This has intimidated many residents that may have opposing views and has resulted in the non-militant people quietly listening to these groups and not speaking publicly. After all, what's the point when it is clear that a couple of politicians are against you and are pandering to the crowd.
This wise man that I know and trust made a very good point. He has observed many of these public processes as have I and has come to roughly the same conclusions. Many of the people that attend do so out of an emotional drive because of some proposed development that will impact their immediate area. They do not read the staff reports or details of the issue and claim to have no time to do so. They rely on their neighbours to provide "the facts" over the fence. Before attending the public input session, they are determined to defeat this development at all cost and believe that Township staff and some politicians have tried to "push this through" or in some way conspired to make their lives miserable.
At the public sessions they bite a donut and drink the coffee. Some may take a cursory look at the story boards, but most would rather give staff hell, ask questions and then not allow staff to answer. But, the bite of the donut and a sip of coffee has suddenly made them "experts" on the issue and they know far more than the engineers and planners. They appear at the council meeting where some politicians smile and glow.
The meeting begins with the sideshow kicking into high gear. Pandering to the crowd now takes priority over any real and meaningful care for our community. Despite the fact that mayor and council are meant to speak with each other during the meeting, that is scrapped in favour of public speeches and the putting down of other councillors that oppose them. The crowd goes wild and cheerful political smiles abound. The Grand Finale is a passionate opposition vote for the subject at hand. Major pandering to the crowd, vocal opposition to those councillors in favour of the issue, etc. Is this community better for all this? You be the judge.
10 comments:
I see on the other blog in town, Jordan has posted the salaries for Councillors and the Mayor. What a joke, this guy gets paid $120,000 taxpayers funded salary to run a Public Hearing that resembles a 3 ring circus. He should pay we taxpayers back for his incompetence!
Do you think Mayor Green is worth the $120K++ that we pay him? Stay tuned for another article coming very soon.
If you are asking me the answer is a BIG SWEET FAT 'NO' he deserves lees. The Councillors should get paid more based on the fact they have to put up with this goof. He gets paid far to much for wanting to see himself everywhere - it is all about HIM and not about the Township and doing good for all the citizens. He looks after his buddies well and that includes Fort Langley folks, and he doesn't care about anyone else - why? Cut his salary........and give it to the Councillors!
In my opinion, the issues with public input in the Township are so extreme that substantial changes have to be made. The reason you get all the complaints at the meetings is by the time we find out about a decision it is a “fait accompli” and we are informed it is too late to provide input.
First and foremost the process is broken because accessing facts has been made deliberately challenging. The computer system designed to aid us in accessing public information is so obtuse that we are often left with little or no time to effectively digest the information in order to provide informed opinions.
Consider a typical development permit. We get the big green sign on the street with the development number. Go online with that number and see how well you do? Simply put you cannot get the information until it is put on the Agenda for council and of course advance notice of which Agenda it will be on is simply not provided in any useful manner. Instead you have to keep an eye on the local paper, except the local papers don’t always get to your home in time (our typically shows up a couple days late) and the notice is written in such a way as to be as useless as possible. You end up depending on street names because the useful details from the permit are excluded. I was careful to check on a regular basis for a development happening nearby and still missed the public hearing. Add to that the fact that the Council Agenda is published so close to the meeting time. If you are lucky enough to get the information you are then left with limited time to read and digest the information. As a hard-working taxpayer with kids I don’t have a spare three hours to carefully review a document on a single day. Give me a week and I can provide intelligent comment, give me an hour and you will get a rant.
If council wants an informed public the first thing they should do is re-vamp the computer system. When a development is proposed put the information for the development online associated with the code number on the big green sign. Make the permit searchable as well. Searchable .pdfs are the norm everywhere except the Township, that way when you know a development is happening but haven’t pulled over on a busy street to write down the damned code number you can still find the thing. As well put online the anticipated date of the public hearing. If the date changes, so be it, but give us a chance to get informed.
As for the public hearing process, well what a joke. The proponent doesn’t speak until the end so we aren’t supplied with the critical information about a project until the last minute, then are asked to comment. Once the public has spoken the proponent gets to speak and “answer” the questions posed by the public. If the proponent has a big change then all the comments before might be moot and since we have technically said our piece we are not allowed to ask follow-up questions or comment on critical changes made by the proponent in their presentation.
Open houses are also a joke because the information is not made available until you get there. If you want informed opinion then give me the information before I get there then I won’t rely on information from over the fence!
Wow, great discussion Blair! Here are some other factors for consideration:
1. Council is expected to make hundreds of decisions in a given year. If everything went to public open house or consultation, no work would get done and what is done would be costly for various reasons. We elect people to make decisions on our behalf and unlike other orders of government, we can see, email and call local officials and staff and get answers instead of form letters.
2. The average Council agenda with reports and such is 300-400 pages per week. How do you distill all that information into something that a layman can understand? How does the layman sort out all the municipal Bylaws and other regulations that impact the proposals and recommendations?
3. Staff may work on various proposals for a year or more. Towards the end of that process, significant grant dollars may come available that would help the municipality obtain needed infrastructure or what have you at a considerable savings. Therefore, sometimes decision time lines have dramatic impacts on the bottom line and people for the most part want infrastructure without tax increases.
4. In the old days the same road was dug up and re-paved 3-5 times in the span of a few years as various projects were launched. These days the planners and engineers prepare annual work plans and track assets with replacement windows calculated. In a given year only X number of projects can be worked on and funding windows need to be carefully observed. Again, decision-making becomes vital to the Township in order to avoid constant disruptions and added costs.
So, what goes to public consultation, how the technical materials are presented, how soon decisions can be made and who pays the price are all complicated elements of the public consultation process and they must all be considered.
People need to understand that there are no conspiracies and staff does not benefit in any way from a decision going one way or another. They are people that make recommendations based on facts, their technical expertise and what they feel is good for the Township given what they know. If you wish to disagree with staff, do so respectfully and have facts to back up your viewpoint. Pointing fingers and speaking louder just makes you a bully.
We totally agree that the ToL website needs a drastic overhaul to make it more user friendly and we understand the Township has some communication consultants that are working on that.
All reports and detailed info is available weeks before public hearings, as they are part of Council agendas that are posted to the website. But, some people may not know where to look. For at least the 208th Street session, a prominent page with materials was on the website for PDF downloading.
Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedules to comment. We hope these comments spark more public input :)
Blair, you seen to think YOU are THE Township decision-maker and, therefore, you need to know 'everything' in order to criticize the decision-makers' fait accompli decision(s).
That job was given to our elected officials to act on our behalf and in doing so, allow legislated publication lines of public notification and subsequent public input should anyone feel personally impacted, more than others, by the probable decision sought of our elected officials.
If you are the one feeling personally or overly impacted someway, there are the usual avenues of further information availed to you through the municipal hall like everyone else.
The open houses are general informational setups and if any is needed further, then the recourse is to the municipal hall. And if you are really aggrieved, then you have the right to make a presentation or a submission to council in order to be heard for balanced consideration. This had worked very well in the past and should work well for the future still.
Your issue with public input or the public hearing process, I suspect, is that you think the whole process of determining a decision rests with you and not with the elected officials whom you elected. The whole public process is for some genuine input in order to sway or possible reset a direction sought, not necessarily counter, as petition would do.
Anonymous:
Let's stick to the issues and challenges and not try to guess what Blair or anyone else feels or thinks of themselves. We believe Blair provided fair comments for discussion. Please refrain from getting personal.
LRE,
I don’t want to imply that Township staff are anything less than helpful because I have always been pleased by their response. My issue is with the data system in use that is broken. As you point out Council data packages are large which is why it is even more important that the data system be useful. An interested member of the public cannot use a development permit number (the number on the big green signs) to determine when a permit or bylaw request is going to public hearing. I cannot understand how the Township could create a file number and then do nothing with it?
With a development permit number interested member of the public should be able to access an electronic copy of the development permit and access the dates when the permit is going to public hearing and consideration by Council. The Township has this information in electronic format (it ends up in their electronic agenda). It is a trivial exercise to index the information when the development file is imported or created. I work at a busy office, our IT guy has three other jobs and yet even he found the time to make our entire database including every letter and report produced in the last decade searchable. We hired a summer student to do some scanning and whammo now we have 20 years of reports available at the punch of a keyboard. With an IT department like that in the Township it should be no more than the work of an afternoon to re-set the defaults. Do an indexing run overnight and every active file in the server would be searchable. Make it a priority and you could have your back-files done in a couple months. Not only would it make the information readily available it would free up staff from dealing with information requests that should have been automated in the first place.
As for the information being available “weeks” before, that is not exactly the truth is it? Go to the web site and look for the next Agenda? June 21st is there and no others, but that is not unexpected since an agenda can’t be made until the last meeting is completed. Even then this week’s agenda is 38 MB is size and has to be downloaded in its entirety to open and see if any permits of interest are there. For a person on a dial up that is an hour of download time. The public hearings section doesn’t have any future details on it even though a public hearing is scheduled in July. From my experience you normally get about a week to ten day’s notice but that is beside the point, the development permits are on file and if you have the time you can travel down to the Township offices and get a copy, but in this age of computer systems asking someone to come down to Township hall to see a file is a ridiculous anachronism.
Blair:
We agree 100% with regards to IT issues. Although Agenda packets only become available the Thursday before the meeting (generally), staff reports that form the basis of a major decision or public hearing generally are received by Council and in the pack some 2-4 weeks ahead of such meetings and usually closer to 4 weeks.
Anon,
You appear to have misinterpreted my post. I never implied that I make the decisions. My point is that the process by which the public is given the opportunity to express their opinions is broken. Why is this important? Well as we all learned as children, Canada is a representative democracy. We select representatives to make decisions on our behalf. As part of the process our representatives seek our input since as a society we understand that our representatives are not omniscient; they cannot know all the facts about all issues and cannot run elections on every issue that may potentially arise during their terms. The public consultation process is thus a critical component of the decision-making process and is written into our laws ensuring that every development permit and substantial bylaw change gets a public hearing. If you bypass the public consultation you break the social contract between our representatives and the people they were elected to represent. With all due respect LRE your statement about Council not having time to listen to input is entirely backwards. Our entire system of government is based on our representatives seeking our input and ultimately our vote. In our representative democracy there are very few decisions where public input is not sought.
The point of my posting is my opinion that the process is broken in Langley at this time. The efforts required to remain informed exceed the capability of all but the most dedicated Council-watchers to keep up. I am an educated and motivated individual with a family and I don’t have the time to ensure that I can provide input on issues that concern me. I have talked to friends and neighbours who wanted to provide input and only found out about meetings hours before they started. The Township relies on newspapers as their main source of public communication and yet as Jordan pointed out on his blog the papers aren’t always delivered on time (or at all in my neighbourhood). Then when it is time to make our feelings heard (at the public hearing) the public is not given the whole story. We are asked to make comments in an information vacuum and then when the proponent releases critical information the public is not given the opportunity to provide follow-up comments.
Post a Comment