By Pepper Parr
August 23rd, 2018
BURLINGTON, ON
Is it deliberate?
Or is it from an organization that is now so dysfunctional that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
We published an opinion piece by ward 2 city council candidate Roland Tanner who wrote about a meting that was very poorly promoted, pointing out that even the ward Councillor and candidate for Mayor didn’t know about it.
We did a follow up piece on how a public meeting on such a critical matter could be so poorly promoted. We kept coming across the Get Involved part of the city web site.
Those who know or should know how to communicate effectively: Back row, left Kwab Ako-Adjei, Senior Manager of Government Relations and Strategic Communications,. Bottom row, centre Donna Kell, Manager of Public Affairs and to her left city manager James Ridge. They would have signed off on the ChAT report.
While we were reading up on Getting Involved we came across ChAT – an interesting group that, in their group photograph, has several city staff in the group – including Kwab Ako-Adjei, Senior Manager of Government Relations and city manager James Ridge.
In April 2013, Burlington City Council approved the first Burlington Community Engagement Charter. The Charter was created by citizens with support from staff. It is an agreement between and among Burlington City Council and the community concerning citizen engagement with City government and establishes the commitments, responsibilities and fundamental concepts of this relationship.
Ako-Adjei and Ridge surely know something about communicating.
ChAT had their most recent annual report on the web site.
Some excerpts from that document
1. Ensure notification is as widespread as possible:
a. Use communication tools that include City of Burlington website, local print media, online digital communication, direct delivery and social media.
b. Reach out to groups/individuals that may be affected by proposed developments, policies, initiatives, studies and municipal projects.
c. Create and develop partnerships that will help reach out to citizens.
d. Ensure that communication plans include early and widespread notifications.
e. Where appropriate, provide progress and/or completion notices.
2. Ensure notification is given early enough so that the citizens may be fully engaged:
a. Set up and maintain a way for citizens and groups to subscribe or sign up for early notification through email, social media or other means.
b. Advise the public of proposed developments, policies, meetings and major projects as soon as possible. For major projects and public meetings, at least two weeks notice to the public is expected. Exceptions will be made in emergency situations where less than two weeks notice will apply.
3. Support staff in providing early and widespread notification so that it becomes part of the corporate culture:
a. Provide staff training in effective public engagement practices through workshops and e-learning opportunities.
4. Collaborate with citizens and partners in empowering citizens through different means of communicating:
a. Use existing resources in the community to help to provide information as soon as possible.
b. Develop and use networks for information sharing of contacts.
5. Clearly communicate meeting dates and deadlines:
a. Schedule public meetings to take place early and with opportunities for public input into decision- making.
b. Create a central point on the City’s website where all dates are available.
c. Ensure dates are reflected on City project pages on the website.
d. Include dates in all relevant communication materials.
Is this happening?
It is so immoral for a city to publish statements like this and then fail miserably to deliver on the promise.
The people who work at city hall want to be seen as professionals – and they should be. But there is nothing professional about how that public meeting Wednesday night came into being.
Burlington once had a city manager who made mistakes – and he had the decency to apologize publicly for the mistakes he made.
And he wasn’t crass enough to define his mistakes as a “learning opportunity”.
Related opinion and news stories:
The Burlington Community Engagement Charter is not the Ten Commandments, and the last time I checked James Ridge was not Moses. Uttering a collection of sanctimonious pronouncements and expecting that suddenly things will change for the better or be done differently is not only naive but is foolhardy and absurd in the extreme.
Real engagement is not about a slick website with colourful pictures, or pretty PowerPoint presentations, or holding public meetings feigning interest while citizens rail on about the latest development proposal desecrating neighbourhoods. It is about real communication based on a respect for and an appreciation of the benefits that come from joint problem-solving, articulation of divergent viewpoints, and the search for viable solutions. Most importantly, it is a dialogue and sharing amongst equals.
What we have in Burlington is a power imbalance that works for the benefit of a few against the interests of many. We have a Mayor who has really proven powerless to lead over the past four years, and who keeps trying to appease everyone with platitudes but really ends up pleasing no one. We have a Council who, despite multiple appeals and admonitions to the contrary over the past two years. has pushed their bloody-minded OP and Mobility Hubs agenda over the objections and against the wishes of residents. All of this has played out against a backdrop of the business community, supported by the Chamber of Commerce and developers, who keep telling us, figuratively at least, to just shut up and drink the Kool-Aid, and whose grandiose promises extolling the virtues of development are over hyped while the negative externalities (e.g. traffic congestion, too few parking spaces, lack of green spaces, etc.) are dramatically under-reported. And watching it all from the sidelines are municipal public servants whose contribution to this circus performance is to continually prattle on about how we all need to “Grow Bold” and “intensify” while producing copious amounts of communications drivel intended to mollify an increasingly militant and wearisome public, all done in the name of “engagement”.
We can change our Mayor, and we change our Council, but those actions, in and of themselves, will not yield change post October 22nd. What we really need to change is the process and the players who manage it.
Consultation and dialogue needs to occur from the outset, not as an afterthought. We need dedicated resources at City Hall, not aligned with developers, who will aid citizens and support neighbourhoods when mounting objections to development proposals. We need City Hall support to create and sustain neighbourhood and ratepayers’ associations as a non-elected counter-veiling force to challenge developers and as a conduit to meaningful citizen engagement. We need advisory panels whose members are reflective of the community, and not populated with special interest advocates. We need to build in the concept of engagement and communication into every business process that is conducted municipally, and not just some pious Engagement Charter that gets framed and hung on a wall somewhere and is essentially meaningless. Those who manage the process need to be evaluated and held accountable on how well they actually do it. And finally, we need to open up a serious discussion around the continued employment of several municipal public servants whose past derisive comments and behaviour don’t exactly connote with the concept of “engagement”.
Stephen. An excellent analysis of the current leadership (?) group at City Hall and what needs to be done following October 22. A change in culture at City Hall is sorely needed and this cannot occur without changing all the key players. We do not have real engagement in Burlington; the current leadership group uses “engagement” as window-dressing and as a talking point.
Hit the city-crats where it hurts! No raise, no bonus, no C.O.L.A.!! Maybe then, they’ll get the message!
I was one of the attendees at the Open House at the AGB on Wednesday evening. The staff were professional, respectful and pleasant – also informative when questioned. But the process of engagement, as noted, is seriously flawed. First, it reflects the bureaucrat’s confusion between developing an engagement framework and actually engaging. In other words, once the structure has been created and all the ‘plain speak’ epithets applied, the job is considered done. More importantly, however, it is a product of a City Hall culture that perpetuates a closed and self-reinforcing ‘world view’, with an arrogance that is exhibited daily. I asked one of the planning staff at the event how I would find the appropriate contact information if I wanted to find someone responsible for a particular service function, any function. The response was telling – “I don’t know”. On the COB website, which is a primary means of interface with the City’s citizen-clients, there is no displayed program structure, no staff listing, no means of attaching a name to a responsible party. This is why engagement and most other channels of citizen participation or input (photo-ops notwithstanding) fail. As practiced here, it is an empty exercise manipulated by an isolated and ensconced senior bureaucracy. It breeds overt cynicism and seriously undermines the transparency and accountability necessary for a responsive public service.
Nice and precise Mike. I agree.
Is it incompetence, or uncaring?