Days 2 and 3 of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Sustainable Communities Conference are in the books! Tomorrow I’m headed home.
If I tried to give you a play-by-play of the past two days we’d be here all night. But there were some common themes that came up over and over again, and it’s worth exploring how they’re applicable to Brighton.
Engaging, Communicating, Collaborating
In the last post I mentioned “public engagement fatigue” with regard to municipal planning, but I heard variations on that discussion with regard to strategic planning, climate plans, and virtually every other initiative. It is HARD to communicate with the public in general, with few local papers and with so many people depending on social media for their news. Not many people know how to find municipal updates, even if they know they exist! (Important note: you can subscribe to municipal news updates here, and you can sign up for a community newsletter here. We also have council updates here.) But even if you know when all of the meetings are, it isn’t always a clear value proposition for attending: often, municipal processes feel very foreign to people, and they don’t know how things will affect them or why they should care.
In fairness to municipalities, that’s not always an easy concept to communicate. Public consultation processes often feel like an afterthought to people, as if their input doesn’t really change anything; but that’s at least in part because of the way that municipalities are required to do public consultations (via provincial regulations), and in part because the process itself is so dense that many people need to learn a lot about the process before they can even know why they should bother to learn anything about the process. (It’s for this reason that I recently worked with Tiny Homes Northumberland to build a website to help people navigate the planning process when building Additional Dwelling Units, like having a tiny home in your backyard for your adult child, parent, or for rental income!)
But as difficult as it is to connect with people in a way that seems relevant to them, doing just that is critical to almost anything a municipality does. Brighton is taking big steps in this regard: we now have Morgan Scott, our Community Engagement Officer, who produces our newsletters and works to find new ways to keep in touch with residents and keep us all up to date. We also received a report on Monday about revising our planning consultation process to make it more efficient and accessible and…well, engaging. But there’s still more we could do, including a new website (scheduled for either this year or next year) and collecting more data and making it available to the public. We will continue to make steps in the direction of being more engaging and transparent to the public, but it’s a big job!
Of course, council plays a big role in all of this. I sincerely hope that this blog has been helpful to residents who might have questions about why we do the things we do on your behalf, and that you know you can email me anytime.
Collaborating is also a major theme of this conference, with presenters in many different sessions talking about how critical it is to work together with other municipalities, and particularly, across sectors with civil society groups, businesses, and other stake holders and rights holders. Municipalities that collaborate with others make bigger gains in reducing greenhouse gas emissions; they improve relationships with Indigenous nations and their own communities; and they aim higher, and at targets they might not have even thought of without that collaboration. This topic is one of the reasons I wanted to come to this conference, and I was so pleased to be here with Korey McKay, Northumberland County’s Sustainability Officer. The County is building their climate plan right now, about a year ahead of us, and they’re building it around opportunities to collaborate with lower tier municipalities. Korey and I both learned a lot, and shared notes when we attended different sessions; we’re already seeing how collaboration can improve outcomes for both of us!
Finally, one quote about engagement and collaboration stood out to me: “instead of telling people what to do, show them how you can help them accomplish great things.” That’s been the approach of our JEDI and Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committees: we’re looking for the good work our community is already doing, and looking for ways to empower and amplify that good work. If you’re doing good work, reach out and connect with us! We want to help your good work to be fantastic work.
Just Get Started
Another recurring theme was to just get started. Don’t wait for the right moment or perfect information; the right moment was decades ago, and perfect information doesn’t exist.
On timing, one presenter noted that we have a tendency to wait for technologies to develop, putting our hope in them; but carbon capture and storage is nowhere near being ready to roll out at the scale we need it, and likewise with small modular nuclear reactors. If we wait for them, in the meantime we will have continued to pollute at current levels and locked in decades more of warming. Any action we take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now, no matter how imperfect, means less carbon adding up in the atmosphere. We should therefore be biased toward fast action, because even if our fast actions are small they will yield larger dividends over time.
Another point about just getting started is that we don’t yet have perfect information. Several presenters talking about identifying and valuing natural assets, like forests and waterways, pointed out that as yet there are few standards for how to do this. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get started — on the contrary, they pointed out that this gives us the opportunity to choose metrics and valuations that make sense in our own municipalities, and that valuing natural assets in any way is better than the status quo, which is to not value them at all. The standards will develop, and we can develop along with them, but in the meantime we still gain a lot by getting started.
Finally, one presenter noted that any plan is outdated the day after it is released. Life comes at you fast, things change, and we need to be able to be nimble and adaptable as we implement our plans. If we wait for things to be stable before we try to carry out our plans, we never will.
Follow Through
Plans are great, but all too often they never get implemented. From the moment we begin to plan, we need to commit to actually following through, which means that we need an implementation/operations plan to go with our strategic planning, and then we need to fund it at budget time.
Coming back to communication and engagement, we also heard about the importance of engaging with the public not just in the planning phase, but also throughout the implementation phase. Give regular updates, continue to receive feedback and input, and celebrate milestones along the way. (Celebration came up many times, not least as a reason to get started in the first place: rather than having a narrative that upholds climate action as what we do to avoid climate doom, instead frame climate action as what we do to celebrate and protect the incredible places, resources, and way of life that we enjoy!)
The need for continued engagement and nimble adaptation is one of the reasons why it’s valuable to have a full-time Sustainability Officer, someone who is intimately acquainted with the plans, engaged with the residents, and in touch with the funders…
Money, Money, Money
This conference is basically just a vehicle for the Green Municipal Fund to promote its funding streams. There are many, and literally billions of dollars to work with. One of the challenges of climate action is that it often requires more money up-front to deliver a more sustainable version of needed infrastructure. For example, we all need more housing, but building it to “net zero” standards (a building that has effectively zero greenhouse gas emissions on an ongoing basis) often costs quite a bit more up front. The users pay much less for energy ever after, but that up-front cost often means that we don’t build to that better standard. Grants from the GMF are meant to ensure that the cost is not a barrier to better building.
I spent quite a bit of time chatting with GMF staff, including on the airport shuttle and over meals and in sessions. I think four of them are going to follow up with me about how their particular funding stream could be useful to us in Brighton, particularly around the affordable housing we hope to build on lands we’ve acquired this term. There’s also a funding stream to help us build our Integrated Community Sustainability Plan, something we budgeted $100k for last year (and carried over $80k to be spent this year); it’s possible we could get almost that entire cost covered by a GMF grant. There are also streams to help us plant more trees and build up our urban canopy; build sustainable affordable housing; and many more. GMF staff are passionate about what they do, and what they do is make sure we can afford to do great things.
I also had lunch with Don Iveson from The Cooperators. His job is to find ways to fund good work like this through private investors. When I told him the types of things I envision for affordable housing in our community, he immediately said that he has investors looking to fund projects like that.
And while I was chatting with Don over lunch, the Honourable Nate Erskine-Smith, Minister for Housing, Infrastructure, and Communities, was speaking at the mic. Knowing that he only has a few months before the election to get as much housing funded as possible, he gave out his cell number, and I immediately reached out via text with a pitch for the kinds of things we want to do in Brighton. He responded that that’s the kind of project he wants to support. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) is an independent body, but it’s still part of his portfolio and is a primary way the federal government funds housing.
I found the past few days to be incredibly validating: all of these people seemed seriously excited about the things we’re doing and the possibilities that entails. I’ve also felt very supported: talk is cheap, but these people are quick to follow up, eager to support what we’re doing. And I’ve been inspired: there are so many powerful examples of municipalities doing great things, things that are very much doable in Brighton, including…
Natural Assets
It seemed like everybody at this conference was talking about natural assets. In short, natural assets are the trees, streams, marshes, etc that provide benefits for us.
Infrastructural engineers were presenting about how superior a natural or rehabilitated stream is to a storm sewer or concretized floodway, because a natural environment slows water down, retains it, and helps it find its way underground to the water table, rather than just flowing rapidly down a hard, straight channel or pipe. I attended a session about how Kitchener is rehabilitating creeks and streams, and by doing so they’re improving their flood resilience so much that the flood plain around the waterway shrunk enough to allow them to build another 11,000 units of housing along their transit corridor.
Insurance experts from Intact Insurance were advocating natural assets all over the place; they recognize that just by having healthy forests and waterways we’re much more resilient to both floods and fires, reducing the amount of insurable losses by simply preventing these disasters from doing too much damage.
The World Wildlife Fund Canada was there to talk about the value of biodiversity to our cities, and the value of natural assets in our cities to animals. Canada has lost 30% of our animal population over the last fifty years or so, as our cities continue to grow into their habitat. It’s possible to build our cities in ways that continue to support animal life, with wildlife corridors and habitat being supported by the way we support those waterways and parks and urban forests even though we’re doing so for other reasons. Natural assets are a win/win!
When I think about Brighton, I realize that we’re flush with natural assets, but most of them aren’t owned by the municipality of Brighton. If we want to support our natural assets, we need to support our Conservation Authority (which owns Proctor Park and Goodrich Loomis Conservation Area); we need good partnerships with the province to support Presqu’ile Provincial Park; and we need good partnerships with residents who own most of the forested areas of Brighton. We can also continue to work with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, which owns most of the marsh on the southeast side of town; and with Northumberland Land Trust, which recently bought 300 acres on Little Lake Road. (I had a role in that sale, and I’m so glad that my clients were able to work with NLT and Ducks Unlimited Canada to ensure that the wetland is protected forever!) The forests and streams around Brighton provide more protection from overland flooding than any of our stormwater ponds, but we don’t currently calculate the value of that flood prevention; we take it for granted.
Moving Forward
Just last week we met with consultants to start our Integrated Community Sustainability Plan. Part of that work will be engaging with residents to determine their priorities, and working with staff and council to integrate those priorities into our strategic plan, operational plans, and budgets.
The actual plan that comes forward will probably include a TON of existing plans, templates, strategies, and certifications. We aren’t reinventing the wheel here; we’re catching up, and there’s plenty of resources out there to help us. One that caught my eye is Nature Canada’s Bird-Friendly City program; it aligns with the steps we’re already taking to reduce cat predation on birds in Brighton. Another is Dark Sky, a program that aims to reduce light pollution so that, ideally, we can see the stars again at night (and animals that depend on darkness to hunt at night are able to survive in our community). Our Operations Manager, Danny, is already working on transitioning our street lamps to more energy efficient, Dark Sky compliant models, but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t make a formal goal of it and incorporate it into our sustainability plan.
We’re on the cusp of a ton of fascinating, inspiring, and powerful changes that will safeguard our natural environment as well as our built environment and way of life. And there’s money for it, from multiple sources. Our council has been very bold this term, taking big steps to purchase land and start this sustainability planning; if we are bold enough to follow through, there are big rewards waiting for us. I can’t wait to get started!