In 2022 I ran on three key values: Vision, Communication, and Collaboration. Each of those values had three key goals. I hope to return to council for the 2026-2030 term, so I thought it worthwhile to evaluate how well I did in achieving those goals.
Those values and goals have been on the front page of my website all term. Here they are, verbatim, whether they’ve been achieved, and what role I had in those achievements.
Vision
Community visioning sessions, where we imagine our future together and find ways to make it happen.
It’s common practice for a municipality to update its Strategic Plan during each term of council, to ensure that staff efforts align with the strategic priorities of council. In the past term, the Mayor spearheaded the effort to produce a strategic plan, drawing from the campaign platforms of the members of council and filtering them through staff and council input to produce a straightforward document with strategic goals that could be easily turned into staff work plans for implementation. This was a simplified process, but it provided some community input by ensuring that the themes and feedback of the election campaign were central to the strategic plan.
This term started off similarly, but I immediately advocated for more community input through a process that invited members of the community to envision our common future together. Council agreed, and I was part of a working group that included Mayor Ostrander, Councillor Wright, and key members of staff. Staff hired Community Design specialist Jenny Whyte to facilitate several public sessions, deliberately held at various times to maximize how many people could attend, to fulfill that process of community visioning. I attended as many of the sessions as I could (I think all of them), and met some residents who continue to share their vision of the community with me. It was and is tremendously gratifying to imagine our future together!
We received some feedback from the community indicating that our working group did not meet the requirements of our procedural by-law, so the working group was reconstituted as a committee of council, and I was selected as the chair. As chair I initiated a mid-term review of the Strategic Plan to update it with more current realities, and then the committee disbanded. Even after the committee was disbanded, I later requested another report from the CAO reviewing the status of the strategic plan. Having to update the plan isn’t a bad thing, not least because much of the reason to update it related to the fact that we’ve achieved so much of it already. We set reasonable goals, and reached most of them.
So on this metric I feel confident saying we’ve achieved my goal.
Strategic planning and participatory budgeting, where our vision is translated into policies and investments.
I had hoped to not only imagine the future with residents directly and translate that into a strategic plan, as I described above, but also to enact participatory budgeting, a practice in which part of the municipal budget is set aside to be determined by a group of residents, either a committee of volunteers or residents chosen at random. This practice has been used elsewhere to great effect, and where it has been used it typically yields excellent results.
We have not yet implemented participatory budgeting, but we’ve had quite a few other changes in budgeting that improve or change the process. Not all of these changes were by choice; the province instituted Strong Mayor Powers, and now require the Mayor to propose a budget rather than having a council-led process. Some municipalities continue to have a council-led process, backed by their Mayor, through a different interpretation of the legislation; our staff and legal counsel advised us that the legislation requires a Mayor-led budgeting process, and the one time we’ve gone through that process (2026) it has been much simplified but still achieved very similar results as past budgets. I continue to have confidence in our municipal budget, and felt that I had sufficient opportunity to make proposals and amendments.
I did speak to our Treasurers about participatory budgeting, and they’ve been open to it in theory. But there are a few things holding us back. The first is legislation: we’re still figuring out the requirements of the new Strong Mayor Powers, and while the Mayor could (and likely would) support using participatory budgeting, it makes sense to try the new required process once or twice before adding new layers to it. But the second consideration is whether there’s even demand for it; we’ve had very little resident input into our budgets all term. I typically get one or two emails asking me to keep the increase low, and one or two emails telling me that the proposed increase is satisfactory. While we might be able to get a handful of residents to engage in a participatory budgeting process, I think they’d be doing so to fulfill my interest in participatory budgeting as an interesting concept, rather than fulfilling their own interest in participating. Just because I think the idea is neat does not necessarily mean that many other people should have to try it out!
One change in budgeting practices that I’m quite pleased to see is a shift in the way we do the Grants in Aid portion of the budget. At the start of the term it was a council-led process of sifting through resident applications and allocating a fund based on 1.5% of the previous year’s budget, and I was immediately uncomfortable with the process: we would spend long sessions of the Committee of the Whole examining small local charities and projects, asking for audited financial statements for low-level grants. I noticed that we would publicly debate a request for a few thousand dollars to support a local event or charitable program, but quickly approve six- or seven-figure budget items without comment. I’m all for public scrutiny of public spending, but at the end of the day I don’t think it’s fair or neighbourly to put people through the wringer for relatively very small amounts of funding, particularly since those neighbours are typically volunteering their time to provide a service that would, if we offered it as a municipal service, cost us far more. I also felt that this process politicized charity. Thankfully, this year we’ve had a staff report indicating ways to make the Grants in Aid process simpler for council and staff, and much less politicized, without sacrificing scrutiny and accountability.
I have asked that we keep track of how much we allocate in our budget, through Grants in Aid and elsewhere, to healthcare spending. It currently amounts to well over $100,000/year, and it’s difficult not to see this as a provincial download, as healthcare is a provincial responsibility. Given that the Ontario budget has hit record levels, including record-high tax revenues (and spending and deficit), it’s frustrating to see costs of things like primary care physicians and basic medical equipment being paid through municipal grant programs designed for supporting community-led events and programs.
So while we did not institute participatory budgeting, I feel like we’ve made excellent strides in the way that we budget, and with a new Treasurer I’m quite sure that there are other good changes coming. I’m also no longer convinced that participatory budgeting is desirable, mostly because I don’t know that anyone else actually wants it. Maybe I’ll give myself half a point here, and acknowledge that my ideals didn’t necessarily match our reality or needs.
Approaching all of this through the lens of sustainability: how will our actions today impact future Brightonians?
One of the first things we did as a new council, in the last days of 2022 and the early days of 2023, was budget. I immediately began to advocate for us to hire a Sustainability Officer, and/or to fund a sustainability plan. Council agreed to budget some money toward this in 2023, and made the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committee the keeper of those funds.
I had started our Sustainability Advisory Working Committee during the previous term of council, by bringing a delegation requesting that it be created. This was particularly important given that we did not have staff resources and expertise dedicated to making our community greener and more sustainable. Since this committee was re-formed for this term as the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committee, I have served as either chair or vice-chair. We have advised council on environmental-related matters, including reviewing certain planning applications, recommending policy changes, requesting the initiation of our new rain barrel subsidy program, and eventually, providing input into the Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP).
We were unable to initiate the ICSP right away, but we continued to advocate for sustainability measures in our Official Plan and Secondary Plan. Though we didn’t spend the money that first year, I advocated for more funding in our second budget, and again in our third budget, which is when we finally hired a firm to complete the ICSP. As I write this, we saw an update two weeks ago on that sustainability plan that shows that we’re on track to deliver it sometime this year. Likewise for the Secondary Plan, which includes significant environmental considerations, many of them simply because I asked for them.
It is perhaps on this point of sustainability that I feel my impact on council the most: we’ve made great progress, but only because I continued to advocate for it. I discovered very quickly that we have staff members who are quite interested and even passionate about environmental sustainability, but their job is to follow council’s strategic direction, so they needed council’s direction to invest their time and expertise into sustainability. I can’t say that nobody would have asked for it if I hadn’t been there, but I was there and I did ask — over and over again. So I’m proud that we’ve made progress toward ensuring that sustainability is core to the way the Municipality of Brighton operates, but I’m very aware that the job isn’t done yet, that we’re still catching up after years of lagging behind, and that when sustainability champions leave a council this work can often flounder and even reverse course.
So while we didn’t achieve my goal of enshrining sustainability as a key consideration during this term of council, I feel we’ve come very close – maybe 75%.
On the whole, then, I’m quite proud of my performance in the “vision” category. I continue to imagine our future, and I’ll talk more about imagining the future of our community in another post about current and future projects.