Today is, in a way, the last day to reflect on the past term before the next one begins. It’s a term that I felt was a tremendous success, but the successes that I am the most proud of are now being campaigned against as somehow negative or even disastrous. Depending on how today goes those successes may be threatened or reversed, chief among them the Integrated Community Sustainability Plan and the Land Banking initiative. I’ve talked about those policies and projects before, so in this post I want to talk instead about what made those successes possible, and why Brighton was able to have the positive and progressive term that we did.
Tone
Our council got along better this past term than it has in many years–so much so that some people have suggested some kind of collusion, or just apathy, because we so rarely argued or debated issues. While there were times that I wish we had had more debate, I’m proud of the lack of arguments and bickering that have characterized some of our past councils, not to mention the councils in some of our neighbouring communities. We achieved more, both in the sense of the number of issues addressed and in the sense of the level of ambition with which we addressed them, because we were not distracted or divided by infighting.
That doesn’t happen on its own. My colleagues and I were committed to building relationships and teamwork with one another. We were especially committed to supporting staff and staying in our lane. The combination of those two commitments meant that we were polite even when we were not quite kind, and constructive even when we were not quite collaborative. Some of our biggest blunders, as individuals and as a council, were the times that we let that slip. It didn’t happen often, and we learned from those mistakes. And our stable approach to leadership helped stabilize our municipal staffing, too.
Retroactive Ambition
Without the distractions of infighting and staff turnover, we had a stable base from which to address the issues that we were facing. That allowed us to be ambitiously constructive and even proactive. And it allowed us to catch up on issues that should have been dealt with long before but had been left to us, either because of that infighting or because past councils did not feel secure in spending what it would take to address those issues definitively.
Those issues we needed to catch up on included:
- The wastewater treatment plant. This is the obvious example: we were out of compliance with the Ministry of Environment’s regulations for many years, and the history of the project was so convoluted that at one point we were each provided with hefty binders of every related report and email going back almost a decade. Choosing a path forward after so many years of history and big feelings was more than a little intimidating; but seeing how the millions of dollars involved had multiplied over that period made it clear that the best time to move forward may have been ten years ago, but the next best time is right now.
- Infrastructure deficit. We’re still millions of dollars behind in our efforts to save for infrastructure replacement, but we’ve started closing that gap.
- Road renewal. We’re still behind on fixing up our roads, compared to where our staff would like to be, but we’re coming back from a long list of overdue maintenance and renewal. And we’ve started the process of looking into assuming private roads, such as Willow Point Road, a project that was deferred by another council 28 years ago because it was deemed too expensive back then! It has not gotten cheaper in the interim.
- Parks and Recreation. Our new Parks & Rec Master Plan identifies that we are behind the standard for parkland per capita, and we’ve started to rectify that by being more insistent on developers dedicating parkland rather than paying cash in lieu; and we’ve raised the cash-in-lieu rate from a flat $500 per development to 5% of the total land value. We’ve also approved a purchase that expands King Edward Park; supported the renovation of the washrooms there into The Shed at King Ed; and advocated for the creation of a National Marine Conservation Area just off our shores.
- Accessibility. Our Parks & Rec staff and Clerks did a ton of work over this term to help bring the municipality closer to being fully accessible. I take no solace in the fact that the entire province is behind in this regard, but I’m glad we’re moving in the right direction.
- By-law enforcement. We’ve doubled the size of our by-law enforcement staff (from one to two!), and our new officer has modernized several of our by-laws, some of which were almost anachronistic they were so outdated.
- Economic Development. A past council cut the entire EcDev department, and while it was reinstated before this term, we supported increasing its staffing to bolster their work and improve communications. They’ve been extremely productive this term, catching up on lost time.
- Planning regulations. With all of the changes the province has been making to the Planning Act all term long, our staff could be forgiven for hunkering down to weather the storm. Instead, with council’s full support and enthusiasm, they’ve forged ahead with the Secondary Plan and Transportation Master Plan, not only preparing us for the coming Official Plan updates but also formally identifying a lot of long-needed improvements in our community.
I could go on and on, because almost everything we’ve faced this term has come with some baggage, some sense that the thing we needed to make a decision on should have been addressed a long time ago. But rather than feeling like we were running around putting out fires, it felt much more like having a spring cleaning to-do list after a long winter: we took a deep breath, and then started knocking things off the list, refusing to put them off further.
Proactive Ambition
Nobody would have blamed us if we’d decided to end our to-do list there. Catching up on all of these areas is more than enough to keep us busy! But being busy is not a measure of success. Improvement on the status quo is really important, but in a healthy organization a state of constant, small improvements is the status quo. Like inflation, small but steady progress is expected. Our goals for the term were not oriented to the way that things were, but rather to our vision for what they could be.
That’s because we started the term with a new Strategic Plan. Like past strategic plans it incorporated the things that the elected members of council had run on, and issues they heard from voters on doorsteps. But this planning process also included a robust visioning exercise, in which we imagined the Brighton of the future; then we could ask the question, what would it take for us to get there? That question became the basis for our most ambitious work this term, and I’m proud of this council for taking that work seriously.
If you’re thinking about what our community looks like in 2050, it’s tempting to think about all of the things that we don’t or can’t know about the future. Will there be flying cars and robot butlers? Will our climate have warmed significantly? But on the other hand, there are things that we know for sure will be true in 2050, most of all that the things that will exist then will include the things that we build today. So if we want something to exist then, we need to start building it.
I get that this is not always a comfortable approach. ~2/3 of our residents today are retired, and are unlikely to still be here in 2050. It’s natural for them to want to defer costs and prioritize savings now, especially in the wake of a global pandemic and in anticipation of stock market bubbles bursting. But our community will outlast all of us, and its chances of being beautiful and prosperous and safe after we’re gone in large part depend on the choices we make today.
Will we have affordable housing? Not without ambitious changes to the development equation, including both regulatory changes and direct action. Will we have a diverse tax base and sustainable local economy? Not without ambitious efforts to support small businesses and create a family-friendly community. Will we have a safe community and reliable infrastructure through increasing extreme weather events? Not without a climate adaptation plan. Will we have stable finances and healthy reserves? Not without fair property tax increases.
We got to work on all of the above this term, and I hesitate to call it all ambitious because it all clearly needed doing. It was only ambitious because nobody was forcing us to do it. We did it because it was the right thing to do, not because it was required; because we counted the cost of inaction as well as the cost of action. Municipal politics is often deeply conservative, oriented toward minimizing costs and risks, so much so that there’s a candidate this term explicitly running on a platform of only ever doing what is specifically required of us. In such a context, being proactive at all is ambitious. And I’m proud of the ambition we’ve shown.
Security, and Love
All of that ambition, both towards catching up on maintenance and planning for the future, was only possible because we had stability and security. This term has taught me a lot about human psychology, and the term psychological safety has entered my vocabulary quite a bit.
Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you know the concept. We talk a lot these days about being “triggered”; we’re aware of the way that distrust and trauma and exhaustion impact people’s capacity for decision-making. We know what “fight-or-flight” and “insecure” means. If we don’t feel safe and secure, we naturally prioritize the present over the future. We have less patience, much less ambition. And this is as true of a community as it is of an individual.
I want to give kudos to last term’s council, which for the most part held it together though the “unprecedented times” of COVID. But I’m also extremely proud of our current council for keeping one eye on the future despite the many challenges of the present. We could have become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the overlapping crises in the world: affordability, housing and homelessness, drug poisonings, climate change, tariffs, culture wars, and more. We could have let it divide us, but we had a council that was looking out for each other. We checked in on each other, backed each other, and built the security of genuine relationships. And that allowed us to do good work, on issues and in challenging times that have divided other councils and communities, both nearby and across the continent.
No matter what happens today, I hope that the next council operates with that same love for each other. Love is the right word for the way that this council has generally operated, and we’re lost without it.
Thank you all for a wonderful term!