Report of Councillor Doucet to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Annual Meeting - 2002
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Are the added costs of ten months of public consultation worth it?
Staff spend about ten months developing the annual budget anyway so it doesn’t make much of a difference to staff costs. Council and committees receive the same amount of time to debate the budget in the participative model. The principal added costs come from the printing of documents and organizing of public meetings which requires new city staff to undertake. I was never able to get a figure for this but I would presume it would be a couple of million dollars at a minimum.
Are a couple of million dollars worth it? Well, what are the costs of pursuing civic objectives which people don’t want and resent their city government spending their hard-earned taxes on? Let me give a couple of examples from Ottawa.
In Ottawa, it is very clear that all of the central city neigbourhoods want to see their small scale community and recreation centres modernized and expanded. They do not want car based, ‘recreation complexes’. The citizens of Ottawa under the current budgeting process cannot get either the city staff or council to buy into small-scale community centres, and there has been what amounts to a ten-year conflict between residents and City Hall. With the citizens mounting partnership funding drives, protests, parades, bake sales, tea parties, you name to get city hall to reinvest in neigbourhood scale recreation infrastructure. And on the city side, the city keeps commissioning new consultants to create recreation studies designed to prove to citizens what they want is not efficient or reasonable, and what they should really want is a modern, multi-purpose centre with several ice pads, a swimming pool, a library, an admin centre, and a convenient parking lot.
This has wasted a huge amount of time and effort on everyone’s part and effectively frozen any reinvestment in central city community and recreation centres. In a participative budget this kind of problem simply disappears because planning becomes part of the budgeting process. In the participative process, staff and residents come to an agreement around planning as well as the disposition of funds, because the process is designed to create consensus, not entrenched opposing positions.
Let me give another particular example. In the recent Ottawa budget, the reconstruction of Bank Street was dropped as a cost saving measure. When I asked staff why, they said quite reasonably with the shortage of funds that the decayed state of the road was not quite as bad as another stretch of road in the city, so it was dropped. I have no doubt staff made the right judgement based on a technical evaluation of the road surface, sewers, water mains etc.
But the evaluation did not consider the social and economic impact of dropping this reconstruction of the surrounding communities because that wasn’t in their terms of reference. The problem is the social and economic impact of not rebuilding Bank Street which is a Main Street configuration with over fifty stores, businesses and residences is enormous. The community and the businesses on Bank Street had been preparing for this interruption in their summer business for three years. New investments had been put off. New investments had been contemplated to be timed with the road reconstruction. Putting off the road reconstruction would have enormous effect on the community.
On the other hand, the street that was judged more decayed had no businesses on it and few residents, putting off reconstruction would mean some summer patching and that was the net effect. A participative budget is inclusive enough in both the particular and the citywide to pick up these kinds of connections and come up with different decisions because the bowl of considerations is larger.
Finally, on the city wide scale, what is the effect of continuing to invest 80 per cent of your transportation budget in roads when it is the clear wish of the majority of your residents report that they want the environmental, community and personal health benefits of investing 80 per cent of the transportation budget in public transit?
Conclusion and Recommendation:
I was most impressed by the participative budget process and recommend to the Social Infrastructure Committee that a planner familiar with the Porto Alegran system be included on the FCM workshop agenda. I would recommend Claudia Macondis who is a planner who has worker in Porto Alegre and is presently living in Ottawa. (She contacted my office after I returned from Brazil.) I would recommend a planner like Claudia rather than a politician for the moment because I asked the Mayor and he and his council have a commitment in Brazil during our sessions of the FCM. There is the added problem of requiring a translator. If the session at this year’s annual meeting goes well, I would then recommend bringing up someone directly from Porto Alegre. Perhaps even a panel composed of a city planner, a citizen and a politician.
Part II of the Report.
Cities for Social Inclusion
There was virtually no media coverage of the World Social Forum II, the World Parliamentary Forum II or the Local Authorities for Social Inclusion Forum II, which were held virtually simultaneously in Porto Alegre during the first two weeks of February. The Local Authorities Forum was held in the three days prior to the World Social Forum starting and the Parliamentary Forum was held at the same time in the same place.
It is very difficult to convey the importance and the excitement generated by these three conferences because of the lack of news coverage in the North American Press. It is almost as if they didn’t happen. There were a couple of articles by Naomi Klein in the Globe and Mail on the World Social Forum and nothing on the Local Authorities Forum for Social Inclusion anywhere except Ottawa where the local newspaper and radio station ran a couple of stories because I had gone.
I will give some simple raw statistics, which will give an idea of the size and breadth of this conference and also the size of the gap between the North American-British solitudes and the rest of the world. At the Local Authorities for Social Inclusion Forum which was renamed at the end of the Forum, Cities for Social Inclusion, there were a 1,000 delegates and observers. There were four senior French Cabinet Ministers as well as three Presidential candidates. Mayors from Buenos Aires, Rome, Paris, Sao Paulo, Brussels, Cartagena, Turin, Budapest, Sao Luis, Recife, Maputo, Geneva, Genoa, Havana, Barcelona, Montevideo, Phnom Penh.
This will give you an idea of the length and breadth of the conference. What these mayors and city councillors were talking about were world problems as well as local problems. Global warming, the disparities between the north and south, city poverty and the difficulties of including all residents equally in the opportunities cities offer and above all the importance of building bridges between city governments so we can attack these problems together, not in isolation. And believe me it was powerful to hear the Mayor of Geneva said that he telephoned the President George W. Bush during the height of the terrorist crisis to tell him, ‘it’s not my country right or wrong,’ that this message must yield to ‘my planet right or wrong.’
And it was powerful to hear the Mayors of Coastal cities like Genoa saying the Kyoto Protocol must be ratified.
I cannot claim any great experience as a city councillor. I am only sitting in my second term but I will tell you it was very, very moving to hear mayors and city councillors from all over the world talking about the same problems that I face on city council and using the same language that common solutions must be found. If you think I’m being dramatic. Ottawa has twice the homeless population as Vancouver and our air quality alerts in five years have gone from non-existent to 18 straight days last summer. The number one reason children are admitted to hospital in Ottawa is asthma.
The size of the gap between the North America, the U.K. and the rest of the world can be measured by there three city councillors from North America, all of them from Canada and all of them francophone.
It is my recommendation that we become involved in next years Cities for Social Inclusion Forum III. And I am attaching a copy of the letter that I am sending out to councillors across the country in the hopes that they will be interested in forming a Cities for Social Inclusion Caucus at this year’s annual general meeting of the FCM in Hamilton. It is a caucus that if, you agree, should report to the Social Infrastructure Committee of the FCM and act in concert with it. The letter speaks for itself.
Many thanks for your kind attention.
Clive Doucet,
Councillor Capital Ward, Ottawa