“Let’s broaden the discussion”
After all the hoopla these past few weeks at Calgary City Council, it has been easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. And I think this is what a lot of Calgarians have been critizing their council of. To be honest I just think the shear amount of business being conducted has split everyone’s focus and created a frenzy of hard to follow activity. Thus we’re all frustrated, and there many things confusing someone.
Today I came across this letter from the Calgary Chamber of Voluntary Organizations. I believe it was published in the Calgary Herald, but below is the full unedited version of what they had to say. I appreciate its tone and how it helps put somethings that have happened these past few weeks in perspective so I wanted to share it.
Appraising City Council – Let’s Broaden the Discussion
By Katherine van Kooy
President and CEO, CCVORecently the Calgary Herald has offered extensive coverage of Aldermanic doings. Last month the Coalition for Property Tax Fairness released their evaluation of City Council members. According to headlines, half of the aldermen received failing grades. An excellent publicity grabber, but is this the way we want to build the discussion of our city and what is important to us?
Last week, readers were presented with a series of articles on the detailed office budget expenditures of the Calgary’s aldermen, mayor and top staff. Is this really front page news? Is this really what we want to focus on?
Perhaps we should be keeping our eye on the prize. It’s a simple concept – one that many Calgarians put into practice last week on the Stampede grounds. Keep focused on the goal – don’t get side?tracked by distractions. Otherwise you’ll miss your target.
In grading City Council, the Coalition, comprised of seven business groups plus the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, provides an outline of their scoring method. Eighty per cent of the evaluation was based on perception of the “tax?payer friendliness” of aldermanic motions and voting records. Who defines taxpayer friendliness? There seems to be an assumption that taxpayer friendliness means tax cuts, low taxes and low expenditures – assumed to the point that this goes without saying. Is it possible that taxpayers have concerns beyond tax cuts, low taxes and low expenditures?
Let’s suppose for a moment that these tax and expenditure issues are the sole or primary focus of taxpayer’s concerns. As such, Calgarians would be interested to know that our residential taxes are the lowest of any major city in Canada. And, while it has been suggested that Calgary’s business taxes are unfair and should be reduced, they are in the lowest quartile nationally. In terms of expenditures, the business community has called for Council to both trim spending and provide value?for?money. As we all know from our own consumer experience, the lowest price is attractive but does not always equal the best value.
Speaking of value?for?money, a recent report announced that “for the vast majority of Canada’s population, public services are, to put it bluntly, the best deal they are ever going to get.” Canada’s Quiet Bargain, released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows public services funded by taxes make a substantial contribution to most Canadians’ standard of living – middle?income families utilize public services worth about $41,000 annually (or 63% of their income). It would be interesting to see a similar study indicating the value of public services that benefit Canadian businesses, such as business grants, economic development programs, government funded business development services and tax incentives.
In a public debate about how we view our city, taxes and expenditures should be part of the discussion. But what else might be of concern to taxpayers? Safe streets, a clean city, recreation, affordable and available housing, fire and police services, arts and culture, homelessness, environmental issues, roads and traffic – these are just a few of the other priorities and concerns raised by Calgarians, and discussed in the City report Calgary and Region Social Outlook 2008?2013. Do we want a city where we feel safe only in our homes? Or do we want a city that in layout, design, planning and policy nurtures vibrant, safe and community?focused public spaces? Do we want a city that is dominated by individual private interests at the expense of the quality of public and community life? What makes a liveable city?
We need to take care in how we talk about the questions that shape our city. Healthy public debate requires that we define our terms, provide details, explain our reasoning, and be transparent about the values that are informing our positions. And we need to understand that all evaluation of public policy and public decisions is subjective. While a report card with scoring methods may sound objective, it is a value judgment – and what has value depends on one’s perspective.
These questions and issues are not about pitting the business community against other citizens of Calgary. We all have a vested interest in these broader questions. All Calgarians, including business owners are affected by social and economic negatives – homelessness, poverty, crime, violence. Likewise, there are many positive urban elements – parks, attractive urban design, arts and culture, good public transit, sports and recreation – that create an economic and social environment that makes cities attractive, benefitting both residents and the business community. Experience has taught us that if we don’t engage now in long term planning and discussions of the future of our city, that we will pay later – how Council responds to these issues today will either worsen or improve the problems and the opportunities.
Tax collection and expenditure is how we pay for amenities and services in our community. Many of us are taxpayers, but we are also employees and employers, business owners and customers, patients and parents, residents and citizens. From these different perspectives, let’s talk about what we want in our city, what the municipal government’s role is in delivering that, what we are prepared to pay for it and how those costs should be shared across the community.
We should evaluate our politicians, and we should have high expectations from them. As we move towards the 2010 municipal election let’s focus on all of the issues and let’s make sure that the discussion is robust and encompasses many points of view. Let’s keep our eye on the prize.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Hopefully we ALL take this advice to heart.
New blog infrastructure
For those of you who prefer to view this blog live and in its natrual habitat (i.e. via going to http://blog.djkelly.ca) you’re going to notice some differences. For those of you that read this blog via RSS I’m hoping you won’t!
Google is making some changes and eliminating it’s Page Creator software – this is a good thing as it was terrible. However I was using it to host www.djkelly.ca and so because the time had come to get rid of that I decided why not just move everything over to WordPress. I use WordPress for a few other projects and I really like it so it seemed natural.
The biggest change is that www.djkelly.ca, djkelly.ca and blog.djkelly.ca now all go to the same place. Here: djkelly.ca. I’ll have some cleaning up to do to past blog posts to make internal links work the way they should but for the most part the infrastructure is now in place.
Thank you for your patience as I populate the new site with the required data to make it useful.
Calgary City Council saves face by embarrassing themselves: ward boundaries solved!
Watching Calgary City Council debate the ward boundaries for the 2010 election last night was one of the funniest moments I think I’ve seen in that hallowed chamber. I mean funny as in sad. Like a comedy of errors. A comedy of people so deep in trouble the only way out was to thoroughly embarrass themselves further.
It was a debacle for council to even keep straight what each motion was, whether it took eight or 10 votes to pass or reject it, and what the implications were for voting for or against that particular motion. At one point the mayor even apologized to members of the media awaiting their final decision for how convoluted the whole process was.
My favourite quote of the night could have been this one:
Mayor: “Is everyone clear on the question”. Several aldermen: “No!“
But instead it is from this exchange between Alderman John Mar and Mayor Bronconnier:
Ald. Mar: “It’s somewhat murky here.” Mayor: “Murky began months ago.”
Murky did indeed begin months ago when council decided they wanted to add one more direction to the returning officer’s mandate (a mandate first approved in 1990): keep five wards on the east side of Deerfoot Trail. (Why they couldn’t have thought of that six months earlier before they set her to work is beyond me.) Then things got really murky when council didn’t wait for her to do her job and decided to start drawing their own boundaries. A process called gerrymandering. You can read all my thoughts on how we got to this point here, here, here, and here.
I live tweeted the whole thing and you can follow that via the #yyccc hashtag on Twitter starting at about 8pm last night.
What were the results? Everything was thrown out. Council admitted failure, apologized to the returning officer and passed only minor boundary changes from the current ones.
Here are the new boundaries for 2010:
As silly as it all seems, I’m happy council admitted the error of their ways and made the best decision they could have given the mess they created for themselves.
What are the next steps however? That is the big question. There is some thinking that these changes MAY put the City in violation of the Municipal Governance Act but I don’t think it does. Taking a look at the council agenda attachment showing the deviation of population between each new ward, everything looks a-okay on that front too.
Either way, expect two major things to come out of this:
- Expect a council policy to allow an outside group determine ward boundaries in the future, so council won’t get their fingers in the pie and make a mess of things like this again. This is pretty much exactly what they have done for determining their salaries and I think it has worked well. Ald. Farrell tried to pass a motion to this effect last night but as several members of council didn’t like her wording and 9:30pm was fast approaching, it was referred to administration to wordsmith and come back with a proposal in September.
- The next major redistricting – which normally happens every nine years (2010 being the ninth year) – will probably happen in time for 2013 now. With more time available between now and then I fully expect council to explore the possibilities of increasing the number of aldermen to created a more fair balance of representation. And a more manageable workload. You can read my thoughts on this topic here.
Stay tuned. Hopefully the next steps will be more steady than the last ones.
University of Calgary cutting 200 jobs
I tweeted about this and lots of people were asking for the full text of the mail sent to all UofC staff letting them know they were going to be reducing the workforce by 200 people. I know it is not politics, arts or marketing related but I figured my blog was the best way to make the text available.
Subject: [All-staff-l] Budget Update from the President
MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
Budget Update
July 14, 2009
We are now about three months into the 2009-2010 fiscal year. This period has allowed us to appreciate fully our financial situation at the end of the 2008-2009 fiscal year and to evaluate the reasonableness of some of the assumptions we made in constructing the 2009-2010 budget.
We ended 2008-2009 with a $14.3-million deficit. In fact, because of the financial prudence exhibited by the University community, we actually spent $4.5 million less in university operations in 2008-2009 than we anticipated. So, where did the deficit come from? It stemmed primarily from the fact that we continued to fund the various activities supported by the University endowments—things like undergraduate and graduate scholarships and bursaries, salary support for professors, equipment and facilities upkeep—even though, as a result of poor market performance, the return on endowment funds did not provide sufficient monies to underwrite these expenses. This resulted in an additional $19 million charge on our operating fund.
What does this mean for our 2009-2010 budgets, the fiscal year we are currently in? As we have indicated in other budget messages, the first charge on our 2009-2010 budget is the $14.3 million needed to cover the previous year’s deficit. In addition, though, the 2009-2010 budget will also be adversely affected by the increase in the deficit in the Universities Academic Pension Plan (UAPP), itself a victim of poor market performance. This will result in the U of C having an additional $8 million expense to cover the UAPP liability in 2009-2010.
One way that we are mitigating these financial hits, as indicated in previous messages, is that the University is increasing enrolment in a planned and strategic way. Hitting our enrolment targets is key to our financial sustainability and will also help off-set the anticipated zero-percent base increases from the Province of Alberta in the years ahead. Notwithstanding the enrolment increase, the University is in a situation where we must make difficult decisions to ensure that we produce a balanced budget in 2009-2010 and into the future—something mandated by the province and the Board of Governors.
To balance the budget and also to continue to live up to the commitment to fund envelope carryovers, we are pursuing several strategic initiatives. First, we have reduced the 2009-2010 budget allocations by an average of three percent for all units and Faculties. This means continuing budget adjustments by Deans and other budget managers, but this is the reality of the dynamics of budgeting and resource allocation.
Second, as we have indicated in previous messages, a significant portion of the University budget, approximately 60 percent, pays for the salaries and benefits of our employees. Given this reality, there is simply no possibility of ensuring that a balanced budget, once achieved, is sustainable unless we reduce our number of support and academic staff. I anticipate that we will need to reduce our staff complement by up to 200 people by the fall of this year. There is likely to be additional staff and faculty reductions in the future. The number is not known now, but will depend on a whole set of factors such as future government grants, tuition levels, endowment performance and salary and benefit settlements.
No one makes a decision like this lightly, even knowing that the staff complement at the U of C is greater on a per student basis than our comparator G13 universities. The University will reduce its staff complement in as transparent and supportive manner as possible. Senior leadership, as well as your deans, department heads and managers, will share information as it becomes available and work to ensure that you are all informed about the reductions and the plans for your particular units and Faculties.
Third, we are vigorously pursuing the iS2 Project to improve our support service delivery and to reduce operating expenses strategically with as little impact on operations as possible. Projects like iS2allow us to make differential, strategic choices rather than just applying an across the board cost reduction strategy. This project will help the University improve its business processes and internal controls and also reduce expenditures through initiatives such as standardization of service levels and preferred buying arrangements.
I wish that the budget news was better, but it is not. You will continue to hear from us regularly about initiatives—such as iS2, capital projects like the co-gen facility that reduce utility costs and strategic enrolment increases—that reduce University costs and increase revenue, and in some cases allow us to deliver the University’s mission more efficiently than we did before.
Thanks for reading.
Harvey P. Weingarten
President
I don’t work at UofC but have several friends that do (including my wife) I hope this doesn’t affect any of them. But then again, knowing how Fine Arts has already been gutted in anticipation for the merging of the Arts faculties the majority of my friends probably find this as old news and not likely to affect them any further.
PS – And don’t even go there – my wife did not send me this email text. She was in a meeting. And I doubt she would have even if she could have. She’s prim and proper and works hard for the U. I cajoled someone else. Besides, they sent an email to all staff. If that is not making something public I don’t know what is. Plus I’m not sure if this is even really new news. It may just be the first I’m hearing about it.
Connelly: let’s do the Plan It process over. And this time have no goals.
Talk about jumping the gun! Alderman Joe Connelly has decided, despite the fact calls for a Developer Panel to discuss Plan It targets are already outlined in the omnibus list of 76 (or so) amendments to Plan It sent to administration two weeks ago, that what they need is a Developer Panel. And he’s making a motion to get things going now, instead of waiting for Administration to digest what they were just sent.
Here’s the text of his motion:
WHEREAS the Plan-It project has produced a visionary document which will establish the “blueprint” for growth and transportation for the next 60 years with an impact on our city that cannot be understated;
AND WHEREAS the assumptions in the Plan-It document suggest a significant change in consumer and commuting behaviors which may or may not occur;
AND WHEREAS the measure outlined in the Plan-It document were seen to be too prescriptive and, in some cases, impossible to achieve;
AND WHEREAS given the challenges of predicting the future, a prudent and cautious approach to the Plan-It strategy should be employed.
NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the measures being prescribed in the Plan-It document be removed and be developed in the implementation phase of the project.
AND FURTHER BE IT RESOLVED that a committee of industry stakeholders be struck to determine by consensus, measures that can realistically be achieved together with an implementation strategy and make recommendations to Council through the Standing Policy Committee on Land Use Planning and Transportation by 2009 December 09.
I was made aware of Ald Connelly’s motion yesterday in a phone call from Metro Calgary. They asked for my opinion on it. What they basically mentioned to me was Connelly was looking to set up the Developer Panel. You can read my comments in their article but I wanted to go into a little more depth here. (Sound bites only provide so much explanation.)
I had three points to Metro:
- I agree with Ald. Connelly, we need to get the targets right. This is an important document that helps set out the future of our city. I don’t think anyone wants to delay it any longer than need be. Let’s get on with the process of ‘doing’ already.
- After more than a year of public consultation (where hundreds of citizens provided their feedback) and a week of public hearings (where almost 200 people signed up to speak to council in the middle of a work day) what more could anyone possibly have to say? If that is not enough time for them to have had their say, how much time would ever be enough?
- If the development industry did not feel they were given a voice, shouldn’t every other citizen be in the same boat? Why create a panel represented by only one industry? I believe it was Ald. Farrell who said during the hearings that if a panel absolutely had to be struck – thereby admitting the consultation the City has undertaken for the past year was not good enough and that one group of citizens IS more important than another – then there were several developers on the pro-side (such as the developer of Garrison Woods) and many other intelligent citizens (such as Chris Turner and Neil Keough) with exceeding knowledge of such things, who would have a lot to add to that discussion and should be included on the panel.
In short, how many times does council need to do the same thing over and over and over again? Let’s finish the process we’ve already started instead of beginning a new one.
However, what the folks from Metro didn’t tell me was the first part of Connelly’s resolution: that the targets be scraped and be created during the implementation phase. This is perhaps the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in a while, and I can’t help but want to laugh and cry at the same time.
What would be the POINT of creating a visionary document, laying out the future growth of the city of Calgary, that does not have any measures indicating how we would do that?! That would be like going on a diet without changing your eating habits or ever stepping on a scale to see if you’re losing weight. (Strangely enough some would argue this would be similar to the odd council plan that has come before and is part of the reason we are on the current issue-riddled path.)
How does one even set goals while already implementing a project? I can’t imagine having built the fence in my backyard without having a plan first. “Let’s just start building a fence and see where it ends up. Once we’re done we can decide if we should have had a goal before we started.”
On the topics of asinine ideas and doing only what the development industry wants, I’m reminded of a comment made by one of the presenters during the Plan It public hearings that went something like this: The development industry tells us they build only what the people of Calgary want. Studies have shown what we want is un-sustainable and will eventually cause taxes to skyrocket or potentially the City to go broke. There are solutions, but when the developers keep offering us the cause of the problem, we’re going to take it because we want it. It is like offering a child a bowl of ice cream for breakfast. They’ll take the bowl of ice cream every day, unless a responsible adult steps in and helps them make the healthy decision – the right decision for the child’s future.
PS – I don’t think the development industry is evil like many on the pro-side of Plan It. For an alternate point of view, where I defend the development industry’s rightful hesitations, see my Think! Alberta posts.
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