Comment
Can we talk?
Too much. Way too soon. The County wants to rewrite Wellington’s Secondary Plan in the next nine weeks. That’s wildly ambitious. But that’s not all; it also wants to overlay a Heritage Conservation District Plan (HCD)—a sweeping array of new rules, guidelines, appeal mechanisms and such—on the village in the same nine weeks. Even if it could be done physically and legally—and that’s a stretch—it would be a mistake. Shire Hall must reconsider its ambitions. It must slow down. It must bring this community along in the process.
The County’s chief planner, Mike Michaud, revealed the timeline for the Secondary Plan review and HCD plan timeline at the Wellington District Business Association (WDBA) meeting last week. The meeting had been assembled to consider the impact of growth generally in the village and the HCD specifically. HCD plan authors Carl Bray and Lindsay Reid were there. So was Dan Leeming, a planner who lives in the village. After gamely laying out the goals and implications of the plan, the presenters heard a barrage of mostly narrow self-interested criticism.
The hard feelings highlighted the biggest challenge facing the County’s planning folks as they set out to impose two new sets of rules on this village. Simply put, we don’t know how to talk about heritage preservation. This challenge is most acute when that heritage resides on private property. Most folks can agree that protecting the history and character of the village is important— but few want other folks telling them what to do with their property.
It is a conundrum that is made profoundly more confusing when the plan is to target a small part of the village core for new rules and regulations—as the HCD does—but ignores the massive developments looming north of the Millennium Trail.
So we need a better conversation. More nuanced. More tolerant. It started last week. But it must continue through many more public meetings. It takes time. It cannot be done in nine weeks.
This village was deeply invested in the rewriting of the Secondary Plan in 2010 and 2011. (A Secondary Plan focuses on a town or village and prescribes matters of density, roadways, sidewalks, lighting, and such. Ideally, it is a reflection of community values, where it has been and where it is going.) The prospect of hundreds of new homes hung over the year and a half long discussion. Folks understood the risks of the wrong growth, the wrong place, and the wrong time. Through several public meetings, IBI Group expertly facilitated productive, interactive sessions pulling together the aspirations, ambitions, risks and opportunities shared by the participants into a solid Secondary Plan—a plan everyone in those meetings could recognize.
It would take until 2015 for Wellington’s Secondary Plan to be ratified—for reasons unrelated to this village or the consultants.
In 2022, most residents aren’t aware that another review of the Secondary Plan is underway. There have been no public meetings to discuss it. No statements of the scope of the review. The only thing we know is that it is to be rewritten and ratified by Council on July 12. It is an inside-Shire-Hall process.
It cannot work. Even if it were technically possible, such a hastily cobbled-together, narrowly considered document would have zero legitimacy in this community. Even if it were brilliantly written and received thumbs up from the provincial ministry, it would still be without residents’ buy-in. Imposing an all-encompassing plan—a once-a-generation prescription for our community—with only a token public input is a recipe for massive and sustained resistance.
It is hard enough to hear drive-by Council members from Ameliasburgh and elsewhere weighing in with their opinions of the challenges and solutions for the village in which we live. Council, especially one at the end of its mandate, must rely on the views, ideas and values of the people who live, work and raise their families in Wellington.
But that only happens with participative public meetings. Meetings such as the one that gathered folks to consider Wellington Beach last week. Talking. And listening.
That is how we bridge the gap between the collective and the private interests in our village. It requires a conversation. A slow, sometimes painful, but deliberative conversation.
A Secondary Plan and certainly a Heritage Conservation District Plan requires a village consensus. We are not even close. To get there, the public must be on the journey. It can be messy. And it takes time. But there can be no other way.
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