Comment
Failure to communicate
Two dozen folks came to Shire Hall last week—worried about the impact of construction on Main Street in Bloomfield this year. (See story here). In a pair of project information centre (PIC) sessions held in the village earlier this year, residents and business owners were presented with three options to consider—as if their opinion mattered
As such, twenty-one folks came to the podiums at Shire Hall last week. They urged Council to choose Option 3. This option proposes working until the end of May and resuming in September. This would allow the key summer months to be free from potentially ruinous disruption.
Most of those who spoke up last week understand that construction work is necessary and beneficial. But they also know—and they let council members know— that the earning window in a seasonal community is short and sometimes fleeting, especially for retail trade in Bloomfield’s Main Street.
So they pressed Council to choose Option 3.
But there was no Option 3. It was no longer on the table. Shire Hall had already made the decision, and it wasn’t Option 3.
By the time the folks were speaking to Council last week, the work had already been contracted. The project was already in motion. What appeared to be an exercise in consultative decision-making was merely a façade—giving folks a false sense that their voices mattered.
Did Shire Hall intend for this to play out this way? I doubt it. Did it intentionally dupe folks and members of council? Unlikely. But we don’t need to strain to see intrigue when the banal or plain vanilla ignorance explains the situation better.
The truth is that the County is terrible at communicating with its residents and businesses. It’s not new. It’s a long-standing problem—back, at least, to amalgamation.
The County never developed the skills or expertise to talk about what it does, or explain why. For the first couple of decades, Shire Hall hated the idea that it had to talk to residents at all— that it had to answer to taxpayers. That’s what elections were for.
Later on, Shire Hall picked up techniques used in big urban centres. But they did so without ever understanding how they should be used or what to do when/if the overwhelming feedback suggested an alternative to the “preferred option”, to Shire Hall’s option.
Shire Hall staff are the experts after all. Or, at a minimum, they are informed by experts. Public feedback is mostly ill-informed and self-interested. Something to be managed rather than factored into decisionmaking.
As such, communication tools like PICs have been used in Prince Edward County mostly as one-way communication—a bullhorn to broadcast its message to a dull populace. “This is what Shire Hall is doing. This is how much it will cost. Get over it.”
Public comments are noted. Occasionally, a response is prepared. But it is all performative. Turn to tab 3 in the Municipal Communications for Dummies manual.
PICs permit folks to ventilate grievances or reveal their NIMBY motivations. No one takes them seriously. They certainly don’t drive real planning.
Shire Hall’s misstep in Bloomfield was in presenting three options as if it cared what these folks thought. Residents, on the other hand, believed these were real options. Real choices. It was possible, they imagined, that they might influence decision-making at Shire Hall.
It was never on. Shire Hall was always going to make the decision. And it did.
There may be solid engineering, project management and financial arguments that make Option 1 the best way forward. With luck, the work will be completed before the end of May. And it does appear that Shire Hall has learned some lessons from the disaster on Main Street in Wellington last year.
In any event, the decision is made—made before the two dozen folks came out and spoke up at Shire Hall last week.
Shire Hall must do better. Proper communications isn’t a frilly afterthought. Shire Hall must anticipate and understand the concerns and issues inherent in its big capital works. A communications plan must be hammered out alongside the engineers, the financing folks and the planners at the front end. It can’t continue to be a tick-the-box exercise tacked on after every other decision has been made.
Shire Hall must be prepared to listen. The institution’s credibility is at stake.
For now, Shire Hall owes some folks from Bloomfield an apology.
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