Good things

It is a good thing that residents care about their community. It is good that smart, experienced, and able folks ask questions, offer opinions, and pose alternative ideas. It is good that hundreds of folks gather to talk about the place they live. It is good that they bring with them ambitions to shape their community, to guide the way forward—to enunciate the values and traditions embedded in the tree canopy, the mature architectural heritage and the two-minute walk up street that becomes 45 minutes, well, because, there is so much to be discussed. To share. To worry about. These are good things. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Tectonic plates are shifting beneath Prince Edward County. Big plans are afoot that hold the power to radically transform this place. Every aspect of it. Fundamental bits like who will be permitted to live here? Will Main Street be vacated as strip malls devour Belleville Road? Where will we work? Will we recognize our neighbours? Or will Wellington become a fashionable waystation for the rich and those who want to look that way? Will the hardware store become a Lululemon? Piccolina a Starbucks? The Foodland an Apple store? Whose ideas are these?

As with other seismic events, it may take decades to play out, with just puffs of smoke and nothing for the initial years. Yet it is good to have such conversations. Even if future leaders fail to recognize we ever had them at all.

No one likes to be second-guessed, to have their plans questioned, their experience under-esteemed, or their opinions challenged. It can be deflating. It can feel personal.

It can be made worse when competing and contradictory views arise from different corners. The temptation is to align with the ones you agree with and to ignore the ones you don’t. It is an understandable human response. But this way lies great hazard.

The stakes are too high. The costs are too great. This place is too small, too fragile. We simply can’t bury mistakes of this scale in the tax or ratepayer base. We can only live with the consequences.

It is why residents must be part of this process.

Everyone’s work benefits from editing. The trick is to understand it isn’t personal. It’s about the end product. This is particularly true when the stakes are high—when getting it right is the only acceptable outcome.

Central planning as a methodology is fraught with dangers and tragic consequences. See any transit project in Ottawa, or the Eglinton Crosstown LRT in Toronto. But it is made much worse when central planning is cloistered and shut away—when decisionmaking happens in an echo chamber, when public consultation is considered a painful hurdle rather than a collaborative good.

Inside cloistered walls, the incentive structure is fatally skewed. When the only folks permitted to challenge plans are subordinates and consultants, we only hear what we want to hear. It is in their interest to go along and keep questions limited to: How far? How high?

The good news is that this community has proven adept and motivated to edit the plans for this place—to share their vision of the community in a constructive and positive way. We know this because of Wellington’s Secondary Plan.

Readers are familiar with this story—three nights over two years, toiling for hours in the basement of CML Snider Elementary School, worrying about their village. What it had been, what it was, and what they wanted it to be.

The product was a document in which residents could see themselves. They could see their values. It reflected the bits of the village they treasured—aspects of a community forged over decades.

Kaitlin had just been approved for an Official Plan amendment in 2010. It was understood the developer would likely begin building homes in the village soon thereafter. Some embraced the idea. Some accepted it. Others wanted none of it. But everyone in that basement room understood their job. They knew development was coming. They knew change was coming. They knew their role was to ensure that any development fit within recognizable values and traditions. So they wrote them down in the Secondary Plan.

The folks who participated in that process don’t recognize this one. They don’t see themselves in the work or in any of these plans. It is happening to them rather than with them.

One day, Council will steel itself and press pause on this process. It must find a better one. The good news is that we know one exists.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca