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Policy fail
Weariness is no excuse for bad decision- making. Sadly, too many issues, great and small, are decided around Shire Hall’s council table by fatigue. Not by insight. Not by argument. Not with a preponderance of evidence. But rather because council is tired. They just don’t want to talk about it anymore.
What this means is that if you don’t like the answer you get from council, just keep asking. Sooner than you think, they will buckle. Put a few bums in the gallery seats and they are likely to capitulate even sooner.
Policy. Principle. Evidence. Considered debate. These are foreign concepts that seem to matter little around this table. They get no air time. More worrisome is that our elected municipal officials fail to see the implications of their lack of effort. They don’t see that their desire for the quick and easy— rather than the harder work of reading, reflection and argument—is damaging the institution they were elected to represent.
What this means is that our council won’t (or is unable to) talk about roads, about bridges, about our hospital, about McFarland Memorial Home. Did you know this municipal facility must be entirely redeveloped by 2024? From the ground up? Less than seven years from now? Have you seen council’s plans? No? That is because they don’t exist.
Instead, council talks about such burning issues as the Beach Bum sign. Again. And again. And then gets it wrong.
Last week, council seemed ready to acquiesce to the Picton Main Street retailer’s defiance of the Heritage Conservation District (HCD) plan produced in 2013—approved and authorized by County council. (Debate was cut off, however, when one councillor picked up and left mid-discussion. There were so few councillors in attendance for the scheduled meeting that the clerk was forced to adjourn the meeting. They had lost quorum, the minimum number of representatives legally permitted to conduct County business.)
It seems few council members had read the HCD plan.
A bit of background. The HCD came about as a result of a broad-based community desire to equip the municipality with tools to protect its built architectural heritage. This ambition was stated clearly in the Visioning exercise conducted by former councillor Bev Campbell in 2005 in a series of town hall meetings across the County.
But nothing much came of it until a lunatic with a wrecking ball smashed a hole in the side of the brick church on Main Street in Picton. The former Methodist church had stood proudly on this location for 135 years. When it was smashed in 2010, a loud and forceful outcry erupted in the community. This could not be allowed to happen again, demanded the community.
Work began soon after on what became the Heritage Conservation District plan. It is a set of rules and guidelines that govern what a property owner does with the exterior of their building in a defined area on Picton’s main street. Some owners bristled reflexively at new restrictions to private property. But most understood they were proprietors of important assets, and that in the longer term the value of their property would likely appreciate at a greater rate due to the preservation of the neighbourhood.
The beachwear retailer wasn’t among this group. She moved locations in 2015, buying a building not far from another she had rented for years.
The problem was that her sign failed to comply with either the County’s sign bylaw or its HCD plan. Nor had she applied for any of these formalities.
Now the average reader will be forgiven for thinking that these requirements seem like just pointless red tape catching up a small business owner trying to eke out a living. It is certainly the case the retailer and her supporters are making.
But it doesn’t wash. Nor is this a safe harbour for policymakers. Our elected folks should know better.
The HCD plan was produced out of public concern for the protection of the County’s architectural face as displayed by Picton’s Main Street. It was debated, revised and formed over several years and many public meetings. The opportunity to modify it was then.
But few councillors participated then. Now they stand ready to gut the document on its first test.
The Beach Bum retailer has, since the last time she stood before council, cut off the end of her sign so that it now complies with the sign bylaw. But she continues to refuse to make any changes in order to adapt to the HCD plan.
She has no intention of doing so. And council seems ready to buckle.
Most just don’t want to talk about it anymore. Picton councillor Treat Hull, however, put forward the only attempt at a reasoned argument last week. He said that the HCD should govern only the physical shape of the existing buildings, not aesthetics such as paint colour and signs.
This would have been a fine argument when the HCD plan was being deliberated four years ago. But it is policy now. County policy. He and other council members have a duty to uphold this policy, or to amend it. To simply say that he doesn’t agree with it and will vote against in this narrow instance, is destructive of the policy that was duly created to give the County the tools to protect its architectural heritage.
When council votes to allow the Beach Bum retailer to flout their own HCD plan—as they seem bound to do— they will undermine the core purpose of it. Without being fully conscious of what they are doing, council will be burning years of work and effort.
But that is what this council does. It doesn’t value or understand policy. They want to make every decision onthe- fly, by the seat of their pants based upon how it feels rather than whether it is fair, right, reasonable or consistent.
It isn’t just its heritage preservation policy that is at risk of being shredded by council’s lazy indifference. We might as well put all policy in the trash bin. Let’s just make it up as we go along.
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