Respect

I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” These, according to Ronald Reagan, are the most terrifying words from the English language.

The consultants had rarely witnessed as much community participation in rewriting a secondary or official plan as they had in Wellington. Not in the County—not anywhere, they said. The residents of the village and the surrounding countryside filled the basement at CML Snider School over several ‘visioning’ evenings. Folks rolled up their sleeves to define the things that made it an enjoyable place to live. They talked about the natural beauty, the heritage, the livability of the village. Preserving treelined streets. Walking for groceries, banking and hardware.
They talked about what the place could be. They imagined the prospect of hundreds of new homes sprouting on the village edges. They insisted on more integrated development— walkways, bike paths and lanes crossing the Millennium Trail to ensure new neighbourhoods expanded the existing village. Development proceeding from south to north. No more isolated neighbourhoods. Building on tradition.

Over 18 months in 2010 and 2011, this community gathered over several evenings to talk about the future of this village. No one spoke about moving ball diamonds and tennis courts to create a centralized sports complex. No one used the word synergy.

Everyone in those sessions understood how things happened in Wellington. When the village needed an arena, the community built it. Raised the money, found the resources and constructed it. The Nashes. The Baitleys. The Greers. The Margetsons.

Minor hockey and baseball happened because moms and dads made it happen—with the resources and effort at hand. The tremendously successful soccer league came about because Gary Parks and Scott Wentworth decided it should be so. For their children. Later they built a fabulous soccer facility in Picton—to improve it.

When John and Jane Allison, Matt Ronan and others wanted to return the storied tradition of baseball to the County, they raised the money, cajoled the municipality, and put in the long hours of labour to make it happen. Then found and installed lights to improve it.

When sports and recreation happen in the County, it’s because the community makes it happen. Bit by bit. Organically. There is vanishingly little in this village that has Shire Hall’s fingerprints on it. Municipal folks have served ably as admin. Sometimes facilitating. That was enough. It still is.

The Dukes. The County Marathon. The playground in the park. The Rotary beach and boardwalk. Rebuilding the Dukedome. (Foster Bailey collecting donations $4 at a time) The new arena. It is a long list—a pattern repeated over and over again.

It is why Shire Hall’s report opining on the village’s secondary plan seems so profoundly arrogant and tone-deaf. It fundamentally misunderstands how these facilities and places are intertwined with the character of this village.

From the report: “By centralizing larger scale municipal recreational facilities there becomes a synergy in the provision of services where cost savings could be utilized (i.e. one parking area, sharing of washrooms, etc).”

Imagine the village were graced with a truckload of money for sports and rec— would we use it to move existing, working, popular facilities across the street? For synergy?

When Dwight Eisenhower was president of Columbia University, he presided over the development of new sidewalks and gathering areas on the green space connecting some new buildings. The likely apocryphal story is that he told the college planners to “Do nothing for a year. See where the students walk, naturally. And where they have beaten a path, put a sidewalk.”

In Wellington, and indeed most rural communities, there was never another option. There were no central planning resources or capacity to capture synergies. They put sidewalks in front of houses and put rinks where the available land was—when money was available.

More deference must be shown to the history of this place—more respect demonstrated for the way things have been done. And much more regard must be given to the secondary plan written by this community just ten years ago.

This is not to say there aren’t new ideas under the sun. Or that there aren’t some notions in this report that are worthy of discussion. But that discussion hasn’t happened. A few stilted Zoom sessions does not a proper consultation make.

Shire Hall must pause and reconsider its entire approach to Wellington’s secondary plan. The current rewriting project reflects a poor understanding of this community, of indeed any rural community. It ignores its history, traditions and the imagining that has gone before. In doing so, it offends the people who live here—have raised their families here. It diminishes the folks who have given their heart and soul to make it a better place.

Scale matters. Prince Edward County isn’t Whitby or Markham. The ideas and plans that find favour in urban and suburban communities don’t fit easily here, if at all. Communities such as ours don’t have the population, the tax base or the expectations of vast sports complexes, recreation facilities and elaborate public spaces.

Rural communities are more pragmatic because they have had to be. It is bad form to insult the folks who built this community, its character and traditions. Even if you are trying to help.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca