Tomb
Why is city council constantly revisiting the same issues?
Something big happened at city hall in January. Council approved a plan for the City of Calgary to start using 100 per cent green electricity by 2012. In other words the city’s operations — street lights buildings and so on — will be powered by renewables mostly wind rather than hydrocarbons. Not only will the plan cut emissions but the city also expects it will save money by evading future carbon taxes.
That bit of good news however was overshadowed by an alderman’s attempt to get members of city council to cut their salaries. Ald. Andre Chabot’s attempt failed; city council decided years ago to get out of setting its own pay and most council members voted not to revisit the matter. (Salary changes are automatic tied to average earnings in Alberta.) The next day local media focused on the politicians’ refusal to discuss their salaries. “HOW COULD THEY?” shrieked the Calgary Sun on its front page which carried mugshots of those who voted against Chabot’s motion. No mention inside of the move to green power.
Two weeks later Chabot tried again bringing a revised version of the same motion to council on February 9 — an attempt he says to “at least get it on the table to discuss it.” His motion failed again but again the media ate it up. It was the lead city hall story in both daily newspapers.
It’s become common at city hall for some aldermen to repeatedly revisit failed motions and others on council are frustrated by the trend. “This constantly having to revisit stuff — decisions that we made being brought back and brought back — is counterproductive to say the least” says Ald. Brian Pincott. The motions get voted down but the aldermen succeed on another level: they win headlines for railing against their council colleagues portraying them as wild spenders in a time of economic turmoil. “It is business as usual down here” says Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart repeating a line she’s used with many reporters in recent months.
While the politicians-are-wasting-our-money narrative sells well in Calgary Chima Nkemdirim has another perspective. “It’s showboating” says Nkemdirim chair of the city hall watchdog Better Calgary Campaign. “There are some aldermen who are notorious for this — for saying one thing one month and then three months later coming around and trying to look like the hero in the media for fighting unreasonable increases when really they’re just grandstanding…. I think people are gearing up for the next election and they want to position themselves as cost-savers and good financial managers and that sort of thing.”
Nkemdirim isn’t the only one who’s noticed. Pincott calls it a “negative feedback loop” between the media and a few aldermen. “It’s really quite distressing” he says. “It feels like the conversation — and I’m being generous calling it a conversation — has been hijacked by table-pounding and foot-stomping without any real thought of what we want to be as a city.”
MANUFACTURING DISSENT
Last April Colley-Urquhart told the Calgary Herald that those who think the city spends recklessly are wrong. By November before city council dissected the budget line by line she was saying something very different. The city is “spending and spending” and facing a “tax revolt” she said; “people have had enough of this.” Colley-Urquhart decried the existing three-year budget process and complained to the Herald that “there’s no desire down here at city hall to be lean and mean.” She started a petition calling for a one-year instead of a three-year budget.
Colley-Urquhart didn’t mention however that she supported much of the spending that she was now attacking. “She voted for almost everything that was in the draft budget throughout the year and then came out as this budget fighter” says Nkemdirim. “And so it just kind of shows ‘Well what did you think when you were approving this? That there was no cost?’”
Colley-Urquhart who represents the city’s deep southwest argues the budget process was flawed. “What they were doing to us is [city administration] started dribbling out these reports in May” she says. “They’d bring more out in June and more in July and more in September. On a one-off basis you’d look at them and philosophically or whatever you’d agree with it. But they never did an accumulative accounting of what the impact would be of all those as they rolled up the budget.”
Nkemdirim however says it’s aldermen’s responsibility to find out what exactly they’re voting for. “Shouldn’t they know what they’re approving and understand the process?” he says.
THE REAL BUDGET-EATER
Another issue that’s been revisited repeatedly — and arguably milked for political gain — is a relatively small inner-city pedestrian project: two designer footbridges across the Bow River. The bridges will cost significantly less than a traffic interchange. Unlike interchanges the bridges will improve the city’s appearance and encourage emissions-free commuting. “If you compare this to an interchange it wouldn’t have been debated for a second” says Ald. Druh Farrell who represents the inner-city ward where the bridges will be built. City council she notes has made a goal to get Calgarians out of their cars. “How do we do that until we invest in it?” she says.
After council approved the project last fall aldermen like Ric McIver and Colley-Urquhart cast the project as a symbol of council’s excess. McIver told media — including Fast Forward — that the bridges could be bought for $2 million or $3 million per bridge even though the city said there was no way it could build a bridge at that price. (The city put the price tag for a basic pedestrian bridge at between $12 million and $15 million; council had approved $25 million for the design of both bridges and the construction of one.) “Once that misinformation was out there it was hard to overcome that” says Farrell. “There was a perception out there that we could have gotten them for $2 million dollars. It was never ever the case.”
Ultimately the bridges went before council a total of four times. By the last attempt to spike the project in January the Herald had branded it “one of the most controversial city projects” in recent years. Nkemdirim however says the bridges are “a red herring” an easy target for politicians who don’t want to deal with the city’s real budget-eater: sprawl. “If city council really wants to curb tax increases and keep a lid on spending it has to put a curb on urban sprawl” Nkemdirim says. “And they have been dishonest by not telling people that’s the fundamental issue.”
When I suggest to McIver that the bridge controversy is political posturing he laughs. “That’s what people that waste money say” says McIver. “The people who don’t care about the taxpayers.” And when I run Nkemdirim’s thesis past McIver — that urban sprawl is the real issue that politicians are afraid to deal with — he acknowledges that sprawl is an important issue but makes an unusual suggestion. “A lot of the sprawl in Calgary is actually in the inner city” says McIver. “The low density inefficient land use very few homes per acre. That’s sprawl and in Calgary right now actually a big part of the sprawl is closer to the centre of the city than the outskirts.”
ELECTION PREPARATIONS
The next municipal election will be in the fall of 2010. McIver has hinted he may run for mayor although he tells me that’s “a question for another day.” (Colley-Urquhart has said she’s been encouraged to run but says she has “no intention” of doing so.) “People are running for mayor now on council” says Ald. Joe Ceci. “So they look for wedge issues to continually exploit and exploit and exploit.”
At times the tone at city hall has been bitter; Colley-Urquhart says recent events at city hall have “engaged the public” but Farrell Pincott Ceci and others say they’re getting more abusive e-mails and phone calls from citizens. “Some members of the public feel justified in being as uncivil as they could possibly be” says Ceci. (In light of security concerns city hall recently introduced a new sign-in policy for citizens wanting to visit their alderman.)
Nevertheless most aldermen agree that on the whole council is doing its job. (I tried to talk to Mayor Dave Bronconnier for this story but couldn’t get an interview by press time.) “There are some really good things happening in terms of progressive policy” says Ceci. He points to the green electricity strategy and the curbside recycling program — another project council revisited in November — as examples. “Some people’s interests are to claim nothing’s getting done” Ceci says. “Well that’s not true. I think we can be quite proud of the positive things that we’re doing at city council.”
On February 10 council approved higher density housing in Hillhurst Sunnyside. Ceci says it’s another example of good policy. “[It] makes our city sustainable stops the chewing up the greenfields on the edges of our suburban communities” he says. Adds Pincott: “That ties back to a lot of the noise that we hear. So much of the generated budget furor around the tax increase completely ignored or forgot why we are at the situation that we are with our budget — which is because of how we’ve been growing our city.”
