City Hall staff’s fear of mistakes is causing mistakes
The Oxford English Dictionary defines bureaucrat as “an official in a government department, in particular one perceived as being concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people’s needs.”
It’s not a particularly kind or generous definition. Goodness knows, city hall is staffed by plenty of lovely humans who put the “civil” in civil servant. But there’s something about a big bureaucracy, whether government or corporate, that turns perfectly lovely humans into risk-averse, rules-obsessed functionaries.
Like the Borg collective, a bureaucracy absorbs kind, smart individuals and assimilates them until they become cogs in a machine whose primary purpose isn’t to serve citizens, but to perpetuate more bureaucracy.
This summer, we’ve seen a litany of tone-deaf decisions and announcements coming from municipal bureaucrats.
This week saw two public relations disasters. First came the decision to retroactively bill people who’d bought memorial park benches for their loved ones. It was a shakedown. Hand over $2,500 or your granny’s bench gets it. In an act of breathtaking tackiness, the city actually stripped the memorial plaques off existing benches and put ads soliciting new bench sponsors in their place.
And sure, those benches need maintenance. It was probably naive of the city to set up this program decades ago without factoring in the long-term costs of upkeep for benches that sit out in all weather. But to come back to families, decades after the fact, and change the rules, while effectively holding their memorials hostage? It was callous and clumsy and cruel.
Next came the news the city was evicting the Heritage Festival from its storage barn in Hawrelak Park. Again, bureaucrats had a point about safety liabilities on city-owned land. But again, the need to follow rules and regulations seemed to outweigh sensible compromise.
Small wonder Mayor Don Iveson interrupted his summer vacation to charge back into city hall to tell the media he was “pissed off ” at the administration’s “bone-headed” moves. That’s very strong language from the usually, measured, nearVulcan-like mayor. That’s a lot of people thrown under the bus. But it’s Iveson and the councillors who get blamed when middle managers make “bone-headed” decisions without giving council a heads-up.
And so it goes. In late June, the city announced it was eliminating its free on-street parking program for drivers with disabilities. The outrage was as fierce as it should have been predictable, and the administration quickly backtracked. It was also in June that the city had to reserve its decision to ban a couple of popular food trucks — offering snacks for humans and dogs — from Terwillegar Park.
Don’t even get me started on the decision to turn the magnificent city hall wading pool into a shallow shadow of its former self. Or the April choice to evict a beloved and acclaimed local restaurant, the Dogwood Cafe, from Victoria Golf Course, to hand over the course’s restaurant to an American company that specializes in work-camp catering.
Again and again bureaucrats made decisions without considering the political repercussions, blindsiding councillors.
Back in June, deputy city manager Gord Cebryk said this about the disabled parking decision: “We didn’t act on what the community had told us. There was no logical reason for that other than we were dedicated to moving the project forward and we didn’t probably realize the impact we were having.”
And that’s the functional definition of bureaucracy, whether private or public sector. People get so “dedicated” to moving a project forward that they forget the human and practical impact of their actions. And that’s the common denominator that describes most of this summer’s bone-head moves.
What’s gone so askew at city hall?
Some of it seems to have to do with a new corporate anxiety about legal liability, coupled with a narrow literalism about the fine print of occupational health and safety rules that brooks no compromise. Some of it, ironically, seems to do with the fear of making a mistake, of angering their bosses or of ending up in the news. Some staff appear so paralyzed with the terror of making an error that they adhere slavishly, almost blindly, to the rules — and end up putting the puck in their own net as a result.
Whatever the problem, the culture is set by those at the top. And if city council and city manager Linda Cochrane can’t change that culture, can’t convince people to put the good of the community ahead of the good of the system, we’ll keep dancing this announce-apologize two-step.