City needs to increase citizen engagement
Deputy Mayor Henry Clarke is one of the deans of Peterborough city council. Having been elected consistently in his west end Monaghan ward since 1998, he has gained a sterling reputation for customer service – a councillor who can be counted on to respond to all constituent inquiries with a combination of promptness and acumen that is a model for others and that has served him well electorally.
As an advocate of good customer service, he has been part of the current council’s ongoing struggle to do a better job at engaging the public in the decision-making process at city hall. Current city consultation practices have been the subject of substantial and persistent public complaint and disappointment in relation to decisions such as the approval of the parkway extension, the building of a casino and the sale of Peterborough Distribution Inc. to Hydro One.
Last month, on two separate occasions, Clarke spoke about current community consultation issues. On June 26 he opposed a staff recommendation and council decision that will put aside for a year or more the city’s participatory budgeting experiment in which residents were invited to brainstorm and vote on neighbourhood improvement projects valued at up to $20,000 per ward. It was intended to engage people and it did not. Clarke worried that, should it be put aside, it might never come back. Two days later, serving as budget committee chair at a meeting intended to hear from the public on its preferences for the 2018 city budget, he shared a widely held view that it would have been preferable if more than 12 people had spoken.
The councillor is right to worry about both of these situations. I have made suggestions for improvements in community engagement in the past and there have been modest gains such as the allocation of funds to councillors for the holding of community events; the online streaming of council and committee meetings; and hearing from the public on the city budget at the beginning rather than the end of the process. Nonetheless, city practice in engaging with its public remains badly dated. Yes, there are some who believe that keeping the public in the dark makes for easier governance, but there are more who believe that keeping the public engaged makes for better decisions. The ultimate purpose of community engagement is to give people the skills they need to effect change in their communities. Its best practices aim at creating processes whereby residents come together to learn and take collective action. For whatever reason, there is a solid body of research and practice in community development and engagement that has yet to inform our city leaders. If the city wants to make progress in the field, as so many want it to, it will need to school itself in practices that go well beyond its current drill of simply contacting the public for the purpose of displaying and gathering information and opinion. For now, here are two suggestions to deal with Coun. Clarke’s concerns.
First, if you want successful community engagement, put the horse before the cart. That is, your first job is to actively assist in the promotion of the formation of local resident, ratepayer and tenant groups whose role it is to advocate on their own behalf, as do business groups. Without them, untethered projects like participatory budgeting won’t find traction.
Second, if you want people to tell you what they would like to see in your budget, include with your invitation a one-page, plain English summary of it to which they can respond.