One-time planning boss joins with former Minto executive in ‘strategic partnership’
Longtime Ottawa planning committee chairman Peter Hume has gone into business as a development consultant with former Minto vice-president Jack Stirling.
They’ve “formed a strategic partnership to pursue development projects and to advise both the private and public sector on how to build a better and more prosperous City” says the minimal website for the venture, called HP Urban. Hume is its chief strategist.
He quit politics in 2014 after spending half his life as a local councillor for Alta Vista. For the last 11 years, he chaired city council’s planning committee, making him the point man for Ottawa’s urban-planning decisions.
He walked a difficult line, often loudly demanding better-quality projects from the city’s builders and more efficient approvals from the city’s staff. Under his supervision, the city rewrote its master land-use plan twice and took up numerous plans for particular neighbourhoods, to try to give what he called “certainty” to existing residents and builders who wanted to redevelop strip malls and parking lots.
Hume also raked in tens of thousands of dollars in developer contributions to his reelection campaigns, and after he announced he was quitting, he was involved in organizing fundraisers hosted by commercial developer Michael Casey (an old friend of his, a vice-president at Arnon Corp.) for several candidates. They included Hume’s successor, Jean Cloutier.
Stirling has worked on both sides of the urban-planning table. He was cashiered as Nepean’s planning commissioner when it amalgamated with Ottawa in 2001 and then went to work as Minto’s vice-president of development, shepherding downtown condo projects and suburban subdivisions through the city’s approval processes.
He left Minto in a corporate shakeup last fall, about a year after the guy who hired him for the family business, Roger Greenberg, stepped down as chief executive.
Stirling is in his early 60s, Hume his early 50s. City councillors make more money than most people, about $90,000 a year, but after 20 years in politics Hume’s likely in no position to retire: he has to do something and planning’s what he knows best. He knows Ottawa’s urban-design policies inside-out, having helped write them, and he has a nose for political problems that plenty of stats-bound professional planners don’t.
Well, he didn’t respond to my attempts to talk to him about his new gig, which maybe isn’t ideal. But Hume’s got genuine expertise to sell, and a history that shows he really cares about building a better city. A builder would be lucky to have his advice.
And yet. Hume joins a list of people who’ve made their names regulating Ottawa’s development industry and then gone to join it.
Two of the top people at the city’s biggest planning consultancy FoTenn — founding partner Ted Fobert and senior vicepresident Pamela Sweet — were respectively the senior planners for the pre-amalgamation Ottawa and the regional government. They now help the biggest builders in town with their most contentious projects.
The city’s former director of planning policy Dennis Jacobs lobbies the city as a freelance development consultant. Jacobs’ biggest visible success, to be fair, has been representing local residents opposing a project on Roosevelt Avenue in Westboro, but his company’s client list includes Minto and Claridge and Mattamy.
The urban-planning business is high-profile but pretty small. There’s not a lot of money in working for community associations that have to pass the hat to cover a planner’s fees; the people who do it are like legal-aid lawyers but with even less business. With very, very few exceptions, you’re either working for a government that regulates things or for a company that’s trying to get that government’s approval.
And if you’re working for such a company, your ultimate mission will be to get it the most wiggle room possible under the numerous overlapping and sometime conflicting sets of rules that govern its work. If builders didn’t want to push the limits, they wouldn’t need development consultants.
Peter Hume’s evident popularity with Ottawa’s developers was always a problem for his credibility as a regulator of their industry. He’d be impatient and irritable with them in public, but under his leadership the city rarely said no to proposals of theirs that came to votes and at election times they always showed up with those bags of money.
He’s a private citizen now and he has a perfect right to do as he pleases. But if you’re one of the many people who don’t have much faith in the city’s ability to stick up for citizens when it deals with planning applications, this will not help.