When you go to enough city council meetings, you know when they’re about to go south. It’s a feeling.
The look of this month’s planning agenda practically guaranteed a long night between a controversial heritage designation, a major project approval, new incentives for affordable housing, and the second phase of the heritage district plan for a property that people in town have very different ideas about. This was stacked, and it desperately needed someone with good agenda management skills.
The University of Guelph got preferential treatment with the heritage designation for the conservatory on their campus moved to the front burner. Then, after hearing from planning staff about how this designation was not only the top priority for Heritage Guelph but met eight out of nine criteria for designation, council did the bidding of the U of G by essentially throwing the designation away.
It's cool though guys, the campus admin totally promises that they will salvage aspects of the project for a commemorative garden that will mark the conservatory’s place on campus. Charlie Brown meet football.
This term of council literally began with a property owner coming to council and saying that a heritage designation was stopping them from proceeding with a project, and if council let them tear down the heritage building, then they would save the distinct heritage elements and build a commemoration. You know what happened? They came back to council months later and said, nope, we can’t do it, we have to smoke the whole thing!
Is there anyone reading this who thinks that commemorative garden is going to happen? It isn’t. And every inch of that conservatory, and its unique heritage character, is going to end up in the garbage.
We’re also forced again to wonder why we even bother having advisory committees of council. Not for the first time, council threw out a recommendation from one of those committees and ignored their input to do something entirely different. It’s part of a disturbing trend at city hall on a multitude of matters where public input is shrinking or being put aside to follow direction taken from behind the scenes lobbying.
Think about all the people who supported the Public Space Use Bylaw who didn’t delegate but sent emails to councillors. Think about all the fireworks lobbyists and business owners who came in at the end and convinced council to override the 56 per cent of people who wanted to ban fireworks during public engagement. And now the U of G was trading emails with councillors the day their building was being designated and talking about how they can only do the bare minimum.
At the heart of the global assault on liberal democracy is a feeling that government just doesn’t work and a small group of elites impose their will on the majority due to their status and access. It’s what sends them into the arms of populist authoritarians, even the ones who, despite their words to the contrary, are deeply enshrined with the elites themselves.
In other words, the message from this week’s meeting is simply, if you’re the University of Guelph, they let you do it. Whatever you want.
Naturally, the big item for this meeting, the one that was the most complicated and came attached with the most delegations, was pushed to last. The draft guidelines and plan for the Ontario Reformatory Heritage Conservation District was going to be huge even if staff proceeded with the best expectations of the loudest supporters. They didn’t do that by the way.
Keep in mind that the project to create an HCD around the OR Lands was a project pushed for by the people. The push to preserve key structures and art work inside the buildings is a project that’s relied on the advocacy of the people. If it were up to Infrastructure Ontario, they would wipe the property clean, but it’s been the people of Guelph who’ve kept the stakes of this property front and centre.
Meanwhile, city leaders hedge on a commitment to even explore the possibility of turning the OR Lands into an urban park, which is what it’s essentially been used as for nearly 25 years now. They worry about giving away this land when there’s a new hospital in the offing without ever worry about giving away other big parcels of land, including a portion of the Guelph Innovation District property right next to the OR Lands.
And then staff come back with a plan filled with highly furtive language about protecting heritage assets on the property. They talk about how these designations are more about managing change than preserving history, which, I think, is the exact opposite interpretation that most of the general public has. The people who pushed for this project don’t want “adaptive resuse” they want to enshrine the present use.
Next week is budget delegation night at city council, and if you look at the council agenda there’s something like a million letters from members of the Guelph Tool Library asking for that group’s Community Benefit Agreement payments to be preserved. Advocates have also been pushing for Welcoming Streets funding to be restored after Mayor Guthrie “heard” that the program he pushed for hasn’t been working like it should.
Over the course of last week’s town halls, Guthrie promised to restore at least some CBA funding and to keep Welcoming Streets after the claxon got too loud. While it’s good that he heard the call, I’m now wondering what inputs Guthrie and staff took while taking the hacksaw to the multiyear budget.
When asked about the totally of cuts in the budget, and where we can see them all, we’re told to check the website. They’re all listed there! Trying to find anything on the City of Guelph website is like trying to find a polar bear in a snowstorm. I’m not Neo and I don’t know kung-fu, but this is what’s passing for transparency at city hall these days.
There is a serious gulf between what is public feedback and what is private feedback, and even for someone like me who lives and breathes this stuff, I get confused about where some of these directives are coming from. Transparency isn’t a word; it goes deeper than acknowledging that something is happening and means that you also understand why it’s happening.
Do we know why things are happening at city hall these days? I’m not sure that I do.
