Leadership & Management
Communities that make change happen
I think a lot of us have seen exciting initiatives for the community fizzle out. There’s a burst of enthusiasm at the start, but taking ideas and maintaining momentum to translate ideas into actions can be a major challenge. Sometimes it’s hard to get Council or Board support. Sometimes the community is either ambivalent or critical. And sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day to branch out into special projects.
Gaining support from Council is clearly the first essential element for any project. That’s a given. But finding the other elements in a formula for successful projects isn’t always as clear. What does it take to move ahead with something like a downtown revitalization? In Ideas that Ignite Downtown Revitalization, three communities share their experiences. The outcomes of their success in terms of significant investment and the change in their downtown core are proof that they are on the right track.
They all made ongoing community engagement a priority, and they applied some creative approaches to engage their community members rather than just using traditional tactics. They took their community’s priorities and translated those ideas into achievable actions, and they have delivered some quick wins for their community to show early success. Based on their outcomes, it would appear the second element to success is engaging the community (even after you have their support for the project), and the third element is having some quick success stories you can showcase to keep your community and your elected officials on board with the project.
Taking on projects that may not have been on the radar of local government a decade ago can also pose challenges for local government. Food security is one of those areas that is gaining interest and support at the community level. As citizens push for more measures to increase local food production, local governments are finding themselves tasked with looking at how they can facilitate these types of projects.
A number of communities have found that they have a valuable role to play in removing impediments to local food production and have become a key partner in promoting food security in their communities. Their advice and experiences shared in Food Security: A Growing Imperative show how making a few regulatory and zoning changes along with working with partners in the community can help support food security initiatives.
There’s definitely a community appetite for food security to support being more self-reliant locally, and creating opportunities to ensure that local, healthy food is available broadly in the community seems to be a growing trend (and yes, I’m having too much fun with the puns). It’s also becoming increasingly apparent that we should not assume that we’ll always have a reliable food source from external markets. Both factors suggest that food security will continue to be something local governments need to take on for their community’s quality of life in future.
In a sense, the theme in this edition is about taking care of our communities – either through creating a safe, attractive and vibrant downtown or by establishing policies and partnerships that protect and expand our capacity to produce a reliable source of healthy food locally. These are important goals for many communities, and I hope the experiences and insights shared through Exchange add value that can be applied throughout the province.
It’s not armageddon…but it could look like it.
Bridges and overpasses collapse. Water and sewer pipes burst. Roads crack and crumble. Buildings become uninhabitable. It’s not Armageddon. It’s not even a natural disaster (though that poses its own risks). It’s the worst-case scenario when aging infrastructure fails, and it leads to serious life safety and health issues. Clearly, failure is not an option. And asset management is the first step towards successful solutions.
It’s funny how we view things differently when working in the world of local government. For most people, I’m guessing they see landscaped boulevards and appreciate the beauty of the trees and flowers. For me, I appreciate the beauty, but I also see the challenges of ongoing maintenance, and I wonder if they have to close lanes to do the work or if they needed to add sprinkling systems to the area. Most people use roads, water and sewer without a thought of the work behind the scenes. I use those services with an appreciation of value for tax dollar. And never again will I buy a house without first checking on the community plan for the area.
It’s a bit of a skewed vision, but it comes from the extra awareness of the complexity and demands of local government operations. In the Fall edition of Exchange, my vision was even more focused than usual as I was hyper aware of asset management and aging infrastructure challenges. My trip to Montreal this summer included shopping and gazing with alarm at multiple overpasses that seemed to be stitched together with patching and metal straps. As we moved along to Winnipeg, I flinched at the extensive damage the winter does to roads and wondered about how the City manages to maintain – let alone replace – an extensive network of roads pitted by potholes.
My vacation became an amateur condition assessment exercise, and my sympathies were with the various communities I visited. It’s tough to grapple with the reality of the challenge to address aging infrastructure, but in Asset Management: From Awareness to Action, we learn from three communities who are taking steps to address the needs in their community. It quickly became evident that even small steps forward are essential and valuable. In Stepping Forward. Stepping Back., we learn that there is progress towards new funding resources, greater awareness of aging infrastructure as a critical risk area, and more collaboration and integration of asset management into regular operations. At the same time, new risks in the area of natural disasters and unfunded liabilities are adding new challenges to the mix. It’s a quagmire for sure.
Recognizing the challenges – and the frustration of being the generation tasked with dealing with such a monumental task – I believe the situation becomes more alarming as we move into election mode. Those who truly understand the funding gap and critical risks of failing infrastructure likely share my shudder when candidates campaign on a “zero tax increase” platform. Even worse are those who say they’ll cut taxes. It shows a blatant lack of understanding of what is truly needed to ensure that the infrastructure we enjoy today is maintained and replaced to provide safe and reliable services. It also tells me the work around communication is not done. There may be growing awareness of the challenges at a Council and staff level, but I look forward to the day when discussion at the local coffee shops is about how we need to look for ways to support financing for replacing infrastructure and build sustainable funding models for all new assets. Maybe I’m tilting at windmills.
Protecting Privacy When Everything Is Public
As a communications professional, my personal bias is to share more information, more often and to more people, but even I draw the line at releasing personal information. What’s interesting is how different my definition of “personal” may be from someone else. The incredibly personal information I see posted on Facebook often startles me, and is usually followed by a thought that someone should give people a heads up that no one needs to know that much detail about their personal…habits. In other cases, I find the snippets of information shared by my friends to be totally hilarious, and I feel connected to them, even when separated by geography.
Even I like to share some of the impromptu adventures I’ve had in my work travel, like the time my pants caught on fire (literally) when carpooling with someone I’d never met before. Or the night that a cockroach ran right across my chest while I was awake reading in my hotel room. It’s still personal information about my life, but not something I feel a need to protect to ensure my privacy.
It was fun tackling the question of privacy protection and proactive information sharing in Exchange. What I’ve learned from working on this Exchange is that determining the thresholds for defining personal information and protecting privacy effectively is sometimes tricky. On the flip side of FIPPA, relinquishing instinctive controls to allow for more proactive release of information can also be tricky. Advice from experts in Protecting Privacy When Everything is Public provides some guidance on defining personal information and emphasizes the importance of educating all staff about how it applies to their work.
Experts make it clear that all staff share a responsibility for protecting privacy and the most effective privacy protection occurs when organizations embed a commitment to protecting information in their culture. In my experience, most local government employees are very comfortable with protecting privacy. That’s not always the case when it comes to releasing information. I don’t know if it’s human nature or government nature, but withholding information seems to be more ingrained than sharing details, particularly when the news is bad. There may be concerns about political or legal consequences when the information being shared has negative connotations, or it could be that all of us want to avoid looking like mistakes have been made.
The reality shared by two local governments in Proactive Transparency is that being upfront and disseminating information proactively, even the negative news, was a positive experience. The demand for information and transparency in government is a trend that I believe will continue as we become increasingly networked online and in our communities. There is an expectation that citizens will be kept informed and, even more so, consulted. And the reality is the news will get out. Privacy will be breached. Mistakes will be uncovered. The key is how local governments handle each situation. Sharing the information you can, protecting privacy where you should, and being responsible about your information management appears to be a recipe for successful public relations and community engagement. It’s definitely not always easy, but I like going with a position of “Why wouldn’t we share that information?” as a starting point, rather than “Why do we have to?”