In response to Neil Godbout's "How the City of Prince George might waste a big pile of time and money in 2023" and Colleen Mahoney's "Letter to the editor: Prince George’s Official Community Plan worth updating."
Mr. Godbout suggests that the city’s community plan is a document that “amounts to nothing more than thoughtful suggestions and wishful thinking, and therefore, work on the policy is unnecessary”.... and Ms. Mahoney suggests that the community plan is not a waste provided that the "consultation and engagement is extensive."
The issue isn't that a new community plan is a waste of money, the issue is that the city needs to focus on ongoing and effective monitoring and implementation of the plan to ensure that it is not a "huge waste of money and time,” something that it hasn't done in the past. A failure to monitor and implement the plan results in wasted taxpayer dollars.
Mr. Godbout's criticism is misplaced. A review and update of the city’s Official Community Plan is necessary because of changing community dynamics as well as emerging issues, opportunities and challenges that have arisen since 2011. Ms. Mahoney's suggestion that rigorous community engagement will ensure that the 2023 Community Plan is not a wasteful exercise also misses a critical issue: without effective monitoring and implementation, the community plan will become stagnant and outdated, regardless of the effective engagement or lack thereof.
There is a valid criticism that should be made: cities constantly drop the ball when it comes to plan implementation.
The cost of creating an official community plan is significant. Perhaps tens of thousands of dollars and even hundreds of thousands when all the costs are considered. You would think that with such a high price tag mayor and council would have an interest in receiving updates on successes and failures. If mayor and council don't know what is and isn't working, they can't make course corrections. They can’t fix what they don’t know is broken.
The city should provide an annual report card to track the successes and failures of the official plan implementation. This will empower council to make changes when necessary. City staff should use this annual opportunity to offer small update suggestions in response to emerging trends and issues. Council could consider this on an annual basis and undertake targeted community engagement on emerging issues so that the plan remains current (which will help reduce the large cost of updating the document every 10-15 years).
To city hall’s credit, the city produced a five-year monitoring report on the 2011 community plan. This was supposed to provide a snapshot of “progress towards implementing and achieving objectives and policies.” Unfortunately, a quick comparison of the 2011 Community Plan and the monitoring report also shows that not all the policies of the 2011 plan were reported on.
Case in point: Policy No. 7.5.16 of the 2011 Official Community Plan states that the city should “consider pursuing a Standards of Maintenance bylaw which allows the City to enforce basic levels of maintenance for rental accommodation.” This would have brought minimum standards for rental apartments and would penalize corporate landlords who allow their rental buildings to deteriorate.
This policy was highly progressive for 2011 but seems to have been completely abandoned without explanation. Why did this fail? Shouldn’t staff report back to the public and to mayor and council about the policy failures so we can avoid these mistakes moving forward?
Jake Jacobson
Prince George
