Council at the half-way mark

(November 18) - Building a city is a lot like building a dry stone wall. It requires piecing together a lot of parts that look like they don’t fit. You choose the right rocks for the moment. Examine them closely. Chip at them for a while. Place smaller stones to steady the bigger ones. Then move to the next section.

A well made stone wall will stand for thousands of years without being held together with mortar. If it needs repair, a section can be carefully taken down and rebuilt without affecting the rest.

It is in perfect balance. Each stone leans on all the others and gets its strength from the whole.

Looking at it this way, we can see our mayor as stonemason. She leads a crew composed of a mix of experienced, skilled workers and some keen second year apprentices.

They appear to be working together quite efficiently. We are at the halfway point of this council’s four year term and it is going relatively well. Not perfectly, but a lot better than a lot of people thought it would.

They say the devil is in the details. If something goes wrong, it is because of something so small it was easily missed. By the same token, when things go right it is because someone looked after the little things. They were put in the proper order in such a way that you barely notice them. You’d know if they weren’t there.

Look at some of the things Council has done. Take the failed Hydro merger for one thing. I never thought joining up with Hamilton was a good idea and still don’t. Some of the councillors saw it as a solid building block for the Community Energy Plan. This plan has been one of Guelph’s best kept secrets. If successful, it will substantially reduce the city’s carbon footprint over the next 25 years. The window of opportunity for mergers is still open. Another one will come along that is better balanced.

Another well kept secret is the development of a natural heritage inventory. We have a good handle now on our structural heritage. We will do better in the future at protecting buildings like the Mitchell farm house. Now we are mapping out the locally significant natural habitats: the wetlands and other ecosystems that must be preserved as we grow.

A healthy city still needs healthy tadpoles.

Then there is parking. I often lament the extent to which an environmentally conscious council is fixated on cars. Their story is that if you want a healthy downtown where people live and shop, you have to stack the cars off to the side somewhere. Then you can build the efficient public transit system that will get more people around in fewer cars.

The mayor has a blog on the city’s web site. In one posting she speculates that maybe, sometime in the not too distant future, we’ll be able to turn the parking garages into apartment buildings.

We need this clarity of vision.

Don’t forget about our children. Sound planning is always about their future. Two items in this year’s budget are particularly important to them. The police want additional money for a new officer to fight child pornography. The library wants additional money for a new worker to program activities in all the branches. Two solid rocks in the same wall. We need both to protect and develop the physical and intellectual safety of children.

Healthy children grow into healthy adults.

This council is doing a commendable job of cobbling together a good city inhabited by a diverse population. There are many different points of view at play and all deserve to be heard and considered.

One good thing about local government is that it is accessible. You can find your councillors, and you can talk to them. If you wonder why they are doing something, just ask. They are never far away.

There is still room for improvement. Council needs to do a better job of communicating its vision and agenda. It must take active leadership. If councillors know where they want to go, they should do more to tell us why and how.

A good stonemason will tell you a wall does not divide. It defines. It sets the landscape and leads the eye to distant horizons.