The Pitfalls of Piecemeal Planning
Why plan?
Organizations and individuals plan for a host of reasons. One of the first things you do when you spread your wings and leave your parents home is learn some aspect of financial and career planning. You need a “roadmap” to help you reach your goals.
Land use planning also serves the goal of acting as a roadmap for the future. Transportation planning? Same thing. A good roadmap is a holistic tool, encompassing everything, good or bad, so every issue can be planned for and every pitfall anticipated.
So, what happens when you don’t do any of this planning? What happens when you just plan the “battle” and not the entire “war” - a piecemeal approach to guiding your life? Usually, you are taken by “surprise” by crisis after crisis. Resources are squandered through duplication and redundancy. I doubt, however, that you could call them surprises with a straight face when they are entirely predictable given the lack of planning.
How much time and resources does Windsor spend on planning for our collective future? Are there “roadmaps” we have that will guide us towards a brighter and predictable future? Roadmaps that aren’t sitting on a shelf somewhere in the depths of City Hall? Wouldn’t it be prudent and responsible for our civic leaders to give us something to look forward to in anticipation of a changing local economy?
The city of Hamilton, frequently cited as a close comparison to Windsor (but easily pulling away from us very swiftly), has spent considerable time and effort planning a future for its citizens. And not just for three years until councillors run for re-election (traditionally the normal “planning” period for our civic leaders), but they’ve recently laid out plans for the next thirty years.
I’m jealous.
From the Hamilton Spectator…
Hamilton has charted the course of its future. After years of study and debate, council approved the city’s urban Official Plan yesterday. Spectator municipal affairs reporter Nicole MacIntyre looks at the plan that will be the foundation of future growth, deciding the location of development and the character of neighbourhoods over the next 30 years. It offers stronger environmental and heritage protections and new urban design guidelines. It also promises to change the face of Hamilton.Urban landscape is about to change
To meet Hamilton’s growth targets, the city must increase the density of people and jobs per hectare in the hubs of its communities.
Hamilton is anticipating future growth patterns and planning ahead of time what they want their city to look, feel and act like. This future-focus has been happening there for a long time. (thanks for that link, Josh) Some would call this “progressive”.
Compare and contrast the recent Infrastructure Stimulus spending announcements for both Hamilton and Windsor.
Hamilton’s list of approved projects amounts to $184,100,000 of public funding. Of that total, not one dollar is devoted to projects that build or widen roadways that contribute to an unsustanable transportation system or open up new greenfield sites for sprawl-type development. Judging their municipal priorities upon their requests for funding alone, it appears that providing their citizens with clean municipal water is high on their priority list, with $100,600,000 (or almost 55%) of their projects devoted to upgrading their water system.
Windsor? $84,014,366 $22,765,334 is devoted to expanding our arterial road network, which many would say only augments our local land developers devotion to suburban sprawl. Add to that the $30,400,00 in infrastructure “investment” for opening up the airport lands for development and you have $114,414,000 $53,165,334 of the $133, 430,000 (or almost 86% 40%!) total infrastructure stimulus dollars awarded to Windsor, dedicated to sprawl-development. Don’t even get me started about the paltry $400,000 dedicated for “bikeway development” out in the middle of an industrial zone (next to Ford’s Essex Engine Plant) that has no connectivity and nobody will ever been seen using! (this will only add to the anti-cycling sentiment that nobody ever uses our ”bikeways”, so why bother building any! Why do we set ourselves up for failure like this, unless that is our goal?)
We may pat ourselves on the back with our ability to suck the most per-capita funding out of the government, but when the dust settles and these temporary construction jobs have evaporated, what will the city of Windsor really look like?
Don’t get me wrong. I understand why the construction lobby is so intent upon backing any-and-all development. They are just looking out for their membership’s financial interests. This is their job. I just feel that we should be working out of some grand playbook together, so that we get those valuable construction jobs while building towards a sustainable economic future with employment left after the backhoes and paving machines have left.
So, who will win out in the competition for new residents and businesses between Hamilton and Windsor, when their municipal priorities are heading in such different directions?
I know there are some readers who will call me out, saying that Windsor is in dire need of watermain and sewer replacement. I do not disagree. However, how are municipalities such as Hamilton in such better infrastructural health and able to capitalize on the recent funding announcements by augmenting their quality of life needs over basic sewage and water delivery needs? When they can move forward on truly progressive infrastructure projects like light rail, and Windsor is busy patching decades-old holes in the hull of a ship that has been neglected for generations? When do we call our steadfast municipal priorities into question?
And when do we decide to change our course?
Tags: City Hall, Hamilton, infrastructure spending, Official Plan, planning, public transit, Transportation Planning
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Chris,
You may want to recheck your numbers before posting.
I only get $22,765,334 in road spending. How did you come up with $84,014,366?
Local Road Infrastructure (Tecumseh Road East Improvements) $8,400,000
Local Road Infrastructure (Walker/Wyandotte Intersection Improvements) $2,498,667
Local Road Infrastructure (Walker Road Reconstruction) $11,866,667
Total = Vincent is right
Must have fat-fingered the calculator buttons. I`ll fix the article. Thanks Vincent.
I’ve lived in a few different cities in Ontario and Windsor easily has the most run-down sidewalks, roads, etc. It looks like we dont spend enough money on infrastructure maintenance (for a host of reasons, perhaps taxes that are too low to be sustainable, perhaps lack of almalgamation of surrounding municipalities not pulling their own weight in paying for the upkeep of infrastructure and services they use - compared to London which merged a number of neighbouring townships into the london tax base, or perhaps because our infrastructure budget is gobbled up patching up Huron Church road on a annual basis as we carry much of the nations goods accross the border, again with little compensation).
This post says so much, I could only hope that council and the city planners are paying attention.
Tim Miron:
The majority of funding for maintaining Huron Church comes from the Province.
Chris makes it sound like that Windsor doesn’t have its own Official Plan. We do and it says all sorts of wonderful things too. City planners have been paying attention. We need you to convince both Council and the majority of residents that intensification is a good thing. It’s hard to say wonderful things in a PAC report only to have it ignored at Council.
Chris shouldn’t be making it seem that Hamilton is doing something amazing. The Province decided via Places To Grow where growth will and will not happen. Hamilton is simply responding to that document (and to the fact that they are now a single-tier municipality and that their old planning documents had to be replaced to reflect that new reality).
Obviously, Windsor has an Official Plan. The Ontario Planning Act ensures all municipalities do. Like you mentioned, it says all sorts of great things, as do many of the documents that come out of city hall. However, I can`t recall any grand, all-encompassing plan for this city. What kind of city are we plannning to grow into? What are our goals and objectives? All we really see are piecemeal plans, that do not contribute to a greater vision of the city, that never make it to reality. When I see municipalities doing things that I feel we should be doing here in Windsor, I must bring it forward. And I would hope that you would help us do the same, Vincent.
When I see municipalities like Moncton, NB addressing issues like peak oil in an official context, it gives me hope that there are municipal leaders who look towards the future. I think we need to keep this in mind when interacting and corresponding with our own local leadership.
Chris, the City of Windsor Official Plan is the “grand, all-encompassing plan for this city”. It’s no different from the City of Hamilton Official Plan you cite above.
You do realize that our OP is only 9 years old? That OP was our first attempt at integrating environmental and urban design policies in a Windsor OP. At the time, it was a state of art of OP. We are conducting our five-year review that will see many changes to the OP. It is by no means a static document.
You also know that the City has a corporate Environmental Master Plan which is far more encompassing than your Moncton example.
Could you cite the piecemeal plans? Just want to know what they are for further discussion.
Cheers.
Sure we have plans - and the plans say that we will do a, b and c to make d, e and f happen. (around here many of these type plans are the result of someone seeing how another city did it and trying to run the same play with different players)
What happens when X comes along and the outcomes start to become L, M and N?
Well the “plan” says that if we keep doing a, b and c then d, e and f will follow. So, ignore X and the L, M and N that came with it because its not part of the plan.
So, in spite of airlines going bankrupt and profit margins shaved further by higher aviation fuel costs and greater centralization of transportation and manufacturing and companies handcuffed by debt and not really in any position to provide capital needed to invest in unserviced/under serviced regions lets spend millions on our airport and adjacent (productive farm) land because the plan says if we do so it will be a great success.
Plans made by top heavy organizations and bureaucracies cannot react to real world change on the fly. Plans are great but if there is no contingency you / we / me are watching the Titanic slip beneath the surface while we slowly die of exposure.
Chris:
How has Hamilton been able to do this? Check out this report:
http://www.myhamilton.ca/myhamilton/CityandGovernment/CityDepartments/PublicWorks/CapitalPlanning/Asset+Management/State+of+the+Infrastructure+Report.htm
And this:
http://www.myhamilton.ca/NR/rdonlyres/9513BF04-C983-4F5F-AE33-221B38534FEE/0/SOTI_REPORT_II.pdf
This paragraph is telling:
1. Implement a policy of annual funding increases for new assets.
The first priority is to Stop the Slide, (i.e. to stop repeating the mistakes of the past). Too often new assets are received by the municipality either at no cost (such as those from developers) or at a fraction of the actual construction cost (such as those subsidized by grants or cost-sharing programs). These assets are not free or cheap, but in fact are the gifts that keep on taking. There is a need to developing budget management models that take into account the City’s growth (physical and population base, and its associated impact on services and assets) on an annual basis.
These new funds would go to increase operating, capital and funding to reserves for future upgrading, rehabilitation and ultimately replacement of the asset. Guidelines would be 4%, 6% and 10% of the
replacement cost for underground, facilities and roads assets respectively.
These percentages are guidelines only, and will need to be refined though further analysis. This policy also applies to assets that have just been replaced, again to ensure that sustainable funding is in place for the future.
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Bottom line - in Windsor, as has been acknowledged, “politics” trumps rational and long-term thought.
We build facilities and infrastructure which increase costs. I know I”m beating a dead-horse, but building the arena in the east-end was a political decision increasing the burden on existing infrastructure.
Hamilton isn’t perfect either. They are being forced to act, as Vincent highlights.
Windsor was the third-largest polluter in the province for dumping raw sewage into the Great Lakes: 4.3 billion litres dumped in 2007
See “Sewage Dumping in Ontario” by Ecojustice:
http://www.ecojustice.ca/publications/flushing-out-the-truth-sewage-dumping-in-ontario/attachment
See also today’s Windsor Star article:
http://www.windsorstar.com/Windsor+sewage+offender/1745886/story.html
The solution to all our problems is two words: WINDSOR CASTLE. If you build it they will come!!!