***Mar 2006 Focus pg 1-32 - Focus Magazine

urbanitiesGrow opGENE MILLERThe City of Victoria is robbing the future to pay for today.Iwant to enlist your help in fleshing out anidea for the City of Victoria and a strategyfor its implementation. I’m proposing thatwe generate some fresh thinking about ourDowntown and the city’s problematic economy.In doing this we’ll open new ground in citizeninnovation and City/citizen collaboration, andassist the city we love—a place clearly overwhelmedand temporarily out of ideas. We cando this in Focus (send in your thoughts); oraround a table in a coffee shop (call or writeme); maybe as a small conference or workshop.The current mis-ordering of importancesby our political leadership and civic managementis driving the City of Victoria to its kneesfinancially. Believe me: right at the very bordersof calamity, these folks are perpetuating aruinous and fatal approach to the City’seconomic strategy.Victoria’s council and key staff have formonths been wrestling with a budget so tightthat the effort to boil out a mere $1.6 million(less than 1 percent) has produced major braindamage in City Hall and bizarre, funny-if-theyweren’t-so-tragicproposals like switchingfrom annuals to perennials in some of theCity’s flower beds. And all of this Herculeaneffort is in aid of tabling a budget for thefollowing three years not with a zero increase,but one that will continue to increase by 3.25percent a year—an 11 percent cumulative3-year jump.No portrait of Victoria’s present politicaland administrative leadership will be completeor accurate without making this simple factclear: The City is robbing the future to payfor today. The Blue Bridge—a subject exhaustivelydiscussed on the pages of Focus—is alucid illustration of stealing from the future.In the City’s deal with the devil to keep thereplacement bridge “within budget,” the structure’sengineering standards have been relaxed,shaving not just amenities but two-and-a-halfdecades (25 percent) off its functional 100-year life—a clear case of the City essentiallycrapping in tomorrowland.It’s not just the bridge, it’s a pattern: TheCity is under-allocating incoming revenueto its capital account (the money needed torepair, upgrade, replace or add infrastructure),in favour of its operating account (what itspends today). None of this is sustainable andit’s going to get us into even more troubledown the road.Ask yourself: How do these things happen,how did it come to this? The answer is that,as with personal behaviour, institutional behaviourfollows the laws of circumstance andconsequences—essentially, an ecological principle.Smoke for 30 years, you get cancer orlung disease. Spew a lot of carbon into theatmosphere for a century, the glaciers meltand the global weather roils.In this vein, the City’s current budget dilemmadidn’t come out of nowhere. It has been yearsin the making and is best understood as a longbrewing,slowly evolving set of political andmanagerial miscalculations and missteps movingus toward the inevitability of consequences.Some of those consequences are here now;others are quickly approaching. The miscalculationsspan successive mayoral leaderships,beginning somewhere in the political dry gulchof the post-Pollen years, and speak to the everexpandingfuddle culture at the City. Thecurrent challenge of boiling $1.6 million orso out of the budget? Believe me, just a symptomand not the disease.Honestly, if you really imagine the solutionto Victoria’s economic problems lies in switchingfrom annuals to perennials in City flower beds,automating parkade payment, freezing a fewpay packages, and eliminating free egg saladsandwiches at committee meetings, you shouldstop reading now.Consider leaky boat syndrome: Water’scoming in through a dozen holes! You can’tbail fast enough! The boat is getting heavierand less maneuverable! The tide’s pushing youaway from the shore! Big, swamping wavesare approaching! Oh-oh! As things deteriorate,all options are compromised.The City is trying desperately to reduce thebudget (essentially, a 4.25 percent increase)by a mere 1 percent and clearly not having aneasy time of it. But much bigger rollers are justoffshore, and the City is under-equipped foran economic event-horizon likely to feature:• a regional sewage treatment levy imposedon taxpayers;• the growing drag of three-quarter-billiondollars in unfunded City infrastructure projectsincluding underground systems, streets, parks,facilities and community amenities;• potential cost overruns (in any event) onthat embarrassment of a Blue Bridge replacement,coupled to the prospect of a legal challengeof the City for betraying the terms of thespending referendum approved by voters;• continued softening of the real estatemarket with drops in assessments and the needfor compensatory mill rate increases;• relentless commercial predation from the’burbs and accelerated erosion of downtownretail and service/office assets;• financial challenges to the sustainability/viability of various City recreational andcultural assets;• an emptying piggy bank, hampering theCity’s ability to mount new initiatives, exploitemergent opportunities, respond to rainy-dayconditions, or compete aggressively in the faceof regional economic challenges in the farfrom-rosynear-future.These prospects point to an enfeebled Cityless and less able to invest in its own well-being.Our well-being.Here’s something that happened in the lasttwo years that brings a fine point to understandingthe City’s dilemma. Under its newland use policies, the City telegraphed that itwas prepared to allow densities of up to 6:1(total building square footage six times thesite square footage) in certain areas in andaround the core. With guidance from an outof-townconsultant who demonstrated littleintuitive understanding of either the competitiveregional economic condition or localbusiness culture, the City came up with a bonusdensity policy that said to developers: “Okay,you can build up to 6:1, but we’re going tocharge you a ‘density bonus’ for every squarefoot over 3:1.” In other words: “No problem…,but we’re going to punish you with a significantfinancial disincentive if you try.” As businessmessaging, this is perverse and anti-market,contradictory and un-partnerlike. It doesn’tsay to industry: “Let’s build this city together!”Why this push-pull insanity? The simpleanswer is that the City desperately needs thedough. Driven by that need, it literally cannotafford the costs of acting more entrepreneurially.Next, there is an extremely murky socialand political mindset in Victoria—sniffy,contemptuous and distrusting of business andenterprise, second-rate in its business skills44 April 2013 • FOCUS