By Heather Ross
If you’re part of a community group organizing a safety audit in your area, you may have to wait up to two years to see any results.
Since the safety audit program began in October 1995, 10 audits have been submitted. Three of those are complete, three are under way and four have yet to be started.
Arlene Gregoire is the only city employee who processes safety audits. But the audits only get her attention when she can take the time away from her main job as a special projects manager, which she estimates takes up 90 per cent of her time.
She says there’s very little funding for the audits, and no sign of any change to come. “It’s a service being provided within existing resources.”
Audits are initiated by community groups. A group does a walk-about, looking for poorly lit spots, areas where a person could be trapped, or areas that make people feel uncomfortable. The group then writes a report and submits it to Gregoire.
Gregoire says she can only work on one report at a time due to time constraints. Emergency items like burnt out lights or broken side walks are taken care of immediately, then the report is set aside to wait its turn. An audit with fewer than 100 items can take almost a year to process once she starts it, and because of a backlog, audits can sit on her desk for a year before she has time to start them.
Despite the delays in processing, City Coun. Elisabeth Arnold says the audits are still worth doing. “From the point of view of identifying things that make people feel safe or unsafe in their communities, they’re the best tool we can have,” she says. “It’s always better if we can deal with everything right away, but reality tells us we have to prioritize.”
She suggests communities can do things like start a porch light campaign or ask neighbors to trim hedges if they want immediate results.
Michelle Anderson of the Crime Prevention Council of Ottawa says while the reports are worthwhile, the groups who start them need to stay together and maintain enthusiasm if the audits are to be useful. “Once an audit is finished, groups often disband and it’s difficult to follow up.”
Gregoire says following up is important. Some audits have many errors in them. For example, one audit done in the downtown core named restaurants instead of providing streets and numbers. When Gregoire began processing the audit some restaurants had closed, making it impossible to identify the problems.
When she tried to contact the group that did the audit, she found her contact was no longer there, and none of the people originally involved was still around. She went to the area to try to clear up the confusing sections of the audit.
Once Gregoire understands the problems, she has to decide whose responsibility it is to fix them. Sometimes it’s a city responsibility, sometimes regional. It can also be a problem with privately owned property, or property that is OC Transpo’s responsibility.
She contacts the responsible group to alert them to the problem. Then she waits. “If I refer something to OC Transpo and it takes them five months to respond to me, I have no control over that.”
Gregoire can only enforce changes if the problem is against a city bylaw or property law.
Another time problem, she says, is season. Many community groups will do their walk-about in the summer, but it takes them several months to file their report. Because many entrapment and lighting problems are created by foliage, Gregoire has to wait until summer to see exactly what the problem is.
She says if people are concerned about the time it takes, they don’t have to give the audits to the city.
Groups can find out who is reponsible for the changes themselves, and alert those people of what needs to be done. “They’re choosing to submit their reports to the city for total processing.”
She says organizing a walk-about is a huge effort, and often only a few people are left to hammer out the report. By the time they’re done, they’re only too happy to hand it over to the city to finish.
If you want to organize a safety audit in your area, call the Women’s Action Centre Against Violence at 241-5414 or the Crime Prevention Council of Ottawa at 244-5645.