The City of Ottawa will be holding public consultation sessions this month and next to improve the city’s way of – wait for it – holding public consultations.
The consultations will establish “guidelines to improve how city staff engages the public,” according to a press release issued earlier this month.
Not everyone has been happy with how public outreach meetings have been conducted in the past. Community associations, for example, have expressed concerns that their views on many projects have not been adequately taken into consideration.
Eric Darwin, a spokesman for the Dalhousie Community Association, says he won’t be attending the new consultation sessions about consultations.
He says his experience with the city’s recent outreach sessions, particularly those regarding the construction on Bronson Avenue and the upcoming changes to Albert Street to accommodate the new LRT by 2018 – have been very negative.
At an open house held March 5 on the planned reconstruction of Albert Street, Darwin says city planners only explained how the proposed changes on Albert Street would affect residents after a question was posed by a participant.
“They were never going to tell us,” Darwin says. “They were just focusing on the ending.”
Conrad Winn, a political science professor at Carleton University, says a good public consultation explains both the negatives and positives of an issue.
“A good public consultation is transparent and not organized for a (pre-ordained) purpose.”
But “public consultations are often guises for public persuasion campaigns,” he notes.
Darwin says that not everyone received notices in the mail about the March 5 public consultation and that it’s not right that some residents were able to attend information sessions while others could not because the event notices were not delivered.
“If the city dries out and dust hits the air, we taste it,” Darwin says about how future construction on Albert Street will affect streets that are parallel to and intersect it.
“They just want to tick off boxes and say they consulted the public,” Darwin insists.
But by only focusing on a few problems instead of on the entire situation, he adds that it is like “(tossing) a piece of meat to the dogs”.
He adds that while public consultations can be sincere, those focusing on major issues are not very successful.
Centretown Citizens Community Association spokesman Robert Dekker says his group has also had some problems with public consultations in the past six months, particularly regarding the Centretown Community Design Plan.
He says a lot of the work that the association did to propose changes and make recommendations was not recognized in the final document.
While Dekker says the association had a better experience with municipal consultations for the Liveable Ottawa project last month, it wants the city to be more serious about consulting and truly listening to the community.
“We would like to see some final documentation that says that whatever the community has input in is actually taken seriously,” Dekker says.
“We’re anxious and hopeful on the city improving their outcome when it comes to public consultations.”
Aaron Burry, the city’s general manager of social affairs, says that the upcoming sessions are a desire to increases the amount of public engagement in municipal affairs in Ottawa.
Asked about the negative responses community associations in Ottawa have faced regarding their concerns not being taken into consideration, Burry said that the city is “engaging the community associations and we’ll be holding separate sessions with them.”
He says that the engagement strategy will focus on what the public has to say and how it wants to be engaged.
The public consultation for Centretown residents will be held at city hall on March 25. Residents can also fill out a questionnaire or participate in an “ideas campaign” online from March 25 until April 19.