City staff are for the most part achieving the 48 hour response target on main roads and bus routes, and they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do under the policy for residential side streets, which is to maintain a snow pack at 10 cm or less by ‘blading’ or smoothing with the sanding truck-plows.

I am receiving mixed feedback as to whether this is working for citizens, but what is clear is that there are many residential streets where the blading practice is not working. This is a pdf of a brief circulated to members of council from City staff indicating that they intend to change their practice to blade more frequently and more preemptively.

I’m not convinced that this is enough.

Precisely because there are too many variables (weight of the truck, skill of the operator, micro-climates in different parts of the city, traffic volumes, width of the street, presence of driveways) I do not think the 10 cm snow pack standard will suffice on a city-wide basis. I believe the many citizens who’ve contacted me are correct that blading when this 10 cm pack is loose is not an effective use of public dollars.

Winnipeg has been frequently cited this week as an example of a city where snow is handled well on side streets. We learned at the Transportation Committee presentation on Tuesday that their policy is also to maintain a snow pack, but their threshold is 5 cm which can’t break up as easily.

They do not remove snow from side streets, they generally pile it to one side of the street and ban parking there. They clear driveways if the windrows are higher that 8”. A handy FAQ on Winnipeg’s practices can be found here and their overall policy is here.

I think we should look seriously at lowering the snow pack from the current 10 cm to 5 cm if nothing else.

This approach has some advantages compared to going to bare pavement (which can then require more sanding if the pavement begins to ice up). When this pack does breaks up in warmer spells or in the spring the accumulations are insufficient to cause that ‘oatmeal’ effect which is so confounding to motorists and pedestrians.

I think plowing to bare pavement and removal of the windrows from all streets should be a last resort, and I’m not sure it would be a prudent use of public dollars outside of an extreme snowfall.

The city is doing a survey in February of citizens’ experiences and expectations, which will likely confirm what Councillors are hearing from citizens and reading in the papers.

I think Council needs to have the policy debate first, being mindful of the costs, and then talk about how we might pay for it. A tax increase should be the last resort, and I agree that threatening the public with that is not helping. I haven’t been doing that.

As chair of the Transportation and Public Works committee I will be personally following up on this in April when a report comes to us outlining alternatives to the current policy.

In the mean time I am applying pressure to city administration to consider a proper grader pass in the areas where the oatmeal is worst.

Good urban form, by way of example.

I caused a bit of a stir on Thursday at Council by raising some concerns about the city’s proposed development plan ‘The Way we Grow’. I rather flippantly suggested we could call it ‘The Way we Sprawl.’

Scott McKeen wrote about the plan in Friday’s Journal and his critique is similar to mine. In spite of what he said, there are some very positive things in this plan, so I don’t want to write it off completely. I’ll come back to that.

First, though, the part of the plan I spoke against and voted against yesterday is the part where our expectations for relative share of growth are set out, which is section 2.1.1.2, on page 13, which reads:

Encourage a greater percentage 25% of city-wide housing unit growth to locate in the Downtown and mature neighbourhoods (see Map 3: Mature Neighbourhood Overlay) and around premium transit locations where infrastructure capacity supports redevelopment.

The underlying assumption of the plan is that the city will grow by 400,000 people in the next 30 years. This means 75% of the units will be outside of the core and away from ‘premium transit’ (i.e. LRT or the very best bus service). Furthermore, since we’re assuming that households occupying infill and intensification units have fewer members, 25% of units in the core only comes to 20% of the people (which has been our experience, since families with children still largely flock to the suburbs, vs. the singles and empty nesters who may pick smaller units with better locations). On other words, our plan presumes that 320,000 people will locate on the periphery, near or beyond Anthony Henday Drive.

I find this tough to swallow.

But here’s the plan’s qualifying statement in the plan about how fast we can ‘turn the ship’ from our suburban character to urban, from page 12:

Changing our current growth pattern will take time.  Edmonton’s mature neighbourhoods received 18% of the city’s growth in housing units in 2007; despite this unit growth, the population in these mature areas has declined in recent years.  Between 2005 and 2008, mature neighbourhoods declined in population by 1%.  All new population growth during this time occurred in other areas of the city, primarily in our developing communities.  The MDP proposes a new direction for growth and it will take time to effect change.  The Plan is a long term strategy and will require incremental decisions that support our commitment to saying “yes” to the things we want and need and “no” to the things that do not advance our City Vision and goals.

I think we need to ‘turn the ship’ faster and push for a bigger share of growth to be urban, rather than suburban, over the 30 years of the plan. Easier said then done, yes, but let’s ask why would it be desirable to urbanize at least as much as we suburbanize?

• A less efficient city will cost more to serve well, or will end up with declining services. We know these peripheral neighbourhoods will be very expensive to deliver services to and maintain infrastructure for; things like fire protection, waste collection, and transit will be more costly to deliver to further suburbia than if we densify the exiting footprint properly. This is intuitive, but the city is also studying this. Wish we had the results.
• Peripheral neighbourhoods, no matter how walkable or attractive, will lock in automobile dependancy for the vast majority of their residents. There is well-documented public health evidence that automobile dependance leads to higher rates of obesity as well as impacts to emotional well-being. Our council-stated goal to see a shift from car use to other modes of transportation (principally transit, walking and cycling) stands in jeopardy. This means more traffic, more delay, more private and public expense on cars and infrastructure.
• Plus there’s no way we achieve community-wide reductions in greenhouse gasses with rising distances travelled by car and worsening downstream gridlock.

In other words, for fiscal, social and environmental reasons, there is a strong case against conceding to so much peripheral development. Again, I’m not calling for a halt to it, since I don’t see how we could accomplish that under current legislation. I’m calling for greater urbanization within today’s footprint. We’re told that market demand’s not there, that demand is for the suburbs, and that we can’t fight that. But I think we have to work to make urban living more family-friendly – which we’re beginning to do – and we need to make it competitive in terms of affordability. This is work worth doing, even if it’s hard. It doesn’t mean cramming families into highrises, it means more duplexes where there are bungalows, nice townhomes where there are underused lands, and family-oriented units on the ground floor of some taller buildings. That, by the way, is city building.

I should note that there is much to like in the plan: the parts that deal with integrating transit and land planning in established areas are positive (section 2.3); the new provisions in chapter 9 about Urban Agriculture and Food are very encouraging; and the design principles for planning in established and new areas are sound in my view (e.g. chapter 3).

The one outstanding issue we’ll grapple with next time Council deals with the plan in February is density targets for new development. These are mandated under the Capital Region Land Use Plan, but these were not going to be discussed in our MDP. At my urging, they will be. Targets were a source of significant debate in Calgary’s recent plan, and were watered down before final passage. If we can achieve sufficient thresholds of density in the new areas then some of the inefficiencies and negative impacts of this growth can be reduced.

In local, national and sub-national governments around the world there is a trend toward making up-to-date government information freely available on-line in generically accessible data formats as so-called ‘Open Data’.

1) What level of awareness does the City Administration have regarding Open Data in municipal government?

2) What current initiatives are underway within City Administration that might qualify under the spirit of Open Data?

3) What further initiatives are under consideration within the city, and on what basis are they being evaluated?

4) Is Administration monitoring any successes and or challenges with this trend in other jurisdictions, especially large Canadian cities, and if so what can be shared with Council?

5) What would City Administration’s recommendation be on next steps regarding Open Data plans or strategies?

This inquiry process gets the issue on the agenda and we’ll go from there. Chris Moore with IT at the city has been very interested in this and I look forward to the report his group will provide.

[UPDATE Oct 19: Mack Male has posted further salient thoughts after a Change Camp session on this topic this past weekend.]

The city needs a new policy for dealing with urban development along the edge of the river valley and ravine system. [Background here.] The latest draft came to City Council’s Executive Committee today.

We have about 22km of such edges remaining in the city where development may occur over time, and the policy could come to bear on a redevelopment in an existing area.

Since 1985 we’ve had a very weak policy which called for roadway along the edge with houses only on one side of that road. Because of a litany of ambiguities in the old policy and prior councils’ willingness to grant exceptions, only around 20% of the development that’s occurred since 1985 has a road at the edge. In many areas, especially in the Southwest, the frequent result has been houses backing directly on the ravine and valley, while some more recent cases have trails providing some buffer.

Let me be clear that I support a 100% continuous public access that is wide enough to provide good separation for wildlife, facilitate emergency access, as well as ensure long term geotechnical stability of the lands. I don’t necessarily think that this public access needs to take the form of a roadway; but in certain instances, as outlined in the policy, roadway may be appropriate and a minimum (30% is proposed) should be provided.

For development backing onto the slope, the draft policy proposes a 15m buffer for public access, which seems to have support from most stakeholders. It sounded like the developers can support this separation but are worried about how the lands will be traded against other obligations (for roads and parks mainly) when the land is subdivided into individual lots. This is one of the implementation details that needs more work.

Today at the public hearing some called passionately for a return to the 100% goal of the 1985 policy, and the creation of scenic roadways like Saskatchewan Drive and Victoria Promenade. Incidentally, few realize that those drives are scenic because a lot of the original vegetation was removed over the years to improve the view. Removing vegetation can weaken the slope significantly too.

The other factor that can weaken slope stability is water, either from poor drainage on a lot or from the many illegal backyard sprinkler systems that are installed in homes backing on the valley or ravines. Clearly we need the larger setback to mitigate this, and we’ll need stronger enforcement of infractions, and protection against liability for the city in the event that a property owner’s carelessness causes damage to the slope and others’ property.

It seems we’re close. Council will work on it some more next week and then some further consultations with the 29 identified stakeholder groups and hopefully we’ll be able to approve a robust policy that can ensure safe slopes and continuous public access.

[February 26, 2010 Update: Council approved the revised policy C542 on February 17. It provides for 100% continuous public along the Top of Bank, a minimum of 30% of which shall be either abutting a roadway or abutting park space fronting onto the roadway. It requires a minimum of 10m of setback from the 'long term line of stability' (established by geotechnical study) whereupon a trail will provide public access, and where houses back directly onto the trail a 6m wide public access is required every 120 metres. The length and breadth of the policy and background material can be found in the city's meeting records here. I supported the policy as it met my goal of continuous public access to the river valley and ravine edge.]

The resulting direction from council was voted on shortly after 5 pm today though the specifics are being kept private for now pending further discussions with other orders of government. I voted for the prevailing decision [clarified at 7:30], though I can’t say what that was, but against the decision to keep it in private. I also made the following brief statement for the record:

“Our citizens need to know that the way infrastructure is funded in this country is utterly dysfunctional. It’s why Canada is falling behind and it jeopardizes our city’s goals with respect to LRT and sustainability in general.”

I kept track of it, however, and all of a sudden it had two readings at the legislature and was going to committee of the whole for the next-to-last stage of approval. Significantly, it was garnering approval from all three parties at the legislature. So I gave what we call ‘notice of motion’ at the council meeting two weeks ago, indicating that I wanted to move the following motion at council for debate this week:

That the mayor write to all members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta indicating Council’s support for Bill 203 “Local Authorities Election (Finance and Contribution Disclosure) Amendment Act, 2009 (Johnson)” and requesting that the legislature also enact changes that would enable the tax deductibility of donations to municipal campaigns by private individuals.

I circulated a brief on the bill for my colleagues later that same week, which I’ve posted here as background. I had also discussed the bill with a number of my colleagues, including the mayor, prior to giving the notice of motion, which made their shock and surprise at the bill during our debate on it this week all the more surprising to me (see “Mandel Slams Election Bylaw” from yesterday’s Journal).

Turns out it passed third and final reading at the legislature on Monday, so it’s a done deal [edit for clarity at 12:37pm same day: the bill is through the legislature but awaits formal proclamation]. My motion was designed to shift the debate to leveling the playing field by allowing tax deductability. This is not only fair in the most basic sense of the word, but it levels the playing field between business and citizens, since a campaign contribution from a business is a business expense, and therefore a before-tax expense. For a private individual, it’s an after-tax dollar expense, and that disadvantages the citizen relatively speaking, which is wrong in the most basic sense of the word. But now we’re back to fighting about a law that’s passed, which misses the point.

Most of what the bill calls for is already required through the City of Edmonton’s Disclosure Bylaw:

• Surpluses from a campaign can be carried forward, but must be spent on a subsequent municipal campaign (not pocketed, as is routinely done in Calgary).
• Any surpluses remaining when a candidate decides not to run must be surrendered to the municipality or else to a charity of the candidate’s choice.
• The bill requires disclosure of the names of donors who give more than $100, while our current bylaw requires disclosing identity of donors who give more than $300. This will reduce the practice of related numbered companies donating $299 multiple times.

Bill 203 also sets out slightly more rigid requirements in terms of bookkeeping, and enacts provisions for audit of those books under certain circumstances; I regard both of these as improvements over our rules.

The biggest rule change is a hard contribution limit of $5,000 per entity, which some of my colleagues recoiled against, but I support. Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception of impropriety when businesses or labour make huge contributions to a given candidate. (There is an interesting question about how this applies to unions vs. related companies: is the separate land wing of BigDeveloperX a different entity from the construction wing of BigDeveloperX, and so could each give $5,000 since they are separately incorporated? Labour donations have been limited to $5,000 per candidate per union, not per local, so two CUPE unions couldn’t each contribute unless the total was $5,000 or less.)

Naheed Nenshi from the Better Calgary Campaign wrote a good piece in the Calgary Herald about this all last week, noting a couple of things it doesn’t do: it doesn’t require ‘just-in-time’ disclosure, where campaign donations are disclosed as they are received, or within a short deadline such as a week; it doesn’t establish total spending caps for campaigns (in Ontario and Manitoba there are limits to spending per eligible voter). For the record, I would support both of these reasonable rules.

I think the bill is a good step forward in principle. Concern that municipalities were not directly consulted is valid, but one hopes municipal leaders will be consulted prior to the proclamation of the bill and the implementation of associated regulations.

It was needed because there was no consensus on these kinds of requirements, particularly from Calgary, so in this case I think the province had to step in. Some of my colleagues took affront to the very notion of the the province stepping in to regulate the affairs of municipal government. Ideally this would not be necessary, but it was in Calgary and I don’t believe there was appetite on Edmonton council to consider contribution limits, so I’m going to chalk this up to good leadership from the province.

I took it all as a compliment since so much of the nuts and bolts of it is modeled after the city’s current practice.

In the end, Council instead voted to instruct the mayor to express council’s displeasure at not being consulted. I wasn’t happy with the turn the debate took, but I missed the tail end of it as I ran home to be with my wife and two-day-old. Hopefully we’ll get another crack at it at council.

I may not be able to convince enough of my colleagues that municipal campaign finance reform is important, but the province gets it and I think the public will too.

I’m very pleased that the committee gave unanimous direction to move ahead with the strategy and to report back annually on progress.

The strategy suggests acquiring a shared set of triple-sort waste bins to be deployed at major events, like the example to the right.

There are related opportunities to better manage the significant waste streams associated with these events. Currently festival waste is processed by commercial handlers (at substantial cost); and while some have invested in composting and recycling initatives, the balance still winds up in private landfills. 

The city’s Waste Management Utility is in a position to see that all the waste streams are harvested for recycling, that the biodegradables are composted though our world-class industrial composter. In time the residual other waste products could be processed through the city’s forthcoming waste-to-energy biofuel facility. I am hopeful that event organizers and Waste Management can come to mutually beneficial arrangements to take advantage of our city’s superb residential waste handling infrastructure.

Longer term there is a push toward biodegradable serve ware (plates, cups, utensils as Heritage Festival did last year), and a reduction in use of supplies derived from non-renewable resources.

There is also work to be done to reduce the energy requirements and carbon footprint for these events through the use of more efficient lighting and renewable sources of energy (such as Folk Fest’s on-site solar).

The main idea is that each of the festivals is doing something, so if the city can coordinate best practices among them we can achieve efficiency and raise the bar. This work also sends the right message about our city’s environmental values to Edmontonians and visitors who attend our festivals and major events.

[UPDATE: video has been posted here.]

Some of the highlights from my point of view included:

The next generation puts a huge emphasis on the things a city offers outside of your day-job.  They value entertainment, recreation, culture and sports. They want Edmonton to look and feel like a green and global city, and many of them know exactly what this means.  They go to cities where you don’t have to own a car, and they wonder, why not here.   

They know that downtown living can be family-friendly.   They know that young families need space to play and be outside, and they find it in our river valley.  They understand being eco-friendly means changing how we live.

They are not scared of this change, they are impatient for it.  

They want to see Edmonton as a city that can grow upward instead of outward.  They want to use transit, or bikes as much as a car.

…

The flavour of this is all about investing in the core, and that’s deliberate. Because as much as we have great neighbourhoods all across Edmonton, future growth will focus on transforming and adding density to the footprint we have today. 

Because we can’t sustain our sprawl.  We can’t. 

We are already forecasting a population in our region of 1.7 million people by 2040 – that’s almost 70 per cent growth – can you see us taking-up 70 per cent more space in 30 years?  If we’re forward thinking, we’ll make better use of the space we have.  

The mayor’s focus on the long-term is appropriate and inspiring — and it’s very pleasing to see that he’s hearing our demographic loud and clear.

This focus on the future, and emphasis on our exceptional strengths as a city meshes superbly with the forthcoming Edmonton 2030 vision initiative and a soon-to-be unveiled campaign focusing on a genuine and earnest refresh of our city’s image.

He also dropped the gloves on the airport question with the following:

…the city centre airport and whether or not to change. It’s a fair question.  It has to be asked.   We will hear from those who value the status quo, and from those who think its time for these lands to play a different role. That’s the issue before us. 

I’m not here today to prescribe change, but I do want to issue a challenge. When those who value the status quo come to Council to promote their views, don’t tell us why we should not change. Don’t deny we will need the infill room over 30 years, when we are talking about 1.7 million residents. 

Please understand that environmental costs will have to be paid either way.  Don’t tell us that your business status entitles you to special consideration, and that treating you like every other Edmontonian is somehow an affront.   

Don’t scare people with health issues that are taken out of context by not looking at the whole time it takes to initiate and complete a medical transfer.  

Don’t act like the 1995 decision was just a “maybe”. 

Tell us about your vision.  Tell us that you understand what kind of city Edmonton wants to be in 30 years, and how the status quo enhances and supports that vision. Explain where the future is going, and how the status quo enables it. Explain what you know better, what you see for the future and why we have to listen, and I know that we will. 

And if you can’t do this, then maybe, just maybe, it’s time to let go of the past and move forward.

You could hear a pin drop as this was being said.

My only complaint about today is I think the mayor’s state of the city should be publicly accessible via streaming webcast. I hope this can be made possible for next year’s speech.

I think most members of council, myself included, realized that more information was needed before we shift away from our free parking policy.

To that end, council directed City Administration to bring us an analysis of: potential impacts on ridership (and fare revenues); the logistics of collecting the fees and managing access to the lots; and the state of the bus feeder service to LRT, particularly in the Northeast.

It was also noted by the mayor and others that there is significant value tied up in this land, and that eventual transit-oriented development could actually yield more riders than any parking lot over time, so we asked for information about the land value and development opportunities as well. (Many cities assemble land around transit hubs, supply parking, and then phase it out over time to replace it with development.) 

I supported putting the question off until we get all these details, but I’m still inclined to recover some revenue to offset the costs of the land and maintenance. Whether $3/day is fair also merits study.

I can’t forget, however, that many of the people who use these lots come from outside Edmonton (15-25%, according to a 2008 survey) and have not paid to build or maintain our transit system through their property taxes.

Honestly, many of our citizens who park and ride now could either walk or use bus service but don’t because the easy parking is entirely subsidized by the tax base.

Much was also made of the poor quality of bus feeder service in the North East, which is debatable. If it’s the case that the bus service needs improvements I am all for directing the proceeds of any parking fees into improving the bus service.

single councillor ward

Word down the council hallway (and my own take) is that these maps are a much better interpretation of the Ward Boundary Design Policy than previous iterations, and so this stands a chance of actually passing tomorrow.

For the record, I’ve consistently supported this move prior to seeing any maps.

On principle, I think the duplication between councillors will be reduced when dealing with constituency issues, allowing each of us greater focus on serving the wards. I also think our elections will be more competitive with only 63,000 people to reach instead of, well, double that. Finally, the significant number of Edmontonians I encounter who do not realize there are two of us per ward today signals that something’s not right with the current system.

On a personal (and speculative) note, the proposed boundaries present me with a tough decision since my family is now living in Belgravia, which was one of three neighbourhoods skimmed off the north end of current ward five and lumped in with parts of current ward four and six to make the proposed ward eight (comprising University, Strathcona, Bonnie Doon, Capilano). However, I also have deep roots in the proposed ward ten (Southgate, Kaskitayo) where I grew up, and I’m only a couple of blocks from the boundary. So, presuming I run again in 2010, I’ll have a difficult decision about where to do it.