The Council Chambers at City Hall is one of the city’s key democratic spaces, and a truly important public space in the civic life of Vancouver. Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to make a number of deputations – and also watch as other community members and stakeholders did the same.

To that end, we submitted a short letter that identified three of our key concerns and ideas. It’s an incomplete list, and there’s other stuff that we didn’t include pertaining to the actual layout of the space, and some specifics related to Council procedure. Nevertheless, the items we did identify have been long-standing concerns for us.

Here they are, as excerpted from the letter:

1. Earlier release of Council reports is critically important to ensuring access, transparency, and participation in civic matters. The City’s current practice – which aims to have agendas and reports available only one week prior to a meeting – is a considerable barrier. First, it is often our experience that there is “slippage” around this one week timeline. Second, a one week lead doesn’t actually provide enough time for individuals and groups to (a) find out about a given matter, (b) review the related report and materials (often many dozens of pages long), and (c) prepare a response.

We would strongly recommend that the City extend the time that reports are “live” prior to a meeting to a minimum of two weeks. This extra time could easily be built into the schedule of sign-offs, concurrences and review that take place prior to posting the reports to your website.

Another suggestion would be to implement some sort of system of “alerts” – that could allow community members to sign up to receive updates on any Council items that contain key words (e.g. a street name, or key terms of interest). This could assist in getting the word out. An approach such as this was piloted in Toronto through a local non-profit a few years ago.

2. The scheduling of Council sessions during the day creates a significant barrier for people who work and wish to make a deputation. Almost every presentation that we have made to Council over the years has meant that one of our members has had to take vacation time (and/or defer work through other means) in order to do so.

One solution might be to utilize technological means to help mitigate this (e.g. through allowing video conferencing/skype deputations). Another solution would be to schedule Council during the day, and Committee meetings in the evening. This way, Council could deal with consent items and other presentations during normal work hours, but allow referral items, motions, etc. to be discussed when more people could attend. Either way, we feel strongly that something should be done to support people speaking to Council without having to incur a financial or work-related penalty to do so.

3. Presenting to Council can be a nerve-wracking affair for many people. The Council Chambers are austere, and the environment is very formal – which isn’t totally a bad thing. However, for new presenters, this can be intimidating. One idea that we have is to see the City create a humorous and engaging video that could walk people through the process of making a presentation. This sort of video could help to demystify some of the process involved, and perhaps even lay out a few “dos and don’ts” to ensure people making deputations make the best use of their time. It could also explain how public input is used – as one component of the material that Council deliberates over. This would help, in part, to answer a common question that community members have – “what happens to my input once I provide it.” It may also help to explain that Council’s role is to weigh trade-offs and make tough decisions (e.g. sometimes they will agree with a public perspective, sometimes they won’t.)

One last note: we hope that, when it comes time to redesign the new City Hall building, that there will be a good public discussion about the design of the Council Chambers. This is where much of our local democracy takes place, and the next Council Chambers built in Vancouver should emphasize values of inclusiveness, transparency, participation and dialogue (among other things).

As with these other neighbourhood-scale policy documents, the VPSN wrote a letter expressing our general support for the draft plan but with suggestions for policy refinement, additions and clarifications. Relating to the mission and purpose of the VPSN, the sections we submitted comments on were Places, Built Form Guidelines, Transportation, Parks, Open Spaces and Greening, and Arts and Culture.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas in the new plan – the implementation of which will take place over the next several decades. Among the long list, and with a focus on the public realm:

• A new 10-acre park at the foot of Cambie Street and improvements to several of the current parks;
• Stronger connections along the Fraser River (something the VPSN has been advocating for a number of years);
• Placemaking and public space improvements along the major streets (including Oak, Cambie and Granville), including the creation of new plazas and gathering areas;
• Improved pedestrian and cycling connections to better link the the different neighbourhoods within Marpole;
• Renewal of the Marpole-Oakridge Community Centre, Marpole Place (Neighbourhood House) and Marpole library.

Excerpt from the Marpole Community Plan (2014)

As noted by the City, the next major step is for Council to consider proposed amendments to the Zoning and Development Bylaw at an upcoming public hearing. The proposed amendments would rezone several areas to allow the future possibility of townhouse/rowhouses and 4 storey apartments.

City Councillor Heather Deal was quoted on additional next steps including, the intent for City staff to “update council in five years on implementation of the plan. Consultation processes will be launched on the community amenities.”

[Cityscape view of Marpole] Credit: City of Vancouver Archives; Reference code: COV-S511-: CVA 780-214; Date: December 1976

There’s an interesting motion on notice that will be discussed at tomorrow’s City Council meeting. Aimed at “Improving Transparency and Public Access to Council Voting Records,” it’s being put forward by Councillor Adriane Carr.

If passed, the motion would direct City staff to provide a better recording of the various votes that take place in Regular Council meetings, Standing Committee meetings and Public Hearings – in particular “specifying which members voted in favour, voted in opposition, or were recused, on leave, or absent/out of chamber.” Carr’s motion further asks that this information be made available, not only in the minutes of each of the meetings, but also through the City’s Open Data portal.

This would mark a small improvement for the minutes of the various Council meetings. Currently, the City’s Procedure Bylaw only require the City Clerk to record the names of Council members who vote in opposition to a motion. Given that there are only 11 people sitting around the table (1 Mayor and 10 Councillors), the math isn’t particularly onerous. Absences are also recorded elsewhere in each set of meeting notes. But that being said, the additional clarity around the ‘yeas and nays’ can’t hurt things. And for that reason, we can definitely support the first part of the motion.

Perhaps the bigger question that arises from this proposal surrounds the potential format of summary records that may be made available on the Open Data Portal. We note a small concern around the idea that aggregate data – what we assume will be tables of vote numbers – could be available for download without the sort of broader context you get in the full meeting notes.

We like the ability to crunch numbers, so we get the appeal of data sets like this. We are also big supporters of anything that makes the democratic process more transparent.

At the same time, we feel that it’s important to flag a potential downside to this – that simplified tables of voting data could, inadvertently, provide fodder for overly simple analyses of voting decisions. Voting records alone, only tell part of the story in any Council debate.

Should the motion pass, we hope, at the very least, that there will be enough contextual information in the data tables (including links back to the individual sets of minutes and meeting notes, the wording of the various items being voted on), to enable the data to be used in the richest fashion possible.

None of the concerns we raise are intended to detract from an otherwise useful motion. We do, however, feel they’re important to raise. They’re offered in the spirit of constructive feedback.

POSTSCRIPT. Another data-related consideration: if you’ve ever read Council minutes, or attended a Council meeting, you’ll know that lots motions contain amendments, slight modifications, larger amendments to amendments, and so on. Each of these gets voted on… which can create a challenging voting ‘narrative’ to follow – even with the complete minutes in front of you! An Open Data initiative that potentially modifies the voting record for the Open Data portal will needs to account for this. Will all votes be disseminated, or only the final ‘core’ vote on a given issue?

The motion requested that City staff

investigate best practices, consult with the Mayor’s Engaged City Task Force, the City’s advisory committees and others, and report back to Council within two months with suggestions on how to improve citizens’ access to speak to City Council, including the possibility of allowing citizens to sign up for daytime or evening time periods, and the use of technology to alert speakers as to which number on the speakers’ list is being heard.

Here’s an excerpt from our letter:

“We feel that the City is making important strides in improving citizen engagement. In recent years there have been important advances in online engagement, civic processes and stakeholder consultations. Initiatives such as Talk Vancouver, Greenest City, Transportation 2040 and the Block 51 consultation process represent some of examples of the good work being done. The recruitment of an Engaged City Taskforce and staff devoted to civic engagement work are further milestones in this regard.

However, as we noted in our Route Map for Public Space Policy (2012-2014),

the various new tools and techniques that are being employed to gather ideas are hampered on two fronts: Council and Park Board meeting processes that require people to take time off work, or schedules key discussions at inaccessible times; and restricted scheduling in the release of key staff reports, whereby reports are released for public review with little more than one week time (and sometimes a lot less) for public review. These two areas represent key concerns that must be addressed.*

The motion being considered on October 8 responds to our first point of concern. Notwithstanding the important work that has taken place to date, we are supporting the motion because we feel that it addresses an area of shortfall: that is, the specific difficulties that many citizens face in speaking directly to Council during their deliberations. Improving opportunities for engagement at all stages of a given process is critical – but this is particularly the case when Council members are debating a given item – approving or amending policy, allocating resources and so forth. Speaking from our own organization experience, it is particularly challenging for people who have limited ability to take time off work (limited vacation, scheduling difficulties, childcare needs, etc.) to present to Council in a face-to-face format. It is more challenging still, given the often unpredictable nature of Council meetings – where discussions sometimes stretch over several meetings.

At the same time, it is precisely is type of face-to-face engagement that takes place in Council chambers that is so crucial to democratic dialogue. Letters and emails will only ever go part of the way to bridging the space between the citizenry and elected officials.

While we don’t have a solution to these issues, we would encourage some study of options to see what, if any, ways the current situation might be improved.

In conclusion, we would also like to acknowledge that the Engaged City Taskforce will be releasing a full report of their recommendations later in Fall 2013. We are looking forward to reviewing the recommendations contained in this document and note that it’s possible that some or all of the items referenced in the motion may be considered therein. However, given the importance of citizen engagement, we also wanted to take the opportunity today to signal our support for enabling greater and more meaningful participation in democratic process.”

* Our second point, referenced in the quote from our Route Map for Public Space Policy, is also worth noting – although it appears to be outside of the scope of the present motion. We’d suggest doubling the one-week advance release time for all staff reports being considered so that citizens have a better chance to find out about, read and respond to the items on which Council is deliberating).

Reference: The Vancouver Public Space Network’s Route Map for Public Space Policy was published in advance of the 2011 municipal election.