Staff Often Resents Public Consultations: BENN

Often public consultations provide insights that staff might not have taken into account when developing their proposed solution, because staff are not as familiar with the neighbourhood as the residents.

Questions such as:

• did you consider the difference in usage patterns by time of day, day of week, season;
• did you consider the full range of users (age, physical limitations) as contrasted with a generic user;
• did you consider the other projects that are underway or have been approved in your analysis?

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You might be surprised (or perhaps not) how often the answer to each of these questions is ‘no’. Similarly, you might be surprised (or perhaps not) how often staff takes these types of benign questions as challenges to their subject expert status.

The objective of public consultations should be to provide staff with information that might result in a tweak or three to their proposed solution. Another objective is to ensure that the councillor is aware of what the community has told staff.

Which takes us back to one of the reasons why staff and councillors are not fans of public consultations.

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Residents’ feedback sometimes exposes how limited staff’s initial work was and staff resents this.

Residents’ feedback puts the onus on their elected representative (representative meaning representing the residents) to get staff to adjust their proposed solution to better reflect the actual situation, or failing that, to explain to the community why staff is not prepared to tweak the plan.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.

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