A $300-Million Ill-Considered Tewin Decision: BENN
Who makes critical decisions knowing that they don’t have sufficient information to make informed decisions? Aside from Ottawa City Council?
Earlier this week Bay Councillor Theresa Kavanagh said that it is time for council to revisit the decision to include the Tewin property, located on the distant eastern perimeter of the city, as part of the Official Plan.
Why?
Well, it is going to cost more than a third of a billion dollars to get the services out there. More than half a billion dollars if one extends the arithmetic to include the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. That is information that was not available at the time that then Mayor Jim Watson “walked on” this material change to the Official Plan.
If ever there was a red flag to make informed decisions, it is a last minute change to the plan. Or in the case of city hall, what they chose to call a “plan”, notwithstanding the laws about truth in advertising. Yet council endorsed the Official Plan, with no questions of substance asked. Without having sufficient information to make an informed decision. Why? Standard operating protocol down on Laurier Avenue.
So here we are, three years later, and at least one councillor is expressing buyer’s regret. Regret for blindly following the lead of the mayor? Regret for following, without questioning, the usual process of approving what the city calls a plan without knowing how much it will cost? We don’t know, because Kavanagh hasn’t shared her reasons with us.
The executive management team and the board of directors of functional organizations make decisions based on as complete and accurate a picture as is available. Complete being a function of the urgency of the decision. Accurate being a function of the completeness. In contrast, dysfunctional organizations follow the path established by generations of goats who wander the connections between pastures.
Council committed a form of alchemy when it approved the Official Plan back in 2022. They converted a distant, unserviced woodland into a future subdivision. They added at least three zeros to the value of that land with the wave of a metaphorical wand and with no understanding of what it would cost the city. Astounding as it seems, that was and remains standard operating procedure for city hall.
In response to Kavanagh’s musings, Stittsville Councillor Glen Gower responded with the classic, default excuse of how reversing an ill-considered decision would mean that staff would have to rework their master transportation and master infrastructure plans. Somehow, the concept of deferring perhaps indefinitely a third to half a billion dollars for a city that already has far more debt than it can reasonably service, is just not acceptable when it comes to making informed decisions.
It is long past time that the city actually embraces best practices, as contrasted with merely saying it does. In this case, the best practices of making decisions based on as full a set of information as possible being something pre-dating the 18th century. Why now? Why not now?
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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Good post
Where is the Auditor General?
watching, the AG gets her work plan approved by the Audit Committee. Little chance that she will be given permission to criticize the myriad of “less than best practices” of council.
Surely Councillor Gower and others around the Council table can understand the basic fact that plans based on poor or no information are likely to be poor plans in the end. If you build your house on quicksand, it won’t matter in the end if the balustrades in the upper hallway are of the finest oak and the flooring is the best marble tiling available. You will lose it all.
Yes, you might have to go back to the drawing board with the TMP and other plans. Better to do that now than to build them on the foundation of a faulty inclusion in the Official Plan (OP). Would he prefer that we have to deal with Plans that have to be changed down the road because information that was false, misleading or absent makes them invalid in the future?
Sometimes you have to admit that a mistake, whether by omission or commission, was made. ‘Sooner’ is always the time to correct things rather than ‘later’. With most city planning ventures, it’s usually more efficient and cheaper to deal with snafus as early as possible. Otherwise, problems tend to compound and the simple solutions vanish.
What harm would there be in re-examining Tewin’s inclusion in the OP in the light of the new information? If everything is tickedyboo, then we have that confirmed. If not, we have time to fix things before it’s too late.