Ottawa Turns Its Back To The Future: BENN

 

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Ottawa is a city of about half-a-million people with a million-plus living in it.

That demand exceeds capacity on our roadways is just the current, most obvious problem. But it is not the only issue. Demand exceeds supply across wide swath of issues. Some are municipal, some provincial, a few federal. What they have in common is that they are all the result of poor planning.

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Planning involves leading, not reacting. Planning means understanding, anticipating and acting to address most likely outcomes. Like with population growth comes increased demand for key elements of infrastructure. Roads, water, sewers, recreational facilities.

Let’s start with roadways and move on to a few low-lights in a long list.

Before amalgamation, when the western extension of Hunt Club Road, from Riverside to Richmond Road was but a pipe-dream, a regional councillor lamented that council of the former city of Nepean had failed to create an east-west high-volume route north of Fallowfield Road. Instead Nepean council had explicitly decided that Baseline Road, a regional arterial route met the needs of the northern Nepean community residents.

Supposedly Fallowfield met the needs of the southern part of that satellite city. Nepean’s plans for moving people in and out of the ever-growing southern expansion of Barrhaven was to be accommodated by five two-lane roads.

Eventually Woodroffe Avenue had an extra two lanes added. As for the planned Greenbank Road expansion? It was planned but never executed. What passes for the current plan is to continue to flush the residents out onto Highway 416, shifting the bottleneck on Highway 417 further west. Does that sound like a good plan for a community that now houses more people than Peterborough?

To be clear, Nepean was not alone in this denial of reality that passed for planning. Other former cities of Kanata, Stittsville, Gloucester and Cumberland were all populated by equally deluded councils.

The 417, a provincial highway, running through the core of the city has been above capacity for decades. There is no meaningful room for expansion. Alternative routes to bypass the city, such as those found throughout the U.S. and western Europe are still considered to be an inappropriate topic for consideration.

When the issue was recently raised by a councillor, the discussion devolved into differences in terminology. Should it be called a ring-road or a bypass. A classic deflection from the core problem, the over-capacity demand on a key element of infrastructure.

Care to discuss the oft-proposed, never built east-end bridge to accommodate the ever growing cross border traffic? Particularly the truck traffic coming from north of the Ottawa River?

What about a west end bridge? Not even at the discussion stage. The unwillingness of council to countenance a civil discussion on the topic is nothing short of appalling. The federal government bodies identified the need, picked a location, but have never dared to defend their decision. It was effectively abandoned as nothing more than an exercise in intra-provincial transportation planning. Pitiful.

Housing. The recent Official Plan was designed for years, yet the far to the east Tewin community was walked on a few days before the council meeting.

How much would it cost to connect the required water and sewer lines? Councillors didn’t know. Councillors didn’t care that they didn’t know. Yet now some councillors are saying that Ottawa cannot afford it including at least one of whom voted to approve the Official Plan during the prior term.

Tewin is but a recent highlight in the dysfunctional process that the city calls nominally the Official Plan. It is a plan that focuses on forcing about half the future residential growth into housing forms that do not meet societal needs. Yet city staff laments the shortfall on housing starts inside the greenbelt. Suffice it to say that demand is less than supply for small rental apartments.

Let’s not forget that council passed the Official Plan without knowing how much it would cost to upgrade the necessary infrastructure. It turns out that the city is short of just less than $11 billion in funding for the infrastructure required to support the Official Plan.

Nothing like following the path of previous failures. Approving plans without an inkling of how much they will cost. Only to abandon those plans due to a lack of funding. Tried, tested and failed.

In the meantime, council and staff continue to spend time and resources on on frills.

Consider the recent decision to fund attracting more family doctors to the city. While more direct health care is a wonderful concept, it lies well outside the direct mandate of the municipality. Same thing applies to whatever the night mayor and his staff are doing.

Then there is the half-billion dollar Lansdowne 2.0 extravaganza. It is not part of the aforementioned nearly $11-billion infrastructure funding shortfall.

City Adds Charge To Tax Charges: PATTON

How does a Lansdowne redo rise above the need for upgrading water mains and sewers inside the greenbelt to meet the needs of the expected population growth? How does diverting half a billion dollars on a frill address the most likely outcome of higher demand for water and to collect and treat greater volumes of sewage?

Successful organizations excel at setting priorities. At allocating resources to manage growth. Planning for the future. Then there is Ottawa, where planning is a reaction to the present. Where setting priorities is a matter of political gamesmanship. Of playing to small, but vocal self-interest groups. Classic symptoms of a dysfunctional organization.

Council needs to recognize that it is overseeing a dysfunctional organization. Council needs to stop enabling that dysfunctional behaviour.

That council is unaware or in denial of the dysfunctional culture that permeates city hall is a core part of that dysfunctional pattern of governance. Until that series of lights goes on around the council chamber, the city will continue to allow demand to exceed supply. To add to the over-capacity utilization of nearly all of the key areas of municipal responsibility except public transit. On that the city has done its utmost to ensure that demand has diminished, even in the face of existing population growth.

Success?

Just the opposite.

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

 

For You:

The Three Little Pigs Were Right: PATTON

LRT Build To Close Parkway For Two Full Weekends

Why I’ll Vote No On Lansdowne: DEVINE

 

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2 Responses

  1. Valerie Swinton says:

    Agree with Ron 100%. The “we’ll deal with that when we get there” philosophy will always end badly. Traffic planning for the new Ottawa hospital and for Lansdowne are examples of that. Making on-the-fly decisions like Tewin and allowing insufficient time for council and the public to consider five critical documents prior to the Lansdowne decision in November is simply unacceptable.

  2. howard crerar says:

    ” . . . now some councillors are saying that Ottawa cannot afford it including at least one of whom voted to approve the Official Plan during the prior term”. This comment can be directly attributed to a phenomenon we seldom hear about on the Bulldog forum these days, “Watson’s Bobbleheads”. The person referenced was likely a bobblehead at one point but is no longer and has discovered they’re capable of thinking for themself. Overall, it’s difficult to understand why council is still more interested in “special projects” than it is in putting (lots of) money into an infrastructure in need of (a great deal of) fixing.

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