Complement public hearings renovation with a mutual benefit approach

Uytae Lee, from About Here, in partnership with SFU’s Renovate the Public Hearing Initiative, last week dropped a nifty 15-minute video on Why public hearings are undemocratic (and mostly meaningless).
 

The video touches on public hearings, why they are problematic, and ways to fix the problems. The video provides good discussion fodder. I summarize some of the key points, problems and fixes, made in the video, and offer more, from my perspective as mediation professional and participant in local land-use planning.

Problems with Public Hearings

  • Public hearings are not useful for gauging broad public opinion
  • Public hearings are not an effective way for public to influence decisions by council
  • There are too many delays and costs associated with the current public hearings process

Some remedies

  • Ban hearings if the application fits with the Official Community Plan (OCP)
  • Provide more options to get public input (eg online platforms). From my perspective in Victoria, the City of Victoria does very good work, communications-wise, when it comes to in-person engagement; e.g., at community forums to gather input into the OCP.
  • Timing of public hearings – its always better to get public input sooner than later.
  • Resident assemblies – a random selection of volunteers (e.g., 25 residents, volunteers, selected to be part of the municipality of Gibson’s resident assembly) to give resident input to the OCP. The Gibson’s pilot is part of the SFU – Renovate the Public Hearing initiative. That initiative includes other pilots for public (hearing) notification signage (Burnaby Pilot), and youth engagement (majority of public hearing attendees are older, resistant to change, have time…), in collaboration with City Hive.

In conjunction with a renovation of the public hearing process

The resident assembly approach (as I understand it) is focused on providing citizen input to a municipality’s OCP. Individual applications from a developer; especially rezoning applications of larger scale and complexity, can be a beast of their own, inadequately addressed via any OCP guideline.

A revamped hearing process should be synced with a more fundamental civic approach to addressing challenging (eg. Scale, complexity) rezoning interests. The mutual benefit approach to mitigating land-use conflict is called for as it focuses on addressing individual projects, ones invariably of a complex multi-stakeholder nature.

Incorporate mutual benefit strategies

  • Supplement the pre-application stage of land-use rezoning application with a Situation Assessment – preferably under the auspices of a municipally-appointed third-party neutral
  • Enhance the community’s capacity to constructively negotiate re: a proposed project – this is necessary for more fair and equitable distribution of power, between community, developers, city
  • Conduct education and training in the collaborative problem-solving and mutual gains approach – this will benefit all stakeholder groups

(For more on these mutual benefit strategies refer to: 3 Mutual-benefit strategies to reduce conflict and improve the land-use application process, on this blog)

And, because it irks me so, civic government needs to be more accountable from a communications lens. For example, the City of Victoria website re: land-use rezoning is 99% textual – that feels somewhwat conspiratorial, given our visually-oriented times. My City needs to provide a better way to communicate, at least at a higher level, how the system works, to the interested citizen.

Your thoughts? How would you improve the land-use rezoning process, while respecting system complexity?

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