"What we've got here is failure to communicate." That line is from the 1967 Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke. And you could say that's the kind of year it was in 2012 for Gregor Robertson and his Vision crew.
That includes everything from the affordable housing strategy and setting up HEAT shelters for the homeless to the squeeze being put on volunteer boards at community centres and the proliferation of bike lanes.
All of those initiatives being driven by Robertson's administration - and its
unrelenting city manager Penny Ballem - may have merit, but each has about it an aroma of insensitivity, a touch of bullying, an arrogance that declares what is being done is best for you. So shut up and be grateful.
That sense is undoubtedly exacerbated by the unbreachable majority on council and a frequently feckless few in minority. The boys in the mayor's office may consider that a strength. I'd say it doesn't serve them well.
Instead of a robust elected opposition, public discomfort manifests itself in what my Courier colleague Mike Howell referred to in his Dec. 12 Newsmaker of the Year feature. It is the ubiquitous bitching, the neighbourhood dissent that has erupted across the city protesting development folks see as a blight on their communities.
Vision may not consider this a threat. After all, those who finally gathered to protest on the lawns at city hall last fall were at times at odds over which of their issues had merit and which were frivolous.
Our saintly governors could satisfy themselves with the belief that the people in Mount Pleasant who came out to protest the Rize Alliance Development at Main and Kingsway, the people who object to the possibility of a seawall extension paving over the last stretch of natural beach in the city, or the West Enders upset by a HEAT shelter in their neighbourhood, are just people who will oppose anything. Same crowd, different issue.
But you can see the cynicism growing even among Vision's friends. For example: When city staff gathered the collective wisdom of members on the mayor's Affordable Housing Task Force to write a report, they posted it to the city's website before task force members had a chance to look at the report which, incidentally, went out under their name.
It goes without saying that nobody consulted with the people in the community who may be affected by, say, the Skinny Street strategy. That strategy would have the city use land at the end of some blocks to build housing which in turn could seriously impede the view and the value of exiting houses. Of course the homeowners were not amused.
Now the city says it will do the consulting it should have done before everyone got their back up.
A failure to communicate on new bike lanes is an old and widely reported story. What has received less coverage, outside of stories by the Courier's Sandra Thomas, is what is happening at the city's community centres.
Back in 2010 Penny Ballem called a meeting of the presidents of the two dozen volunteer boards that run the city's community centres. If those presidents were living under the illusion that their operations were somehow autonomous, they were disabused of that. Vision considers them just another government department, kind of like engineering.
For the next two years the city nipped away at the community centre budgets.
This year the power grab over jurisdiction and control was escalated. According to Mount Pleasant Community Centre board president Christopher Richardson, what the city and Ballem put forward as "discussions" through their surrogate park board general manager Malcolm Bromley quickly turned into "negotiations" and then became straight out demands. In a series of meetings with individual community centre boards, Bromley has made it clear those boards are disposable.
Vision is not unaware it is being criticized for its "failure to communicate" as a failure to engage the community. We saw its response a few weeks ago. It set up another task force: The Engaged City Task Force.
Whether that turns out to be more of a closed mind than an open ear will be something worth looking at in 2013.
