Effective municipal planning can be a challenging task to undertake. Municipal staff must overcome the day-to-day challenges a municipality faces while balancing the needs of the community at large. Therefore, it is hard to know how to properly prioritize resources and projects, while working in harmony with what the public has indicated through consultations, open forums, and social media. We sat down with Mark Reid, a partner with Urban Strategies Inc., which focuses on complex planning initiatives in communities of all sizes, to speak about best practices in municipal planning.
The Central Peninsula Neighbourhood Plan that you have been helping to launch in Saint John – can you give me some background on the project?
Our firm undertook the official Saint John Municipal Plan (PlanSJ) and during that planning process, we reviewed and produced a range of background materials including demographic information to help determine where and how the city was going to change and grow. During this process, we introduced some fairly cutting-edge policies, including a priority development boundary, or a service boundary, beyond which the development community would not be allowed to grow or expand. We identified suburban and urban areas for growth through the process and the Central Peninsula was identified as an urban growth area.
PlanSJ’s implementation policies recommended that three priority neighborhoods — Crescent Valley, the Lower West End, and the Central Peninsula — all undergo more detailed neighborhood planning initiatives to better harness future population and employment growth and align capital spending to support and fuel this growth. The Central Peninsula Neighbourhood Plan is really about carefully looking at what is happening within the community, understanding what is working well and not so well, and understanding economic opportunities to support growth, and then striking out to create a public and private sector action plan to support desired growth and change.
We want to identify public and private sector actions that can collectively bring about positive change, growth, revitalization, and community enhancement. We believe that through this process we can create a more vibrant neighborhood and improve the quality of life for those who live and work there. This is the primary driver behind this plan and why it is important to the municipality and the people who are invested in the core of the city.
How do you find working within both the public/private spheres? Is there pushback from one side to the other?
The public sector plays a significant role in establishing certainty about where change and investment will occur through a neighborhood plan. This then informs the private sector about physical changes that the municipality may be undertaking which can create increased land value or desirability leading to development opportunities for the private sector. It is important through the planning process that there is a clear understanding of what the public sector expects the private sector to do and conversely, what the public sector is prepared to undertake to support or encourage private sector interest and action. For example, a municipality might announce public realm improvements or an area where façade improvement programs will be supported by municipal grants or incentives and this can work to encourage various forms of private sector reinvestment. If a planning process can align these actions and get these entities to work together, there is a greater opportunity for real success and community reinvestment.
The City of Saint John has done a number of proactive things to support development and investment in the city. They have established a clear and more streamlined development process, and developers can gain access to the status of building permits, development applications at the ‘One Stop Development Shop’, where they can also find out about underlying policies and by-law regulations and a range of urban development incentives aimed at encouraging redevelopment and investment. The City will meet with the developer initially to try and understand what it is they would like to do, provide development customers with access to a dedicated and knowledgeable Development Service team, provide a consistent and efficient process for development while improving communication and transparency. These processes work to save the development community time, effort and money. When the overall development and approvals process is clear and well understood, and there is a clear understanding of primary development parameters such as height, density and form, then the public and private sectors can often work well together.
What types of things should municipalities be doing to effectively revitalize their downtown core?
The biggest contributor to the success of any downtown is a permanent residential population. If a city can undertake initiatives or incentives that make it easy for the development community to move forward with a residential or mixed-use building that fits into a known development and built-form framework or policy document with a high likelihood of being approved expeditiously, then it becomes easier for a municipality to support and encourage downtown revitalization. Many North American cities are seeking to transform former ‘Central Business Districts’ into vibrant and dynamic urban neighbourhoods that work for people of all ages by increasing the residential population of a downtown. Most often, more retail and increased economic development can be achieved through the addition of a greater permanent residential population in a downtown.
In Saint John’s downtown, there is a significant daytime employment population of about 14,000 jobs, but only a permanent residential population of about 8,000, not really enough to support a traditional sized downtown grocery store. Their downtown has become much more interesting lately with the introduction of many new restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues that are bringing people from places like Rothesay and Quispamsis. These people are coming for the urban night life and entertainment scene which doesn’t exist in their own communities. If we can get a more one to one job to population ratio adding potentially 5,000 more people living in downtown Saint John, we will see a significant boost to the economic potential of the central core. It will also become a much more desirable and lively tourism destination. Part of the challenge is to identify areas of change where new opportunities for intensification and place making can happen, and then formalize this through the neighbourhood plan and policy framework, again giving certainty to the development community about what they can and can’t do.
Sometimes change is not supported or adjacent neighbourhoods don’t want change. In my experience, it is important to demonstrate the benefits of change to the broad community and work toward shifting mindsets to understand and embrace these benefits. Again, a permanent residential population will often champion a vibrant and dynamic urban environment – this is what they are looking for and can help to tip mindsets that are less certain about change and intensification.
In your experience, what are some of the things that have worked and not worked when creating municipal plans?
I think one of the most important elements in the creation of any successful plan is authentic broad-based consultation. People seek and need an opportunity to participate in the formulation of a plan, understand the plan intentions, opportunities or issues the plan needs to address, the goals and plan vision, and have multiple opportunities to help formulate and refine these elements as well as participate at various stages in the project. This includes in person face-to-face public consultations, small group round table discussions and focus groups, and increasingly, online and social media links, which are becoming the tools that many people will choose to access information and feel connected to a planning process.
As planners and designers, we sometimes have a tendency to focus on outcomes or the ‘projects’ that will ensue from a planning process. While these are important, if people cannot connect the projects to the goals and vision established through the process of making the plan, then there won’t be sufficient understanding of the plan intentions or enough momentum to carry the project through to implementation. The consultation process has the potential to engage and mobilize plan champions who understand and support the overall intentions of the plan and can bring momentum necessary to drive the plan forward. This grass roots community momentum can live well beyond the term of a city council so engaging this community is important if the plan is to be successful.
A permanent residential population will often champion a vibrant and dynamic urban environment – this is what they are looking for and can help to tip mindsets that are less certain about change and intensification.
You have worked with a lot of cities and towns in implementing municipal plans, so you have seen firsthand some of the hurdles that staff have faced through these processes. Can you speak to some of those, and how you have seen them overcome?
Undertaking a municipal plan or a downtown revitalization strategy is a significant project for any municipality and these types of projects occur infrequently possibly every ten to twenty years or so. This is to say that these projects are unusual and unlike typical service delivery processes that municipalities undertake on a day-to-day basis. There are often high expectations placed on these planning process and project outcomes. One of the most important things a municipality can do to ensure success is to effectively manage expectations and communicate that project outcomes are really a set of goals or targets, and that the project process and eventual outcomes will evolve and emerge through the process itself. You can’t really fully determine project outcomes before you have done the work. The plan will evolve through public and stakeholder consultation and all the necessary inputs and supports that emerge and ultimately point to a set of well-grounded and rational set of actions.
Once staff, council, and the public accept that the plan is an evolutionary process, participation is a natural outcome, at all levels. This then may help a municipal team to formulate internal advisory groups that can bring multi-disciplinary departments together to talk about plan impacts and how best to modify plan outcomes to better suit inter-departmental needs and activities as well as public goals. The formulation of a citizen’s advisory group and a subcommittee of council, focused to aiding in plan formulation can also assist in advancing and refining plan goals. The challenge is to get everyone working toward an understanding of the same goals and benefits so everyone can pull in the same direction.
Municipalities that adopt this more flexible approach toward complex municipal planning processes are often better at achieving positive outcomes and broad-based support for the plan. This often means that municipalities must be open to changing an intended process or course of action and be open to advice from knowledgeable consultants. They must be prepared to change the work plan to fit the process and what the community is telling them is important, and they must be prepared to convey these directions and values to council even when they don’t align with initial or anticipated project outcomes.
You do a lot to engage the public in order to inform the planning process. Can you explain how you perform a public engagement campaign?
One of the most successful elements of our approach is to include our core client team as a partner in the work and the overall delivery of the public and stakeholder consultation strategy. We prefer to have a highly collaborative relationship with our core client team and work with them to understand what they would like to achieve in terms of public engagement. We can then construct the overall public engagement strategy with them, and tailor it to suit the specific needs of the community. As this can only be done once the municipality has selected a particular firm to undertake the work, there is a need to recognize that procurement processes and proposed project budgets require a measure of flexibility in order to tweak the work plan to collaboratively develop the consultation and engagement strategy. This also means there needs to be flexibility to adjust and tweak the project fee. This is why I like the “Best and Final Offer” procurement approach, as it allows tweaking at the interview stage, better enabling the municipality to articulate its needs in response to a proposal while also enabling the proposer an opportunity to respond to these needs. This procurement approach often results in a better team client match which can lead to greater project success and a positive experience for all involved.
For the consultation strategy to be successful, there needs to be a very high level of communication and a high level of trust between all the players. We typically start this process with an internal work session with staff on existing and emerging goals, followed by a strengths, weaknesses and opportunities session. We then follow up with interviews with multiple interest groups, such as, the leadership of a community, including the police, people from the school district, the heads of business improvement districts, universities if they are present, and anyone who is potentially going to have a role in delivering the anticipated plan outcomes.
We utilize stakeholder and focus group interviews to gain an understanding of the range of issues and opportunities that are important to the broad community. Our team learns a great deal through these conversations including important developments or planned projects within a city or downtown as well as general background information that aids in our understanding of the issues and the challenges facing the city as a whole. We want to understand what works and what doesn’t as well as the range of possibilities and opportunities that should be explored for the future. We follow initial reconnaissance with background research and physical design analysis and then share our understanding of what we have found with the community and explore potential opportunities for the future. We use this process to bring and frame a set of issues to the table as well as suggest possible city building strategies that are relevant to the issues at hand. We carefully frame the issue and opportunity set so we receive meaningful and useful feedback that can support plan development. This means the consultation strategy needs to articulate what we are trying to achieve, what we have learned, where the possibilities for the future lie and how we would like the community to provide input and why participation is important. Finally, we want people to understand how their input can be used to achieve the best results for everyone involved.
What kinds of forums do you find work best? Do you find it is social media, flyers, town halls, or are there other better methods you find most effective at getting the community out to voice their opinion?
The most effective tool is a project website, by far. Even if people don’t come to the public consultation events, the number of unique hits to a website means that people are paying attention, they are looking at the information posted to the project website and have choices as to how to participate online. All the presentations that we give publicly go to the project website, and workbook questions and questionnaires are also posted so members of the public can participate in online surveys or with other communication tools. We often get a large number of hits on the project website and that always gives council comfort that people are aware and have choice in terms of how they would like to participate. We typically provide the public and council with a summary of “consultation by the numbers.” That is, information about how many people have come out to date to participate in one of several public consultations, how many unique website visits we’ve had, how many tweets we’ve received, how many Facebook posts, and how many online survey’s we’ve received.
Personally, I like face-to-face public consultation events. I like the process of providing information to the public, of being a host and delivering presentations and conducting workshops and addressing questions and feedback. Our firm has always been very engaged in hosting public events and we aren’t afraid to have a conversation about the issues as well as the non-issues. Sometimes parts of these conversations are tough or unpleasant. In many cases, having the tough conversations is what is needed to get to the right answers and the right strategy.
Do you find that when you are doing public consultations, that it produces a noticeable result? Do you think it impacts the planning process?
The fundamental goal of public consultation is to get people who are in the same room to hear each other and really listen to what others are saying and find the set of common priorities and goals within this conversation. Through the use of workbooks and guided table discussions we create a setting where people can have a conversation about particular issues and we then find a mechanism for people to report back so that they hear each other’s thoughts and comments. Ideally, these responses begin to align. We facilitate this room report back and support the growing alignment by interjecting and emphasizing points, and demonstrating the benefits that could be achieved by one course of action over another. By the end of the process, there often emerges a clear agreement on the approach towards multiple topics as issues have resonated with many and actions or strategies have emerged that seem most compelling or exciting for most in the room. It is this kind of common ground and feedback that becomes the ‘bones’ of the plan, a plan that will resonate with many and find broad support.
