Shaping Burlington

Shaping Burlington presented the following comments on “Burlington Our Future, Draft Intitiatives” at the Community Focus Group held at Tansley Woods on 21 September 2011. The draft plan can be found on the City website at: http://www.burlington.ca/pdfs/BurlingtonOurFutureDraftInitiatives.pdf

Shaping Burlington appreciates the efforts of City staff to incorporate the recommendations of the Shape Report and of the delegations Shaping Burlington has made to City Council in regard to the Strategic Plan. We are very supportive of the clear overall direction to promote community and citizen engagement. We do however believe that the draft Strategic Plan initiatives must be strengthened to reflect better the needs identified in the Shape Report to strongly encourage and facilitate the involvement of Burlington citizens in municipal government. By citizens, we mean residents of Burlington. We suggest the following modifications to the draft Strategic Plan initiatives:

• Under Strategic Direction 1, Objective 2, item 1 – add Burlington Cycling Committee for collaboration on cycling initiatives and Burlington Transit Advisory Committee for collaboration on transit initiatives.
• Under Strategic Direction 2, we note that there is mention of the desirability of avoiding poverty, but no mention of the need to deal with existing poverty issues in Burlington. We suggest that there be a Strategic Initiative to address these issues developed in collaboration with groups working on such issues.
• Under Strategic Direction 3, replace current introductory wording to as follows (changes highlighted) “Creating community confidence through mutual trust and excellence in government. We want Burlington citizens to be proud of and involved in their local government. To be confident that the City is well-managed, forward-thinking, responsible, and responsive to community concerns. This strategic direction is about creating community confidence through mutual trust and excellence in governance. It is also about paying attention to the City as a provider of services and a workplace with a culture of support and engagement for City staff. (The purpose of the wording changes is firstly to recognize the desirability of active citizen involvement in good governance There is also a need to clearly differentiate the roles of the City as a government, a provider of services, and an employer. The word citizen is used in the related strategic initiatives so we suggest using it instead of resident for consistency.)Under Outcomes, we note that there are desired levels under many of the items e.g. quality service delivery, effective governance. We suggest adding “meaningful” in front of citizen involvement to indicate a high expected level. We also suggest changing customer satisfaction to “customer services satisfaction” to link customers to services provided as described in the introductory wording. Similarly, under Key Indicators, we suggest changing customer satisfaction date to ”customer services satisfaction data”
• Also under Strategic Direction 3, we suggest reordering the objectives to place a version of Objective 2 as Objective 1 to reflect the high priority identified in the Shape Report adopted in principle by City Council for strong action to foster a citizen engagement culture. Objective 2 currently reads “forge strong community relationships, with open dialogue and citizen involvement in municipal issues”. This sounds like it could be part of any municipality’s strategic plan – not that of a City such as Burlington with an accepted need to special action. We therefore suggest it be reworded as Objective 1 as follows: “Foster a strong citizen engagement culture through working with communities to encourage and facilitate citizen participation in municipal government.”Under Strategic Initiative 1, we suggest there should be a Deliverable related to the Expected Result “open data”. under strategic initiative 3, we suggest adding “Public involvement Coordinator” hired as a deliverable.  We also suggest specifically identifying “staff training” as a deliverable under this initiative. We also suggest, under Deliverables for Strategic Initiative 4, identifying the communication strategy as being two-way to emphasize the need for feedback mechanisms.
• We note that there is no mention of providing updates to the community on the progress of implementing the various initiatives in the Strategic Plan. We suggest a separate strategic direction to describe how this will be accomplished.

Chris Walker

Chair, Shaping Burlington

On 30 August, Shaping Burlington will be presenting the following report to the Budget and Corporate Services Committee suggesting a framework to build on the work already done or in progress, as well as to deal with two of Shape Burlington Report’s recommendations to transform City communications.

Read the full report on City Communications here

Key Points:

1. The Shape Burlington Report called for a major transformation of City communications and the City Talk newsletter.
2. In particular it was recommended that City Talk not be a primarily a political vehicle, but a corporate information provider.
3. While there has been some change in City Talk, we note that the most recent edition is still dominated by political content.
4. City Talk‘s was originally intended to be for corporate communication for keeping citizens informed of important matters early in the decision-making process, not political content.
5. We understand the vital role of councillors’ political communication.
6. We therefore further recommend that
   1. Councillors be encouraged to communicate political content, but separately from corporate communication. Print and other media should be encouraged.
   2. The City should review the entire communication process with the objective of transforming city communications in line with the Shape Burlington recommendations.

The City of Burlington has now advertised for a two year “Public Engagement Coordinator” position as per staff report CORPSERV 5-11 available on the City’s website as part of the agenda for the Budget and Corporate Services Committee on 21 June 2011. Shaping Burlington presented the following comments on the staff report at that meeting.

Engagement Coordinator Comments

Burlington Strategic Plan – Top Priorities for Term of Current Council

Background:

Shaping Burlington is the successor volunteer community advocacy organization to Shape Burlington which produced the Shape Burlington Report adopted in principle by Burlington City Council in July 2010. Our primary mandate is to advocate for implementation of the eight recommendations in that report, all of which are aimed at improving the culture of civic engagement in Burlington. We believe that such implementation is a long term process that requires inclusion of enhanced civic engagement mechanisms in all City decision-making processes such as the development of the Strategic Plan. As such, our top priorities to be recognized in the 2011-2014 Strategic Plan are:

Priorities

• Creating an Engaged Community as a Major Strategy

  Implementation of the eight recommendations in the Shape Burlington Report through appropriate recognition as strategic objectives in a section perhaps titled “Creating an Engaged Community” with appropriate objectives and measurable actions given the importance of ensuring that all citizens are strongly encouraged and empowered to fully participate in City initiatives as appropriate. Currently many citizens have little interest in municipal government – extensive measures are needed to encourage and facilitate all members of the community to become engaged, and to ensure that such engagement makes a difference. For example, a specific objective could be “to improve the process for gathering community feedback during strategic planning by direct invitations to community groups, timely provision of background information, and feedback to the community to show that input has been carefully considered.”

• Periodic Review and Reporting on Civic Engagement

  Periodic review and reporting to the community over the lifetime of this Strategic Plan of the actions included in the “Creating an Engaged Community” section to determine whether the objectives of this section are being met, with appropriate remedial action if required.

• Municipal Government as Representing Citizens

  As we noted in our delegation to the City Committee of the Whole (14 February 2011) on the proposed Strategic Plan process, we believe that the mission statement for the Strategic Plan should reflect the role of a municipal government not, as currently worded, that of an organization having business, competitors and stakeholders. Rather, the role of a municipal government is to represent its citizens and provide services for its citizens.

• Community Surveys – Need Open-ended Questions in Future Initiatives

  We support the use of community surveys but note that the survey questions used in the Group workbook etc. for “Burlington – Our Future” provide limited scope for people to provide their own ideas. There is very little space to provide other ideas among big lists of suggested answers. As such, this survey is unlikely to produce really useful information. We suggest that in future surveys there be a strong emphasis on open-ended questions such as ‘What do you like about Burlington? What do you dislike about Burlington? What improvements would you like to see?” We would be pleased to work with City staff on development of future surveys as several of our members have extensive experience in this area.

We look forward to further opportunities to contribute to this very important process. I would be pleased to answer any questions.

Chris Walker

Chair, Shaping Burlington