Why eliminating City of Winnipeg Community Committees will improve our city

While much of the focus of the current City of Winnipeg governance review is focused on assessing the power of the mayor within our governance system, there is an alternate subtle culprit to blame for the difficulties when working towards better city-building at the local level. The culprit I have in mind, is a subtle system of five “Community Committees”. The combined existence of these committees results in a lot of conflicted, controversial and difficult decision-making. To be clear it’s not any one councillor’s fault, it’s the system we have established that was well-intended but is now failing us badly. 

 Where did the culprit come from?

 Before 1972 what we now call ‘Winnipeg’ was actually 13 different municipalities each with their own council, each making their own city-building decisions. Back then, Winnipeg-proper was generally seen to be bearing the lion’s share of the public service burden, providing community amenities and services that the other 12 municipalities were able to take advantage of without correspondingly sharing the burden of cost for those amenities and services. In an effort to address this matter, in 1972 the 13 municipalities agreed to become one municipality, unofficially dubbed ‘Unicity’. The name of the largest municipality ‘Winnipeg’ was carried forward to represent all 13 municipalities. The new municipality included a whopping 50 wards – that’s 50 individual councillors and one mayor working to make city-building decisions. In order to make this enormous transition palatable, a commitment was made to keep decision-making relatively local by establishing 13 Community Committees to hold public hearings on zoning matters.

 Since 1972, the number of councillors (and their respective wards) have been reduced from 50 to 15. Correspondingly, the number of Community Committees has been reduced from 13 to 5 Community Committees, each represented by three ward councillors. As noted, these Community Committees are responsible for holding public hearings about zoning requests for development of all types, small and large housing proposals, infill and ‘greenfield’ development. The committees hear all the arguments for and against a particular land use matter, they consider the district planner’s policy recommendations, and then they ‘decide’ upon the matter. This decision is technically a recommendation that is then sent up through a series of other committees to eventually be considered by Council as a whole. 

 So what’s the problem?

 The start of the problem is that the recommendations of the Community Committee are very rarely overturned once they reach the Council floor. Why is this a problem? It is a problem because important city-building decisions are effectively being made by just three councillors that represent each of their three wards. But it gets worse. Within this small committee of three, it is most often just one councillor that is effectively making the ‘decision’. This is because, politics being what it is, there is an unwritten understanding that the two councillors whose ward the matter is not in, will not usually oppose the direction of the ward councillor where the proposed project resides. So, while the idea of local land use decision-making is a worthy idea in theory, it doesn’t actually work in practice. 

 Why is this arrangement bad?

 This situation is bad for everyone – but when it comes to city-building matters, mostly this system is bad for the local councillor. City-building matters are often controversial – building new things where existing people already live is almost never easy. Local people fear the worst. It seems that once a person is settled into their home and into in their neighbourhood, rarely do they then expect further changes to happen around them. When inevitable changes (of any scale) do come around, it often results in a collective negative sentiment in the neighbourhood. Neighbours often express something like this: “I am not against progress in our City and I’m not saying I’m against development, I’m just saying I don’t want it to happen here”. This is where the oft-used phrase not-in-my-back-yard or ‘NIMBY’ comes from – development is okay anywhere, just not in my backyard. Of course, the obvious observation is that if development can’t happen near anyone’s back yard, it can’t happen at all.

 This situation places our poor solo councillor on the Community Committee in a really tough position. This councillor was elected with two key responsibilities – one to help make city-building decisions, and two, to represent their constituent. So what are they to do when faced with a good city-building project that they like, but that the local neighbourhood opposes? Councillors are truly caught between a rock and a hard place – should they support the project for the benefit of citizens as a whole, or should they follow the lead of an often small portion of their constituents who demand that the local councillor vote against it? This dilemma is one of the main reasons extensive public engagement is always encouraged – and while it’s true that a good public engagement process can often result in a successful win-win situation, that is not always the case, and lately in Winnipeg it seems so less and less.

 Should city councillors listen to local objections?

 Ideally, city-building decisions that effect the viability of our city as a whole, should not be biased towards a small, vocal group of local vested interests. Specifically, this often boils down to single-family homeowners not wanting to see anything other than single family homes near them. Yes, the local folks that are the most directly impacted should be treated respectfully and transparently and the project should be modified to mitigate impacts, but no, this doesn’t mean that city-building should cease. If all city-building projects that negatively impacted someone had not been pursued, we would have no projects, we would have no neighbourhoods, no businesses, and no homes. The truth is that just about every person that has ever objected to a new project, lives in a home, on a street, and in a neighbourhood that has negatively impacted the person or thing that existed before. Our entire City used to consist of only nature. The person that objects to new things because of a particular feared impact, is the same person that probably contributes to the traffic they complain about, probably uses the pool, library, or store where trees used to be, and probably uses the electricity, or drinks the water that comes from flooded land. There is and always has been a price for city-building.

 So what is the solution?

Ok, so the system doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for planners, it doesn’t work for councillors and it doesn’t work towards the betterment of our total City. It’s divisive and flawed. But what is the solution? I think what should be done is to simply remove the culprit. Remove city-building ‘decisions’ from Community Committees entirely and move those decisions up the ladder to a non-local committee of council, to an appointed board, or to Council as a whole. Local councillors could then more clearly represent the interests of their constituents while the balance of Council can consider more objectively those local interests as set against the greater interests of the City. While some councillors might not want to lose a sense of control that the current system tends to provide, others will likely see the benefit this change would offer to their own daily duties and to the betterment of our City at large.