How do we know if we have a Good Community Plan?
After a time on Council you tend to have an idea about which questions will be asked by which Councillors. I hunch that Coquitlam staff and my colleagues know that I am likely to ask about measuring our successes, using performance indicators that will help inform us about the decisions and actions we take as a Council.
This past week we received a Community Planning 2011 Accountability Report. It’s a simple to read document with graphs, photos and straight forward descriptions outlining the various activities of the city department responsible for the ‘strategic coordination of sustainable land uses’. The Department is responsible for neighbourhood planning, Coquitlam’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategy, Homelessness/Housing Affordability, Geographic Information Systems, Design Guidelines, Regional Growth Strategy and Social Planning among other activities.
As I read through the document I am asking “How will we know that we have been successful?”
As a family therapist I have always worked with goals. I ask my client what they want to achieve through our work together and I help them formulate achievable goals in the time we have, constantly checking in with them to see if we are meeting our targets. As SHARE’s fundraiser it was dead easy to monitor progress – there’s nothing easier than counting money as an indicator for measuring goal achievement.
Housing choices, housing affordability and Coquitlam’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategy appear easier to measure – we can attach numbers to easily measured indicators that permit us to monitor our progress. Community and neighbourhood planning however is very different.
So I question how we measure whether or not we have a good community or neighbourhood plan.
We go though various processes in an attempt to try to engage as many residents as possible (which is a whole other issue that I will blog about later). We work with advisory committees, consultants, experts in community planning to come up with a plan - we take it to the neighbourhood for feedback – tweak the plan – take it back to the community – repeat 2-3 times and then Council makes a decision. But how do we know when we have a good plan? How do we know that we made a good decision?
We talk about creating more walkable, compact communities – are we checking to make sure that we are in fact reaching these goals? Are people walking more in these communities? We talk about sustainable development that includes protection of watercourses and environmentally sensitive areas – are we measuring our performance to see that we are, in fact, achieving these goals? Are we measuring how well we are protecting these sensitive areas?
It’s easy to talk about goals and vision….it’s quite something else to measure your progress in a meaningful way.
I will continue to pursue this line of questioning – it’s the only way I think we can really be accountable.
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