Three new council members were elected to office just over a year ago and one former  Council member got elected as Mayor.  In this feature we look at how each of the four has done during their first year in office.  We`ve left comment on the three “old timers”; Councillors, Taylor, Dennison and Craven to the mid-point of this term of office.

Our Burlington has attended literally every Council and Council Committee meeting; the only media in Burlington to do so.  We have watched and listened as the new members ‘learned the ropes’ and developed their unique style. Here is what we observed.

By Pepper Parr

A year ago they were wondering which office they would get and waiting for December 1^st to arrive so they could assume office as members of  Burlington City Council.  Marianne Meed Ward had beaten Peter Thoem for the Ward 2 seat, Blair Lancaster had beaten back Mark Carr for the Ward 6 seat and Paul Sharman, to the surprise of many,  came out on top of a list of five candidates for the Ward 5 seat.

Rick Goldring was elected Mayor; but that was more Cam Jackson losing than Goldring winning.

The most exciting race was Mead Ward – not that it was close, but exciting because of the expectation attached to her candidacy.  She was forward, brassy and had attached herself to two issues that were wrapped around each other – saving the waterfront from developers and resolving the Pier issue.  She was supported heavily by the Save our Waterfront association – served as head of that organization during the election, and then quietly threw it under the bus rarely to be heard from again.  An action voters want to keep in mind, when Mead Ward declares her candidacy for Mayor of the city – and she will declare that candidacy at some point.  At her peril in 2014 with better prospects in 2020.

Mead Ward fully expected to win her race, but she didn`t let up for a moment and when the votes were counted, she pulled out her Agenda and carefully set her sights on the next rung of the political ladder she expects to climb

If the municipal election were held tomorrow Meed Ward would be back in faster than a slam dunk.  She is the noisiest council member, she pushes every limit there is and asks more questions than all the other council members combined.  She is seen as a real pain in the neck by both many council members and even more staff.  However, it is the platform she ran on – and she is doing everything she said she would do – and then some.

Her most impressive performance was when she asked for a recorded vote on a series of matters – there were six of them – before Council and she stood up all by herself and voted no each time.  Her fellow council members were beside themselves with anger – but Mead Ward was as proud as punch.  She wasn`t going to be pushed off her position by anyone.

While she is difficult –she is also effective and is making some differences that are evident and will soon be seen and appreciated by residents across the city.  She has brought about changes in the way development proposals are brought to the city and the manner in which they are processed by council committee.   No longer will a developer get away with putting forward a couple of dozen changes to a development and then have the changes brought back before a committee in as little as ten days.  Mead Ward has put a stop to that practice – something old timers Craven, Taylor and Dennison could have and should have done a long time ago.

Meed Ward is also changing the way Section 37 funds are spent.  A section 37 is a section of the Planning Act that allows a municipality to give a developer a larger amount of density than the Official Plan or a specific zoning by law allows in exchange for a benefit to the community a  developer will provide.  The practice in Burlington has been for the Planning Department to handle all the negotiations with the developer, usually in private meetings.  Meed Ward wanted that process opened up – wide open. She wants the community to be at the table when the value of the community benefit is determined and then also involved in deciding just what that community benefit will be.

Mead Ward runs a Community Advisory Council that is well run and very real – she listens to her constituents.  And she doesn’t draw just the rag tag people who have nothing else to do with their time.  She has raised the bar when it comes to communicating with her ward.

One sees a very “gung ho” Council member at her ward meetings.  For the first one she wanted it to be just perfect and laid on cupcakes, coffee and juices for those that attended.  City hall staff did get to her on that one and advised that kind of spending wasn’t in her budget.

Meed Ward, who brings a journalism background to her work, put together a Newsletter and made it available to everyone electronically and told anyone who didn’t have email to give her office a call and she would mail a copy to them.  She managed to use up her mailing budget the first month in office.  What we were seeing was an inexperienced but very committed Council member going the extra mile to communicate with her community.  She respects the people she represents and genuinely wants to represent their interests.

What was important was the way she interacted with her constituents and would tell them how much she loved her job.  And she does love the job.

What isn’t clear is if the Meed Ward followers are a “fan club” limited to a couple of hundred people or a following that is city wide.  She sees herself as a Councillor for the city – not just ward 2.  Other Council members would prefer that she tend to matters within her own borders and leave them to take care of problems in their ward.

Blair Lancaster has been the quietest of the three council members.  She doesn`t say much, tends to use the same phrases – best practices is her consistent clarion call.  Nothing surprising in her efforts so far – if anything a little on the disappointing side.  She doesn`t appear to go to bat for people in her ward who have issues that are before Council.

What Lancaster has done however is beef up the way this council handles conflicts of interest matters.  Lancaster owns a Spa in the downtown core that is professionally managed for her.  When there was a report on The Downtown Core initiative – and it wasn`t much more than an update – Lancaster left the Council horseshoe and sat in the public gallery.  We`ve not seen that done in the past year by this Council or the one that preceded it.

 

While Lancaster really didn`t have a conflict, she chose to take the position that while the conflict may not have been real it could have been seen to be real and she chose to stand aside and absent herself from the discussion and any vote taken.  Within a couple of weeks Councillor Dennison, for the first time that I can remember, recused himself from the discussion and any vote on a matter he had a conflict with. It was a very minor conflict.

When Lancaster chose to stand aside she raised the bar for every member on Council.   A needed action for any municipal council but that one contribution in itself won`t be enough to get Lancaster re-elected if the next municipal election were held tomorrow

Lancaster is strongest as a public spokesperson for the council.  She handled the microphone at the Escarpment meeting held at Mainway Arena very early in this term – and she was close to stellar.  She has the experience and the poise to handle large audiences and I suspect she would do very well even if a meeting got rowdy and out of hand.

Paul Sharman got himself elected on transit issues and the problems that challenged Sherwood Forest Park in his community.  He slid in between a host of very acceptable candidates and when he got to council it didn`t take him long to insert his brisk, sometimes loud, always very direct approach to matters into the workings of the Council.

He took on the General Managers and the Directors in a way they had not been taken on in some time – there were a couple of very bruising council committee sessions early in this term.  He stunned everyone when he called for a 0% tax increase and asked that staff return to their columns of numbers and come back with just that.  One could see senior city hall staff gulping when the proposal was put forward.

There was the memorable meeting, when he made it very clear to a General Manager that the office space Council members used on the ground floor level was not acceptable, and that Council members were to be allocated space that was more suited to people, who were after all the equivalent to a Board of Directors.  Staff soon saw that Paul Sharman didn’t take prisoners.

Council members now have space on the seventh floor where each has a spacious office with a window and a small conference room that is much different than the “bunker” they used to have to use on the ground floor.  The space was drab looking, had no daylight – it was embarrassing.  It looked more like a police interrogation room, than something city council members used for meetings.

Sharman has softened a little and now tends to talk intensely with the Mayor, in that small huddle council members go into, when they talk to each other with a meeting going on. Budget discussions for 2012 will begin soon and a Transit Master Plan is due to come forward soon – we will see then what, if any, change there has been in the way Sharman makes his point.

While Sharman is strong and direct – he hasn`t really done his homework on council procedures and is not a very effective chairman of the Budget and Corporate Services committee.  His Clerk has to bail him out too often.  That and support from his vice chair, John Taylor gets him through the procedural part of meetings.

Sharman had not been a resident of Burlington for all that long.  He moved to Burlington from Oakville, joined the Chamber of Commerce and got involved in their Political Action Committee, got onto the Board of the Shape Burlington Committee where he shook a number of people to their roots.  Declared his candidacy for Mayor in the 2010 election and when Goldring declared a few days later he withdrew the Mayoralty candidacy and filed papers to run in Ward 5 as a

Council member.   He is aggressive, direct and there is seldom any doubt as to where he is coming from.  He is not a strong constituency man but it didn’t take him long to get a firm grip on what the issues were.  He deals with problems better than he deals with people and brings a solid “business mind set” to what he does.

He is a bear when it comes to facts and figures and consistently goes after staff when the numbers presented to him look a little fishy. He has this ability to be seen as outraged when there are numbers that don’t add up.  City hall staff  have by now learned to go over data more carefully knowing that Sharman will catch anything that doesn’t appear to make sense and will make his views and feelings known at their expense.  It isn’t that staff is sloppy, but he has raised the standard and brought forward a much different level of reporting to Council.

Rick Gold surprised himself as much as anyone else, when he defeated then Mayor Cam Jackson. He needed a couple of months to get the feel of the job he now has and is proving to be a much more effective Mayor than his predecessor.  He just may be seen historically, as one of the best we have ever had.  While a politician he doesn`t seem to need the limelight.

He isn`t all that hands on; he doesn`t have to be all over an issue.  He speaks when he has something to say and is inevitably positive without sounding like some kind of a city booster.  He asks questions of staff for clarification.  He doesn`t put forward stunning or startling ideas.  With a year under his belt we are now getting some idea as to the kind of Mayor he is going to be.  He is using the power of his office to strike out on his own.

The environment has always been a Goldring concern and he pushes to keep that viewpoint on the agenda but he doesn’t always get his way.  He has bumped up against Council members who have been at the horseshoe much longer than he has, and has been outmaneuvered frequently during his first nine months.

One doesn`t get the sense that there is a strong, forceful personality at work; that he has to dominate.  That is not to suggest that he is weak.  He has a much more collaborative style, but when there are tough decisions to make he doesn’t shirk them for a second.  A former City Manager learned that lesson.  One slowly realizes that Rick Goldring has fashioned a council that works well together with each member having all the room they need to be their own person.  This mayor brings a sense of humour to the proceedings and while he doesn`t appear to require people to refer to him as Your Worship, the title he is entitled to during Council meetings, other council members have begun to use the honorific when addressing or referring to him.

What comes across again and again is the man’s basic sense of decency.  It is seen in the small personal gestures where he helps people out when they are making a delegation.  There was the memorable moment when a woman speaking to a Council Committee and got lost in her notes and wasn’t able to follow where the conversation was going.  The Mayor left his seat, gave the woman his copy of the document they were working from and picked up a new copy for himself.

Goldring created the Inspire event, a series of speakers he brought to the city to inform and educate citizens of Burlington on important issues.  Christopher Hume, the Toronto Star architect critic, had some scathing comments to make on the way the city was built and was very blunt about the manner in which he thought McMaster University had treated the city, when they built on the South Service Road instead of in the downtown core of the city. The comments had people in that audience cringing.

Goldring wants people in Burlington to hear points of view that are different and to expand the dialogue that takes place.  He doesn’t want a sense of insularity to take hold in the community.  The turn out at these events is small but it grows; too early to tell if it is having any impact.

The wisest move Goldring made was to appoint Frank McKeown as his senior aide.  McKeown had filed papers to run in Ward 4 but withdrew when Brian Heagle filed his papers.  McKeown felt that he and Heagle would split the anti-Dennison vote.  Heagle then failed to actually run for office and Dennison was back at the Council table for another term.

When Goldring woke up as Mayor, he probably needed some time to think through what had happened to him.  But it didn’t take him very long to realize he needed to add some strength to his bench and asked McKeown to serve as his principle aide, while he learned the job.

There were some very mean, nasty remarks made by people at City Hall who should have known better about the nature of the relationship between the Mayor and his aide.  Wise people are smart enough to know what their strengths are and where they need help – and they then go and get that help.  Rick Goldring brought in a man with a strong understanding of organizational principles and an ability to see and understand the political realities that exist in Burlington.  He didn’t do the Mayor’s thinking for him but served as a solid sounding board for the Mayor.

McKeown’s job is now close to done – his time on the eighth floor is probably nearing an end.  There is no need to ask what the Mayor will do without Frank at his side; the transition that had to be made is now close to complete.

Goldring decided to run for the office of Mayor because he felt that his predecessor had developed a Council that was divisive and would only get worse.  It was perhaps an impulsive decision, we will never really know, but when Rick Goldring found he was Mayor, he dug down deep and did the job.

Rick Goldring may over time prove to be one of the best Mayors the city has ever had.  He is certainly a two term Mayor – would he serve for three ?

 

By Pepper Parr

BURLINGTON, ON  October 31, 2011  It`s going to be a little tougher to get through to your Council member during the month of November.  They will be meeting at an off-site location (a local hotel) to interview prospective candidates for the job of City Manager.

A usually reliable source, who sits around the horse table,  says there are some very good candidates – not quite sure how this Council member knew that before the closing date for applications – but the person did.

There is one known candidate from within city hall staff interested in the job.  Current acting city manager and full time General Manager, Community Services, Scott Stewart has indicated his interest and got his resume in before the deadline.  Stewart hails from Hamilton where he honed his management skills;  and if you can manage staff and council members in Hamilton, you can manage anywhere.   Stewart has a very direct approach to tasks.  To paraphrase the man – he will say: `Ya know what has to be done, so just do it.  If you don`t know –ask, and I’ll make sure you know”.  Stewart is not big on holding hands.  He tends to get things done and in the past year we have seen his handiwork in a number of areas – most tellingly The Pier.

Stewart will never get a job as a diplomat, but he will get the job done and knows how to develop staff.  He can spot the winners and he isn`t shy about placing a bet on someone he believes needs just a little nurturing.  He has a great sense of humour, knows how to have fun and really believes the Maple Leafs can win the Stanley Cup.  That belief could handicap his job application.

There is also a staffer whom many thought was sure to go after the job but he has made it very, very clear that he is not in the running.  The  “no I am not interested in the job”  is Frank McKeown, who currently serves as the Mayor`s right hand man.  McKeown has been with the mayor since the beginning of this term and is responsible for much of the growth the Mayor has shown as he transitioned from a ward councillor (Ward 5) to Mayor.  Goldring is much more of a Mayor today than he was the week he was sworn in.

While many felt Frank McKeown would be a first rate City Manager, they didn’t know the man when they made those comments.  McKeown is a project person and an immensely successful serial start-up entrepreneur.  He works best at situations where there is a clear objective and a goal in sight.  Give Frank McKeown those two things and you`ve got the equivalent of a pit bull on your hands.  The long arduous meetings filled with a lot of silly talk – that ain`t Frank.  So he will not be the next city manager.  He may not be with the Mayor that long either.  Frank`s job is done – and it has been done very well.

There will perhaps as many as a dozen people who apply for the job.  Burlington is a good city to live in; a great place to work and the money is good (above $200,000 a year plus perks). The challenges the city faces are exciting..  There are some problems but the city has all the resources it needs to meet the challenges.

The City Manager is the most important person a Mayor has to work with at City Hall.  It is vital that the Mayor and the City Manager be singing from the same song sheet; that the City Manager understand the vision the Mayor and his Council have and is fully behind all the objectives the Council has set out.   Burlington is about to officially pass its Strategic Plan – which is a useful tool for an incoming City Manager.  That document, the best this city has produced in some time, will be read several times by all of the job applicants and if they are truly aligned with its contents – then they deserve serious consideration.  Stewart was a part of the team that crafted the document.

A couple of reliable sources advise that the first round of interviewing will be wrapped up well before the end of November with round two taking place in December and a decision perhaps as early as mid-December.  There just might be a candidate that is so sterling; one that just jumps out as THE person for this city.  Should that be the case – the city just might direct the recruiting firm they outsourced the hiring to – to make a job offer.

Every member of city council was interviewed by the recruiting firm as well as members of the city`s executive committee to determine just what they each felt Burlington needed in the way of a city Manager.  Those interviews produced a protocol, which is basically the job description for the new city manager.  You can read that document here.

Former Mayor Rob MacIsaac had Tim Dobbie as his City Manager – they worked like a tag team of wrestlers but it was always clear that the Mayor was always calling the shots – Dobbie just did his bidding and at times that wasn`t always easy.  Dobbie left the job for health reasons and the city had hired a new city manager, Roman Martiuk, before the 2006 Mayor, Cam Jackson, took office.  Jackson and Martiuk never saw eye to eye.  The Mayor came from a Queen`s Park environment where as a Minister he could do whatever he wanted – all he had to do was clear it with the Premier and fellow cabinet members and then direct deputy ministers to carry out the plans.

Martiuk came from a solid municipal background and had great difficulty accommodating a Mayor who didn’t really understand the way municipalities worked.  One Council member referred to Jackson as a Mayor who thought he was a Premier.  Needless to say it didn`t work out for either Jackson or Martiuk, who may have thought life was going to be easier when Goldring defeated Jackson as Mayor.  While Goldring was part of the Council that hired Martiuk and should have known what he had to work with when he became Mayor, it didn`t take Goldring long to realize that a Martiuk-Goldring team wasn`t going to materialize either.

Goldring should have had some sense, even as just a Council member, as to how Martiuk managed things.  The learning curve for the new mayor was steep and it was tough going for him in the first 45 days, but he found his footing and with McKeown at his side he grew into the job.  There were some nasty, tasteless comments about Goldring’s reliance on McKeown, made by people on staff, who should have known better. It wasn`t dependence, it was a wise move by a man who found himself with a job he wasn`t fully prepared for and knew enough to bring in the support he needed.

When Council learned early in its first term that the city had a surplus of more than $9 million that they had not been warned about – Goldring, with the aid of McKeown, saw faint words written on the wall and over time those words became clearer.  During the several staff/council Strategic Plan meetings the differences between Council and the City Manager  became clearer.  At that point Martiuk’s days were numbered.   Martiuk, who is no stranger to city hall politics, decided to find out just where he stood and met with the Mayor to review.  That review meeting ended up with Martiuk deciding to “step aside”  then rather than face a full scale review of his contract with city council.  That allowed council to look for a city manager more attuned to the style of the new team.