By Pepper Parr
BURLINGTON, ON April 26, 2011 – He can be grumpy. He is often pedantic. He is very often a stickler for the rules and can snap out a Point of Order to the chair of a committee faster than most people can say Jack Spratt. He is truly passionate about his Ward. But there is nothing fuzzy or warm about this man who will tell you he has ambitions for higher political office. The one thing you can say is that he is effective
Quick to go to the rule book and quick to cut off improper debate. Effective? Not always but he believes in what he has been doing since 2000
Rick Craven ha been doing what he does for more than ten years and yet doesn’t hold the “sway” that Councillors Dennison or Taylor have over their Wards. There is a sense of Team that seems to elude Rick Craven and while he has a solid base in Aldershot (Mead Ward Learned that in 2006 when she ran against him and lost soundly) he doesn’t have anywhere near the impact on Council that the other two more senior Council members, Taylor and Dennison have and has been crowded out by the much stronger personality of Ward 5 Councillor Paul Sharman.
When there was an even remote chance that the Tiger Cats would take up residence in his Ward, Craven was like a “hound who had treed a possum” howling and jumping all over the place. He was the biggest booster there was but that one got away on Craven. Then when IKEA let it be known that it wanted to leave Aldershot and move to a location that would allow for larger retail premises that would include a larger office and administration facility – which meant some 150+ more jobs for Burlington but a huge loss for the Aldershot BIA, Craven was big and magnanimous. If it was better for Burlington – then he would live with the loss, secure in his mind at least – that Aldershot was the place to be.
Finally, a development that is mostly pluses – it’s taken a bit of time to get growth along Plains Road.
There has been some good news for the community. The LaSalle Terrace is slated to proceed and once constructed and operational it will take some of the strip mall look that tends to dominate parts of Plains Road West out of the mix.
While Plains Road tends to be seen as the focal point for Ward 1, it is really the Beachway (that part of the Lakefront that is west of Spencer smith Park), that holds the promise to make Burlington into a city that has capitalized on its truly magnificent waterfront. Add to that, the Burlington Performing Arts Centre (BPAC), which also sits in Ward 1, and you have the two most promising city building projects on the go in the one ward. Craven, a practiced politician, also happens to sit on BPAC Board where he gets a first hand look at that development and sits on the Waterfront Advisory Committee where he sees what is coming up from the grass roots on the thinking around the Beachway.
Craven Chairs the Community Services Committee and at times proves to be a task master who will insist that more formal protocols be followed but has recently given up on that approach. Councillors Dennison and Taylor know everyone by their first names and don’t take to Craven’s insistence that people be addressed more formally. It’s tough to go against Dennison’s “I’ve known you for years” attitude or Taylor’s “happy-go-lucky” folksiness.
He has fun when doing his job but as often as not he leaves a meeting abruptly and in a bit of a foul mood. You never get the sense that he goes out for a beer with the rest of the team. Never appears to be a “happy camper”.
Part of that is because Craven brings a different kind of seriousness to the work he does; almost driven at times. He sees what he believes are big mistakes being made and he knows that in the long run it is the taxpayers who pay for the mistakes.
He knows too, that the taxpayers would like everything they can think of and at the same time he knows they are going to balk when it comes time to pay the bill and sees his job as making sure the taxpayers know what the cost is going to be BEFORE the bill is rendered. Again and again he will tell his fellow council members that they need to consistently explain the consequences behind the decisions council makes.
The city currently has just 68% of the money it needs to pay for the road and infrastructure repairs that are necessary. “We didn’t set that money aside and now we have very poor roads in parts of this city and the public wants them fixed now – but we don’t have the money to pay for that work” explains Craven.
“There are all kinds of surprises out there waiting for us” claims Craven. “The breakdown of the boilers at the Burlington Art Centre is but one example he will tell you about. “Government is not the enemy” says Craven but then adds that “we raise expectations in the minds of the public that they are not really prepared to pay for. There is just one tax bill and all the money we spend is collected through that tax bill.”
“And” Craven is quick to add, “if you abuse that taxpayer it doesn’t take them very long to let you know how unhappy they are”. Craven argues that the role of a Council member is to seek “balance” and use “common sense”. We have to listen to our constituents and learn from them.
“We froze the staffing compliment with the budget we just passed” says Craven and the result, he says, is that the city manager cannot hire a new person if it is going to increase the amount of money he is going to spend. That, according to Craven means that the city manager will hold back on filling a position because he won’t have the funds to pay the person and he goes on to add that not having critical staff people on hand will mean poorer, diminished services.
The decision by senior city staff to make “gapping” close to a policy that was never approved at council has created serious problems for the city even if it did produce more than $3 million of the $9.3 million surplus we had at the end of last year. Gapping is when you create a significant amount of time between when a person leaves a position and when the replacement goes on the payroll – the gap between those two dates result in significant staff savings to the city and because 80% of our costs are human resource based – gapping proved to be very convenient for the city’s Executive Budget Committee.
Craven see “gapping” as something city staff legitimized but it resulted in work piling up and very disgruntled staff and unhappy taxpayers as well. Craven points to the functional design project approved for Plains Road in 2010 on which work has yet to begin.
Burlington, Craven will tell you is not a complete city yet. The Performing Arts Centre is going to make a huge difference and he believes that if we can get our heads around what we want to do with the Beachway, the Lake will become much more relevant to a greater number of people.
The “diamond in the rough” for Burlington – an opportunity to create a truly magnificent waterfront that combines the “finest beach in Ontario” with a vision that reflects what Burlington wants to become.
The big issue the city has to face with the Beachway is what to do with the 28 private homes that are left. They are privately owned homes that do not have sewage service and use septic tanks that fall short of acceptable sanitary service. The land on which the homes are built consists of 37 feel of sand, defined as a dynamic beach, that is constantly shifting and is not suitable for development.
The property usage is controlled by the Region which will not allow sewage services to be installed – which is odd because the sewage treatment is literally just across the road.
The city created a Waterfront Advisory Committee just before the last election but it hasn’t met the hope many had for really positive ideas or significant feed back from that committee. Part of the reason for the failure, perhaps too strong a word – let’s just say it didn’t develop into something as effective as the Sustainable Development Advisory, – is that there was a political element to the creation of the Watefront Advisory that may have served a purpose before the election but it resulted in a committee that has yet to really find its way and with the current leadership it won’t go anywhere. The result is that the committee appears to have lost the clout it could have had. Craven sits on the committee but for the most part doesn’t say all that much. One gets the sense he is there to protect his constituency rather than use the committee to promote his community.
Craven studied Communication Arts at Mohawk College and worked in radio for five years as a news reporter. A graduate of McMaster University Craven worked with the Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board for two decades.
He got into the political game by coming up through community organizations starting with Chairman of the Aldershot Community Council and on the Executive Liaison Committee for the Halton Police Community Consultation Committees. This is a guy who works at the grass roots level but doesn’t bear the colour or style of a populist. Very personable and outgoing but you don’t get the sense of his being a close team player. Effective though but just a little too serious.
We will return to Councillor Rick Craven later this week and dwell on what could be his legacy to the city and perhaps a step to a higher level of public office.
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