By Pepper Parr
August 19th, 2020
BURLINGTON, ON
It was the best ZOOM production we’ve seen since the lock down.
Michelle Dwyer handled the flow of questions exceptionally well. There may be a future for her in professional broadcasting.
Michelle Dwyer served as the moderator who took the calls during a virtual information meeting about the close-to-final report from the Taking a Closer Look at the Downtown event which she passed on to the team on the other side of the panel that included Alison Enns, Thomas Douglas and Jenna Pulato.
It ran smoothly, a truly professional production. The people who run the city web casts – especially the Standing Committee programs, could learn something from this team.
Dwyer would have looked even better if the camera had been adjusted just a little.
Each of the participants was working from home (Dwyer might have been working out of city hall) and were able to move from person to person without any glitches.
They were doing a virtual information meeting on one of the final Get Involved Burlington segments that was focused on the Scoped Reexamination of the Adopted Official Plan for the Downtown.
By way of background – the 2014-18 city council approved a new Official Plan that was sent to the Region where it had to be approved. The Region sent it back saying there were parts of the Plan that didn’t fit with the Regional Official Plan – they needed some fixes.
That notice from the Region came in after the 2018 election which brought a lot of new faces to the council table and a Mayor who saw the development of the downtown core a lot differently than her predecessor.
In its notice to the city about the Official Plan that it was sending back, the Region said the city could look at other elements of the Plan and not just the four the Region had been specific about.
That gave Mayor Meed Ward the room she needed to take a deeper look at what could be done with the downtown core.
Mary Lou Tanner, former Burlington Director of Planning
The city now had a new Director of Planning: Mayor Meed Ward did not get along with Mary Lou Tanner who was directing and defending what the 2014-18 Council had approved.
Mayor Meed Ward sent City Manager James Ridge packing and brought in Tim Commisso in as an interim City Manager who quickly became the choice of new full time city manager.
Most of the players had changed – which got the city to the point where the Scoped Reexamination of the Adopted Official Plan become almost a cottage industry in itself. The Director of Planning was given carte blanche to hire a consulting firm to lead the Review. They were thorough – and they weren’t cheap.
Heather MacDonald, the new director of planning, was given permission to do a sole source search – she hired SGL Planning and Design who began a process that produced literally dozens of reports with two more to come.
Alison Enns, part of the panel that took questions from the public on a virtual information meeting, worked very smoothy with Thomas Douglas on the ZOOM presentation
Thomas handled most of the question related to transportation at the virtual information meeting.
The FINAL report with some surprising recommendations wasn’t available to the public until a few days before the live review; despite that many of the questions were very detailed – members of the public had drilled down and done their home work.
A transcript of the broadcast, as well as the broadcast itself is expected to be available “shortly” Both will be posted to the Get Involved section of the city web site.
Planning staff have asked for comments before August 28th. The report will go to a Standing Committee September 30th and to Council in October.
If the report makes it through each of these steps, and doesn’t get bogged down with an appeal before it goes to the Region, it could become the law of the land before the end of the year.
It will have been a long, tortuous and expensive trip.
