Civics 2.0 - Engage Citizens

I'm often asked what the biggest issues for Ward 4 are, and what people are saying at the door.

Taxes, a feeling that the ward is falling behind, and concerns about public safety top the list, for sure. Many residents, though, talk about a feeling that City Hall doesn't listen to them. They appear disengaged from municipal politics because it appears to be located in a place "out there" somewhere, decoupled from the places where they live and work and do business.

This disconnect between City Hall and its citizens should be troubling to all of us. If it can't be repaired, we can't develop a "shared" vision of a next London that is safe, affordable, prosperous and healthy. We'll be left with the status quo, and the status quo is simply no longer good enough. The world is changing around us and, if we don't keep up, we'll be left behind.

I don't pretend to have all the answers to this but we must begin a dialogue on how we might rebuild the bonds of public trust between citizens and their municipal government. But let me make a couple of suggestions.

The default position of most citizens in London is that City Hall is wasting the money that taxpayers provide to it. And this doesn't surprise me at all. Look at the way the city reports on its spending - in dense, complicated documents that most of us can't read, even if we wished to. We don't provide financial reporting in a format that is transparent and accountable and able to be read by the average citizen. So, for those who might wish to see for themselves whether they are receiving fair value for their tax dollar, what options do they have? They can listen to the bland assurance of politicians that they are doing everything they can on behalf of their constituents to control spending, or they can listen to the partisan opinions of special-interest groups. Cynicism is the inevitable result.

I think we can begin to address this by regular reporting of the city's financial affairs in a format suited not to accountants but to citizens. Let's provide regular reporting of where tax dollars are being spent in an alternative format easily understood by readers: line items, with year over year comparisons of salaries and benefits by department, consultant fees, debt servicing costs, subsidies to organizations, capital expenditures by project (I once spent a weekend trying to find the total cost of building the Oxford Street bridge, as the costs were spread out across a number of categories), and so on.

The default position of most citizens on matters affecting them in the places where they live and raise their families - in their neighbourhoods - is that the city doesn't do things WITH them but TO them. We simply don't do community consultation very well and the City won't accept the startling notion that the "experts" on matters affecting neighbourhoods are the people who live in them. We need to engage citizens in the planning of their neighbourhoods from the very beginning, even if it does occasionally get messy. Public participation meetings held late in the process to satisfy legislative requirements, when the opportunities for meaningful input to address legitimate neighbourhood concerns has long passed (designs already laid out, recommendations already made, money already spent...) force neighbourhoods to become defensive rather than active participants in the design of infrastructure and developments in their own neighbourhoods. We know what happens then: robbed of the opportunity to participate, we devolve to NIMBYism. For good and perfectly understandable reasons.

These are just two suggestions and I'm sure there are many more. The important point here, I think, is that we need to start a conversation on how we might go about bridging the chasm that divides the citizens of London from their City Hall.