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Feature - Whistler council at the halfway mark

A year and a half into their elected term, how has Whistler council fared in relation to its priorities?
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Councilor Nick Davis at the WORCA meet the candidates before the last election.

In February 2003, fresh with the excitement of being chosen to lead Whistler for the next three years, council outlined their goals in a strategic planning workshop. Their top five priorities were identified as: • Whistler. It’s Our Future, CSP; • Transition Strategy (until the CSP was completed); • Affordability and Affordable Housing; • Financial Sustainability/Tools; and • Provincial Relationships.

Now they are half way through their term.

All seven members of council sat down with Pique Newsmagazine recently to talk about this council’s progress to date in relation to those five priorities. Here’s what they shared.

By Alison Taylor

After almost eight years at Whistler’s helm, Mayor Hugh O’Reilly can honestly say this term has been his toughest to date.

"I would say it has been harder (than the previous two terms), there’s no doubt," said O’Reilly, during a recent interview in his office at municipal hall.

It’s not just that the slower economic times are adding pressure throughout the resort. Or that Whistler has reached a critical point in its growth and difficult choices about the future are on the table.

But rather, O’Reilly’s council hasn’t "gelled" or come together as a cohesive force, as it has in previous terms and as such, frustrations abound on all sides.

Now, halfway through their term, council is at a crossroads, recognizing that if they are to work more effectively together for the next year and a half, they must start to put some differences aside.

Looking at the top five priorities laid out in February 2003, which included the CSP, financial tools and affordable housing, members of council had mixed feelings about their results to date.

"A year and a half has gone quickly," said Councillor Kristi Wells, who is currently serving her fourth term on council.

"I don’t feel much of a sense of accomplishment as a team."

The accomplishments however, are not as obvious as they have been in years past, said Councillor Gordon McKeever, who was newly elected in November 2002.

"This is very much a planning council," he maintained.

"A planning term is not going to be a term that you see a lot happen."

A year and a half ago the community delivered a clear message through the polls that they were looking for change.

Three new councillors, Caroline Lamont, McKeever and Marianne Wade, were added to a team of three veterans and the mayor, bringing with them a significant amount of experience in community planning and a breath of fresh air to local politics.

Prior to their arrival there had been only one change at O’Reilly’s council table in six years, when Councillor Nick Davies took office in 1999, replacing Nancy Wilhelm-Morden, who did not seek re-election.

The mayor recalled that during those two terms in office, from 1996 to 2002, even though each councillor brought differences to the table, they learned quickly to work together effectively as a team.

This council has yet to do that, he said.

He isn’t the only one feeling the distance at the council table.

"Certainly there was much more cohesiveness among the last council and there was a much stronger sense that we were all working for what was in the best interests of Whistler," said Davies.

"This council I think there’s clearly more politics at play. I think there are people on council who are already running for mayor and are prepared to beat up our staff to do it, and that clearly isn’t in the best interests of Whistler."

At the heart of the issue in many ways is a resistance to the way council and staff have operated together for the past seven and a half years.

The team has been stymied by a disagreement on the general rules and responsibilities of the council.

In recent weeks, as council struggles with a decision on the new community library, they have been accused of "micro-managing" the process.

Councillor Marianne Wade said some members of council are just looking for enough information to help them make informed decisions.

"Council needs to be setting direction, requesting – I think – more comprehensive reports that provide due diligence on financial analysis, which include our costs and cost recovery... so that we can have a good framework to make good choices on," she said.

"If we have all that information up front then it’s easier for us to make a decision and stay to that decision and move forward."

She isn’t the only one criticizing staff reports for their lack of information.

"I think that staff reports often only give you the good news story," said Councillor Caroline Lamont.

"I think that maybe this council might be a little more demanding."

As Davies sees it, the team is focusing on the nitty-gritty details – details he said should be left for municipal staff.

"We have an excellent staff so why not just rely on staff and keep an eye on the bigger picture?" he asked.

"There’s far too much getting down into the details and we keep losing sight of the bigger picture."

The governance model

This tug of war over council’s governance and their level of involvement has been a source of contention ever since they took office.

The governance structure, which has been in place since O’Reilly was elected mayor in 1996, is based on a strong administrative system, backed up by a council who give municipal staff broad high-level directions. Staff then deliver results, without much input from council along the way.

This is a vast departure from the governance model Lamont remembers when she was planning director at Steamboat Springs in Colorado and a municipal planner in Whistler from 1989 to 1996.

At that time a so-called "strong mayor" model of governance was in place. Lamont remembers Mayor Ted Nebbeling coming into the planning department at least once a week, asking questions and directing staff.

After Nebbeling left, there was a sweeping organizational review of municipal hall, which established the current model of governance.

"There’s good reasons for why that governance structure is in effect," admits Lamont.

"But I’m not so sure it serves this council very well with the type of issues that we have right now."

This council wants to be very involved and engaged and as such, they need a governance structure that reflects that, she added.

Though they tried to work under the governance structure for the first year in office, by November there was a request from council for a governance review.

It’s been five months now and the review has yet to materialize. Now, it looks as though it will not come before council until July.

The delay has been very frustrating and disappointing for many members of council.

"We’re all sick of waiting and we need something," said Wells.

If the governance structure was a hangover from a previous time and place, so too was the Comprehensive Sustainability Plan, a project that has dragged on throughout this term.

The CSP kicked off in early 2002 amid great expectations and excitement. This plan was to become the guiding document that would plot Whistler’s growth and development until the year 2020, with economic, social and environmental sustainability principles built into it. Ideally it was to have been delivered before the November 2002 election. But given the scope and scale of what was proposed, as well as the vast opportunity for community consultation, that goal was unrealistic.

By the time the election drew near, the contentious and increasingly expensive plan became a hot topic in the election debates.

And so, the new council inherited the CSP.

While the CSP was underway, Lamont was keen to ensure council stayed focused by keeping new projects at bay until the plan was in place.

She called for a transition strategy, which would essentially place something similar to a moratorium on business in the municipality during the CSP planning process.

It was marked as one of the top priorities, and according to Lamont it was a complete failure.

"It was my intent to put pressure on the municipality to get the CSP done, said Lamont.

"So if we basically said we’re closed for business until we get the CSP done, not only is the community screaming, developers are screaming, businesses are screaming, everybody wants this.

"It totally backfired because council keeps approving things or considering things that are outside of it. So it was just lip service, probably to shut me up at the strategy session."

As projects rolled in for council’s stamp of approval, the CSP got lost in a mire of pricey consultants.

Now, it is long overdue. It is $400,000 over budget, coming in at over $1 million to date (most of that money was spent by the previous council) and excitement about the final product has waned, to say the least.

The CSP has challenged this council, preventing them in some ways from moving forward.

"As a team we really haven’t taken on a project of our own," said O’Reilly.

"We’re still dealing with something that’s left over from the previous council, that came with its own set of challenges and issues."

Progress on CSP

Still, of the five priorities set out at the beginning of their term, most members of council point to the CSP as one of the area’s where they have done the most work to date.

It may have floundered a little during the election and then a little more as the new councillors got up to speed at the beginning of their term, but Wade said by the end of last summer council stepped in and got the plan back on track.

"I think council had concerns about where it was going and the amount of money and those sorts of things and realized that we need to evaluate where we were at," she said.

She said the solution came in the form of Mike Vance, a former Whistler employee who was recruited from Mammoth to deliver the CSP. The draft plan will be coming forward in the next two months.

McKeever agreed that getting Vance on the job was a crucial turning point for the CSP.

For all the criticisms about the CSP process, McKeever said it cannot be overstated enough that Whistler was embarking into uncharted territory when they began this plan. This, in some ways, explains why mistakes have been made along the way and why it has taken so long.

"First and foremost this community plan is a very unique plan and like many things Whistler has done over the years, there’s no roadmap, there’s no manual on how to do this, there’s very few reference points out there," McKeever said.

"And that having been said, mistakes are going to be made."

Wells, however, disagrees with the idea that council has focused on the CSP this term. The project has only become a major priority in recent months she said and she regrets that council did not take a more hands-on approach, guiding and focusing the project along the way.

"I think there’s a general understanding that council in general, as a role, picks a broad vision and then staff will implement it in whatever means they see best or in the budget parameters that they’ve been given," she said, referring to the current model of governance.

"So council did that with the CSP… which was fine up to a point but I think that because it wasn’t coming together… I see it would have been an appropriate time to shift that role (and get more involved)."

Furthermore, she added, if you actually compare council time spent on the CSP to time spent on the Nita Lake Lodge, more hours have gone into the Creekside development project than the new community plan.

"I don’t think it’s where the most amount of work is done and I think that’s the problem," she said.

It’s no wonder the Nita Lake Lodge development is demanding significant time and energy from council.

Approved last fall, the project is in the midst of a lawsuit, challenged by a wealthy homeowner. The challenge has left a large development on the shores of Nita Lake cut off at the knees. That means the more than 300 beds of employee housing that was set to come with the project is also up in the air.

Council members maintain employee housing is still a priority, although the 500 beds they had hoped to deliver when they first began their term may not materialize any time soon.

"I think by the end of the term if we don’t have a goodly number of beds planned going forward and clearly understand where they’re coming from, that would be a tremendous disappointment," said McKeever.

"We wanted to see people sleeping in beds but that is going to get a little harder to achieve perhaps."

Housing initiatives

Beyond the bricks and mortar however, there are many other aspects to the employee housing issue in Whistler which this council has tackled.

Council delivered a comprehensive housing report, which examines the potential of more than 60 different private and Crown land sites for employee housing.

The report, which was presented to council at the first meeting in April, has been a long time in coming.

Even if this council is not credited with building any beds this term, that report will be an invaluable planning tool for the future, said Lamont.

"To be fair, there were some sites that we did very actively pursue and they’ve had issues," she said.

"On the flip side, I feel so much better now that this report has been done, that even though the next council, if I’m part of it or not, will get credit for (building housing projects), it had to be done and it was the right thing to do."

Council also seized upon the non-cost housing initiatives, a series of bylaw changes that encourages the creation or retention of employee suites in Whistler homes. It was designed to stop the "leakage" of employees from the resort within the existing housing stock.

"We had that one going within three months of the elections," said Wells.

"And that was really important to me in pushing it because that was something that’s been on the backburner for a while. And although you may say it hasn’t produced hundreds of units, it’s an incredible, sustainable tool."

Though the applications haven’t been flooding into municipal hall, the tools are now there where once they weren’t.

Fortunately this council was also granted somewhat of a reprieve this term in terms of delivering employee housing right away.

The slower economy may have eased the pressure to build.

"If there’s any silver lining in all this (the slower economic times) it is that’s given us a little bit of a breather," said O’Reilly.

"If we’d had another gangbuster year and the housing was a big issue, I’m sure that we would be hearing it again from the chamber and other people in the business sector. But we haven’t had the same response this year."

That doesn’t mean housing still isn’t a priority he added, pointing to the hundreds of names on the Whistler Housing Authority list, just that the immediate pressure has eased.

Providing employee housing is also linked to council’s other key priority of affordability.

There is still some debate among councillors about how much influence the municipality can exercise over general affordability in Whistler.

How can council make the resort less expensive?

They agree that one way is by partnering with other groups in town and making sure the message is clear that businesses must be responsible, particularly in these challenging times.

Councillor Ken Melamed, however, sees a very obvious co-relation between the lack of affordability and council’s role in approving certain development projects like the five-star Nita Lake Lodge.

"The move to upscale businesses in Whistler has contributed to the lack of affordability and arguably council could find ways to control this," said Melamed.

"There are mechanisms you can use to bring the scale down.

"But it’s very clear that the business community has a greater voice on council that the peons."

Financial tools

Affordability is also tied to a whole host of things, some of which are beyond the control of the local government.

Some council members feel the provincial government is holding the future of an "affordable" resort in the palm of its hands as it delays on the promise of granting Whistler special financial tools.

Financial tools, whatever form they might take, are designed to put visitors’ money back in the local community, taking pressure off the property tax base.

They were envisioned as a long-term funding source, unique to Whistler, in recognition of the sizeable financial contribution the resort makes to provincial revenues.

"In our community we (the municipality) are part of the industry," said O’Reilly.

"We’re part of the deliverables. We’re just as integral as the restaurants and the shops and the mountains. A lot of what people come for is being maintained and operated by the community.

"It would be nice if the tools could provide an opportunity for those guests to actually contribute and take some of the pressure off the residents and the land base."

The municipality has long been lobbying for financial tools from the province. The perfect bargaining chip arrived when it came time to endorse the Olympic bid in October 2002.

When the last council gave their support to the bid, they did so based on certain conditions or legacies, among them a 300 acre Crown land bank and financial tools.

Before the last council committed to the bid, they had a promise from Premier Gordon Campbell that they would get these financial tools.

For the three councillors and the mayor who were part of the negotiation process, the fact that the tools have yet to materialize is a bitter pill to swallow.

Melamed was the only member of that last council who did not support the bid, in part because of the loose promise of financial tools.

"Some may recall that one of the reasons that I withheld my support for the bid at that time was because... we had promised the community that one of the legacies from the bid, win or lose, would be these new financial tools," he said.

"What we got was a promise from the premier to do his best and nothing has happened in the (past) year and a half and the longer it drags on, the less hope we have of getting those much needed tools."

The municipality however is not sitting idly by, twiddling its thumbs until the province delivers on its promise. Instead, it is looking for other ways to help Whistler become more financially sustainable through public/private partnerships.

The RMOW has been pursing entrepreneurial opportunities, like Yodel, where it partners with a company at a relatively low risk investment.

"You have to have Plan B," said McKeever.

"There are always unique opportunities for us to play a very special role... that only we can deliver."

Currently there is no set policy on how the municipality pursues these entrepreneurial possibilities, but that should be coming forward in a policy paper within the next month.

McKeever said it must be a well-defined policy but at the same time it cannot be too restrictive, because often unique opportunities are created that align perfectly with the municipality’s goals and objectives.

"It’s just all part of an alternate economy model, instead of carrying on the back of the property taxpayer," said McKeever.

Still, council for the most part hasn’t given up hope that the financial tools – whatever they make look like – will eventually come from the province.

O’Reilly’s read on the situation is that Whistler will get financial tools after the 2005 provincial election.

"To be quite frank, I suspect that our really big deliverable will probably happen after the next election," he said.

"Governments will make bigger changes at the beginning of their term than they will at the end of it."

Davies is also confident of a favourable outcome for Whistler. Not only did the premier make a deal with council but also, Whistler has done a tremendous job in stating its case, proving that although the resort makes huge contributions to the provincial economy, its only return is a small percentage of the hotel tax.

"When I got elected four and half years ago there was a feeling at the provincial level that we were a bunch of fat cat rich dudes in Whistler who didn’t have any problems," recalled Davies.

"Whenever we asked for something like financial tools or highway upgrades we were just trying to get fatter and richer. And the provincial government now understands the importance of the tourism industry to the economy of this province and it has a great understanding of some of the issues that the tourism industry faces. That’s a direct result of the directions that we gave our staff and the staff executing those directions."

Tough decisions

Progress in building these provincial relationships and lobbying Whistler’s case has been made in a number of ways, though it may be hard to quantify concrete results.

Whistler has been an integral part of the Resort Task Force. This is a group made up of provincial resort communities who as one voice are trying to lobby the government for the special needs of resort communities.

More recently, council approved an internal promotion that created a Deputy Administrator position at municipal hall, freeing up more time for Administrator Jim Godfrey to build these provincial relationships.

Wells sees this internal move as a band-aid solution to a very serious problem.

She sees holes in the organization and quick stopgap measures to fill them. This isn’t addressing big picture issues or things like how the municipality is going to deal with its Olympic workload or what it will do when Godfrey’s contract comes up for renewal next month.

In the fall Wells called for an organizational review of the hall to address some of these concerns.

It was to provide an overarching blueprint, identifying weaknesses and addressing them before it got too late.

Council rejected the review but Wells and Wade still believe it’s a crucial step in moving into the next year and a half.

"To me it’s just doing our own due diligence, getting our house in order, being ready to deal with the decisions we’re gong to have to make," said Wade.

In the meantime, O’Reilly is attempting to get his council in order.

Perhaps in an effort to shake things up a little and provide some new perspective, O’Reilly changed the seating arrangements of the council table at last Monday’s meeting, recognizing this is the half way mark.

It’s the first time he has ever done something like that.

"I think that mixing (it) up is a good thing to do," he said at that meeting.

For the next half of this term council must face tough decisions, like the location of the Olympic athletes village and the parameters of the new multi-million dollar library.

O’Reilly admits that he must get his council back on track and functioning collectively as a team to face these decisions during the next half of this council’s term.

"I just need to get us working on some rules on how we’re going to communicate and set some standards on how we’re going to get this work done," he said.

"Because right now it’s not working as efficiently as I think it can be and I’m hoping we can improve upon that, because I think that’s what the community expects from us."



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