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My response to today’s lead editorial in the Guardian, submitted as a letter to the editor:

A recent Guardian editorial (Community policing equals safer cities, August 12, 2009) discussed the elimination by the Charlottetown Police Services (CPS) of its Community Policing Officer position. As noted, this move was a recommendation in the Organizational Review & Evaluation of the CPS released earlier this year; however, this should not be understood as a retreat from community policing principles. Rather, the CPS is in the midst of reorganizing and developing a strategic plan that will put the task of community policing at the core of the CPS Mission: “As guardians of the Birthplace of Canada, the Charlottetown Police Services, working with the community, will provide high quality police services and maintain a safe and peaceful environment for residents and visitors.”

Responsibility for spearheading this mission will now reside with our newly appointed Deputy Chief, who has been tasked with oversight of Operations and Community Policing. This provides the advantage of having a senior ranking officer undertaking a larger leadership role, and helps to underscore our objective to have all members playing a role in community initiatives.

The strategic plan also defines our Vision, or why we are here: “To work in partnership with the community to enhance the quality of life through Crime Prevention, Enforcement and Education.” In addition, four of the eight CPS Core Values specifically address the community, and in the near future the mayor will be appointing members of a new Community Consultative Group that will help guide and validate the priorities of the CPS.

All of our considerable efforts over the past five months have been focused on aligning CPS operations with national policing trends and implementing a truly comprehensive philosophy of community policing, as articulated by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police this week in Charlottetown. The job of connecting with the community will not belong to any singular officer, but to the whole of the CPS.

We are on the right track. Council has committed to ensuring we have the best policing service in the country. We are renewing the CPS in ways that are already improving public confidence, and will pay dividends for the whole community well into the future. The commitment to the shared values of the CPS and the community at large is best exemplified by our new slogan: “Our City. Our Community. Our Responsibility.”

Councillor Rob Lantz
Chair, Police & Bylaw Enforcement Committee

A front page story in the Guardian today requires a correction. Although I only read the online version, which was updated this morning after I spoke to the reporter, I can only assume the print edition repeats the same mistake: that the City will be paying police officers for off duty work performed for third-party clients. This work is known as Paid Duty, or Extra Duty. The story strongly implied that the cost of this work would be a new expense and that taxpayers would be subsidizing security for private businesses.

Not true. Members of the Charlottetown Police Service will continue to perform Extra Duty, but clients will be invoiced for the service and payment will be through the Police’s regular payroll. User pays — not the taxpayer. Big difference.

Related thoughts here.

Councillor says city must act on vacant downtown properties
EDITORIAL STAFF
The Guardian
23/01/09

Coun. Rob Lantz says the City of Charlottetown needs to act on the number of vacant properties in the downtown core.
The city approved a height variance request from Homburg Invest Inc. on Thursday, which paves the way for a proposed $45-million, three-phase development to go ahead.
Homburg is moving ahead with plans to construct an eight-storey office building on Fitzroy Street, a 10-storey hotel on Grafton Street and major renovations to the interior and exterior of Confederation Court Mall.
Lantz said if Homburg is going to show that much faith in downtown Charlottetown the city corporation should help mitigate the risk by making sure the core is firing on all cylinders.
“That can’t happen when a significant number of important buildings are left empty and in such a state of disrepair that they can’t even be leased, even if the owner was prepared to lease them,’’ Lantz said.
“We need to engage the owner of these properties, along with the two other levels of government and the business community, and find a way to get these spaces back in the market, whatever that takes.’’
Homburg has launched a $5-million lawsuit against Nemir Tweel Corp. Ltd., Christopher Tweel and two companies identified only as 2950243 Canada Inc. and 100946 P.E.I. Inc., all which own a number of properties in the downtown, alleging the properties are rundown and affect the developer’s current business (Confederation Court Mall) and what they are currently planning to do.
“If the owners are unwilling to make the necessary investments, perhaps
they should sell instead of sitting on these properties. They’re too important to sit empty.’’

This Guardian editorial is at least the second news report I’ve seen that states incorrectly that the Idle Wheels property “has been rezoned”. It has not been rezoned. IRAC has ordered the City to rezone the property, but in its order, IRAC states, “there is insufficient evidence and argument at the present time to persuade the Commission that an automatic rezoning should follow in these circumstances.” In other words, it’s not rezoned until council rezones it.

I agree that residents should have been made aware of the appeal, but unfortunately most of council — including the councillor who represents the area — was not even aware of the appeal until the decision was reported in the media. Consequently, we could not notify residents of something we ourselves did not know. This also caused us to miss the window to appeal the decision, but we are pursuing other avenues because council feels it is not entirely appropriate for an appointed commission to be ordering elected officials to make planning decisions, particularly when the order clearly states “that the City did follow all the procedures required in its Bylaw.“

I just had a call from a member of the Upton Farm Preservation Network. She was concerned about this line in a Guardian story about a possible concert next summer:

Upton Farm is the desired location for the 2008 show, a piece of property that is split in half by the Trans-Canada Highway at Mayfield. The concert would take place on the south side, in behind the Maypoint Road.

This is the second time the Guardian has wrongly identified this as the proposed venue. This part of the farm has never been considered as a location for a concert. It is the north side of the farm that is under consideration, immediately west of where the bypass highway meets the Upton Road [view on map]. I’m sure this is causing a lot of unnecessary stress to residents in the Maypoint/Orchard Hill Park area. I’ve asked the Guardian to correct the online version of the story and print a correction in tomorrow’s paper.

How do you say ten things in one sentence? I don’t know, but I should learn. I’ve had a few — not exactly frustrating, maybe unsatisfactory is the word — incidents with the media lately. It could very well be that I’m just way too long-winded, but if I’m invited to give my views to a member of the media, I expect to be given the chance to express them in full, and “get the message out”, as they say. Maybe that’s unrealistic. I probably just need a crash course in media 101.

A good example would be my email to a Guardian reporter, posted below, about my dissenting vote on the tennis courts in Victoria Park. I was asked to explain myself so I did, at considerable length. I gave permission to quote me on anything in that email, but it disappeared into the vacuum of cyberspace (until I decided to post it here, which I suppose is exactly what this blog is for, but to be honest… very few people actually read it).

Then yesterday, I spent a good portion of my lunch break explaining my personal views to a reporter about the ongoing efforts to secure a major concert in Charlottetown next summer. The meat of the story, I quickly discovered, was the supposed bidding war between Charlottetown and Summerside. Now, there are a few things I’m just not able to discuss at the moment, but otherwise I was very forthcoming. My twenty minutes translated into a very brief morning news item, and the things I felt were important were again left on the cutting room floor.

Before I continue, I should say, I don’t blame the reporters involved. I know they always set out to tell a story and sometimes they have a narrative in mind that may not jibe with mine. Fair enough; I’m not the news editor.

So today, I was asked to give an interview on camera as a follow-up to the same concert story I did for the radio yesterday. I agreed, and duly reported to CBC headquarters at 5:00pm to record the interview. In this case, it wasn’t so much that the thrust of my message didn’t make the news, because I didn’t get a chance to “go there”. When the interview was interrupted several times with variations of “I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but let me ask the question again this way”, I knew I wasn’t going to get a chance to say the things I wanted to.

Now again, I don’t want to get blacklisted by three of the best reporters in Charlottetown. I’m not blaming them. In fact, they’ve taught this rookie a valuable lesson. And they’ve given me the opportunity to prove to myself, here on this blog, that yes, I am indeed LONG winded.

Coming soon: The things I wanted to say.

While managing some of the thousands of comment spams that bombard this website, I inadvertently deleted some legitimate comments that were made on some recent posts. The anti-spam routine that normally identifies and sequesters machine-generated comments (mostly ads for prescription drugs) allowed a few illegitimate comments through, and when I was deleting them I accidentally deleted some real reader comments and even a couple of my own. I was able to recover most — if not all — the ones I trashed, but I’m not sure I got them all. So, if you happen to notice a comment you made on this website has mysteriously disappeared, it was not intentional. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.

On this same topic, I’ve been meaning to mention The Guardian, and specifically their comment policy. It was a great move when they started allowing readers to comment on stories online; it’s an excellent way to gauge the public’s reaction to an issue and engage readers. But something that has always bothered me is their seemingly random and vaguely defined criteria for deleting comments. The comments are not always insightful nor necessarily coherent, but it’s a guilty pleasure of mine to read through them (even if they are criticising me and my fellow councillors). Quite often you will notice a reference by one commenter to another comment that obviously no longer exists. Otherwise, when the Guardian moderators delete a comment there is no way to know, and no explanation is given. It would be helpful if when a comment is removed it does not simply disappear into a black hole, but rather gets replaced by an explanation, such as “Comment #14 removed for excessive profanity and potentially libelous statements”, or whatever. There’s something that makes me uneasy about The Guardian’s comments feature because you have no way of knowing how many comments are deemed inappropriate and deleted, or why.

You’re welcome to comment here with as much libelous profanity as you please… to a certain extent.

Tyler Richardson, an organizer for the 2009 Canada Summer Games, presented options at a public meeting on October 5th for adding two additional tennis courts in Victoria Park in order to achieve the minimum eight required for the Games’ tennis venue. In the end, both options as presented were fairly universally rejected — for various reasons — by the crowd in attendance. A commitment was made to go back to the drawing board and consider some of the many good suggestions that were made. Thanks to Nigel Armstrong from the Guardian for capturing the event on video.

This recent article in the Guardian was not perfectly clear on a couple of points. First, council did not ‘OK’ the retail development in Winsloe because we had no power to okay it, or deny it. The development is taking place on a stretch of road that remains the jurisdiction of the provincial government. The developer acquired all the necessary approvals from the the provincial government and the project can go ahead regardless of city council’s opinion. The developer did volunteer to enter into a Development Agreement with the city’s Planning Department, which gives the city some assurance that the development will conform to certain standards, but that agreement has not, or had not, been signed.

Secondly, the city’s Planning Board recommended against an application to rezone a property on St. Peter’s Rd. for the purpose of a possible grocery store, among other things, because there are already two large parcels of land in the immediate vicinity that allow for commercial development such as supermarkets, shopping centres, grocery stores, retail stores, etc. Councillor Devine’s point, which was not entirely clear in the comments attributed to her, is that we need to strengthen the existing undeveloped commercial nodes in East Royalty, rather than creating more commercial space by rezoning existing residential property. The issue is not whether the residents of East Royalty should or should not have a supermarket or other commercial developments in their neighbourhood. It was the opinion of Planning Board that the property in question need not be rezoned for such development to take place in East Royalty.

Incidentally, this story sparked a conversation with a small grocery store operator in my ward yesterday. He expressed surprise that anyone would want into the increasingly competitive and difficult grocery market in Charlottetown. For small operators such as him, Sunday shopping has simply made an already crowded market even more difficult to compete in.

Of the few visitors I get to this website, many are looking for information about bottled water bans in general, or specifically the ban put in place by the city of Charlottetown. I know this because my statistics application identifies the search engine string a visitor used that led them here, among other interesting data about visitors. For example, I noticed that someone using a computer on the Radio-Canada network had visited last night and this morning after having searched for “city hall charlottetown bottled water“.

I assumed a reporter was doing some research for a story. By mid-morning I received a call from Sophia Harris who was putting together a story for Compass (our local CBC evening news show), which was also to be part of a larger story being produced for The National (our national CBC nightly news show). I agreed to meet Sophia at City Hall around noon where I had a priorly scheduled meeting. We shot some staged footage of me and HR Director Andrew Thompson filling our paper cups with Charlottetown’s finest municipal H2O, and I answered some questions to the best of my ability.

This was the second time this summer a reporter had tracked me down via this website to discuss our bottled water ban. Several weeks ago, I received a call from Kim Arnott, a freelance writer for the Municipal Information Network, who wrote a story about the current trend away from bottled water.

Given the almost daily visitors here who are curious about the issue, I expect we’ll hear more and more stories in the media and very likely many municipalities following Charlottetown’s lead. For me this ban makes perfect sense from four different perspectives:

1. Purchasing bottled water reflects badly on us, as the purveyor of clean water services in Charlottetown. We should enthusiastically endorse our own product because it is excellent;
2. Bottled water is expensive;
3. Bottled water is not an environmentally benign product. The particular brand that the city used to purchase was shipped from western Canada, which leaves a huge carbon footprint, not to mention the waste in landfills;
4. We should discourage the effects of market forces on something every human needs. It shouldn’t become the new oil.

I’ve heard a steady stream of “black suit” comments since Saturday’s article in the Guardian about the clothing allowance provided to councillors at the beginning of each new term. I think I’ll wear my old blue suit to next Monday’s Council meeting.