Who Get’s to Cook in the Hell’s Kitchen of Sustainability?

We Choose on November 15^th (Local Government Election Day in BC)
(A version of this article was originally published in The Island Word, November 2008.

by hans peter meyer

One of my mentors, a former Vancouver Island mayor, proclaimed (way back in the mid-1990s) that, "Local government is the Hell's Kitchen of sustainability." In 2005, the last time we got to cast a ballot for the folks who cook in our local Hell's Kitchen, the "s-word" wasn't even part of the political lexicon.

Today, with the help of people like Al Gore and Premier Green Campbell, it's got a new-found cachet. Unfortunately, our local Hell's Kitchens have only gotten hotter in the dozen or so years since my fave mayor made her prescient comment. In fact, things are getting so hot that if local politicians don't act quickly, within a generation our cities and towns will face financial crises driven by climate change that will make the current market collapse look like a minor event.

This is important stuff for us as citizens and taxpayers to ponder as we inch towards November 15^th, the day we get to chose who gets to cook in the kitchen of local government. That, my friends, is local government election day in BC. By the time you read this, it'll be too late to nominate anyone, and it'll be too late to really organize around the few candidates who really have a grip on some of the sustainability issues facing our communities. Nevertheless, there is time to put a couple of thoughts together, talk to the neighbours and the kids, before casting your ballot. And folks, I urge you to please get out and cast that ballot. Because we need local politicians who can stand the heat, and who can read the recipe book of sustainability.

The heat that's coming isn't just from climate change. The survivability of our communities and neighbourhoods will force some hard decisions in the next few years. Making the right choices now may not be popular, especially with those who want to cut taxes for short term benefit. Making good choices now will, however, mean the difference between a community that is thriving in 25 years, and one that is unable to pay its own way because it is (literally and figuratively) swamped.

There may only be a few candidates who get the drift of this. As voters and taxpayers, this makes it very important we act strategically. And effectively. One way to do this is to only put a mark beside the names you know will act in the long term interests of your community. Don't get sucked into the mugs game of cutting taxes for the sake of cutting taxes. Pay attention to who is talking about the real issues, not just the attention-getting, fear-baiting stuff like taxes and crime. Yes, these are important. But if we focus on these at the expense of the need for long term investments in physical, social, and cultural infrastructure, we're actually setting ourselves up to pay higher taxes and deal with more social unrest and crime down the road.

Affordable housing strategies, even in our small towns and cities, that encourage diversity of income in a neighbourhood can make a difference to issues like criminality and addiction. This doesn't mean our local governments become social welfare agencies. It just means we take care not to create economic segregation through our development approvals. Exclusive communities, informal as much as formal, are the flipside of ghettos. The community that allows one permits the other. It's ironic that one of the most "business-oriented" municipalities on Vancouver Island is also the one leading the way with innovative affordable housing policies, policies that are resulting in attractive suburban developments that include "affordable" homes cheek by jowl with their upmarket cousins.

This kind of a strategy leads to the human scale, somewhat "messy" reality of what small town life really is like. This is a reality of diversity of incomes, diversity of lifestyles, diversity of opinions about what and how community functions. It is in this diversity, this messiness, that urban life actually really shows its strength, its ability to be flexible and innovative. Economic segregation, whether it's built around social housing or a golf course, doesn't help us be more flexible. Instead, it encourages feelings of "us" and "them" that intensifies to outright fear and loathing when crisis blows into town. Communities that sustain human scale - diversity of incomes, face to face contacts, celebrations, etc - mitigate much of this fear and make our lives more meaningful. It is this scale of life that we, as citizens and members of community, are challenged to create and sustain every day as we drive, walk, or otherwise move through the roads and streets of our neighbourhood. It is also something that we need to think about when we cast our ballot: How will this candidate work to maintain or rehabilitate the sense of human scale, of personability, in my community?

Which brings me to taxes. As citizens, we too often behave simply as tax payers, worried mmore about our wallets than about whether the taxes we are being asked to spend are being invested wisely in community sustainability. Compared to the big leagues, local government tends to be a fairly lean operations. Our region has experienced significant growth and change in recent years. We're also just starting to notice the various effects of climate change. Candidates should be making the case against tax-cutting and for strategic investment - for the long term benefit of our civic wallets.

For candidates short of ideas on how to make some "local government strategic investments," I'm offering this short list:

• Expansion of public transit infrastructure (get people out of cars and trucks reducing demand for big ticket tax items like bridge and roadway construction and maintenance);
• Expansion of recreational and cultural services (support healthy families and the capacity of "cultural entrepreneurs" to grow the cultural industries we have in our region);
• Investment in housing that integrates income groups (reduce social costs of segregation, create the "simple but messy" small town experience);
• Rehabilitation and/or development of natural systems (mitigate extreme storm effects, assist with the cleaning of water, sustain the aesthetic and spiritual qualities that make our small cities and rural areas attractive places to live).

November 15. Lest you forget: Your chance to pick the ones taking your place, taking the heat in our local 'Hell's Kitchen of sustainability.' If you don't vote, don't complain about what the cooks dish out.

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©hanspetermeyer.ca / 2008