Not Alone in Our Infrastructure Problems

These are excerpts from an article published November 29, 2012  by Noel Keough in Viewpoint

This story begins a long time ago, as recounted in great detail by local historian Max Foran in Expansive Discourses: Urban Sprawl in Calgary, 1945-1978. In the 1950s, the City of Calgary essentially handed the responsibility for residential planning to the private development industry. Since that time, developers have delivered the suburban, sprawling, car-worshipping and fiscally unsustainable city we have today.

It wasn’t until January 2005 that the city recovered from that trauma and, with the leadership of aldermen such as Joe Ceci, embarked on an unprecedented citizen engagement to chart a new course. That effort culminated in 2006 at the World Urban Forum in Vancouver, where then-mayor Dave Bronconnier unveiled the imagineCalgary 100-year vision.

Eighteen-thousand Calgarians had a hand in crafting that vision. The citizen panel that led the process included Naheed Nenshi and Brian Pincott, who later became mayor and alderman, respectively, as well as the CEOs of both the United Way and Glenbow Museum. In July 2006 at a special hearing of city council, dozens of organizations presented letters of support for the document, including Sustainable Calgary, Calgary Economic Development and the Calgary Region Homebuilders Association.

Between 2007 and 2009, with the participation of thousands of citizens, and the unanimous endorsement of council, a 60-year road map on how to achieve the imagineCalgary vision was given legal weight in the Municipal Development Plan (MDP) and the Calgary Transportation Plan. Change is sometimes excruciatingly slow, but the planning process plods along. In December 2011, council endorsed the continued development of a growth management strategy that would give teeth to the MDP.

ImagineCalgary, the MDP and the growth management strategy represent the long road to fiscal prudence and sustainability for our city. The problem is that the road to fiscal prudence diverges from that of profit maximization for the development industry, and they are not amused.

The industry refused to endorse the imagineCalgary vision, they challenged the MDP process every step of the way and, in the final analysis, diluted the plan during a closed-door 11th hour deal with mayor Bronconnier. In the winter of 2011 they were successful in lobbying council to institute a 40 per cent taxpayer subsidy of infrastructure costs for greenfield suburban development — over $80,000 per hectare — rather than absorbing all the costs themselves. Prior to this, the city was on the hook for 55 per cent of suburban infrastructure costs.