Dodgy council procedures

WE have for a number of years hammered Councillors and Council staff about (the absence of) liveability planning in Tasmania. In this capacity we have very recently alerted all Tasmanian Councillors and officers of a free top quality workshop on new methods of traffic calming to be held in Glenorchy on November 17.

One Councillor got back to us remarking that he would “pass it on to his traffic people for comment”. Agreed: Passing on the article to the traffic people is good; in fact absolutely necessary. The “traffic people” need to be smothered in such information on proven working models, technology, etc etc. if this State ever wants to move out of the urban planning and public design misery that it is in.

However, it should have been the very same “traffic people” who pass such information onto Councillors; and that for a decade or so! The officers should have by now so educated Councillors that we are experiencing soft modern traffic solutions everywhere and reaping the economic and social benefits.

In fact traffic planners and engineers should be demanding state-of-the-art policy directions from their (Alderman-)masters so they can implement modern standards along with the supportive public education programmes deemed ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY in all planning literature.

Instead, our “traffic people” have for so long (in their own words, and with some obvious self comfort) resigned themselves to planning, designing and implementing for “liability, not liveability”, thus reinforcing the NIMBY and adversarial level of public awareness.

Elsewhere in the world it has been the engineers, traffic planners, urban landscapers who have driven the technology whilst advancing ongoing public education of what revitalisation, traffic calming, pedestrianisation etc, etc is all about.

We are looking at a major governance issue here, namely the structure of policy decision making. It has become 100% clear to us over years of lobbying for liveability etc that NO BODY is in charge of Council and public education and policy making.

Buck-passing

On the coal face this leads to absurd conversations such as the one witnessed at last Tuesday’s Planning Week Forum (Strategic Planning — who is planning Tasmania?) by the Planning Institute Australia in conjunction with DPIWE where a Council planner and a Councillor of the same Council accused each other of not enabling their respective bodies to carry out street tree planting (as just one example).

Buck-passing in ALL Councils is used as a well oiled management tool. But it obviously leads nowhere fast (and has done so for a very long time). Yet everyone has been most busy, most engaged, most hard working, but also very frustrated and finally most resigned and sick and tired of it all (while still willing to take the pay cheque, of course). This style of management is NOT NORMAL in much of the rest of the World.

Dealing with the governance STRUCTURES that lead to the above policy vacuums should be urgently addressed proactively by Councillors (who else?).

The other area of the necessary turn-around of planning and implementation practices lies in addressing the quality of the Council personnel. The low level of expertise and expectation and the high level of superglue, tunnel vision, silo isolation and self-preservation mechanisms by senior Council employees is not conducive to good outcomes.

Add to that a low level of Council and public urban planning knowledge and experience and it becomes clear why young, fresh traffic engineers, planners, landscapers etc with the new knowledge content of their professions have no chance of putting anything into practice in such a climate. You can’t expect them to spend their whole professional life trying to convince the old hard-edge guard that the world has moved on. They can only stay here by giving up their professional integrity or move on to save themselves (see also the doctor exodus). Either way, Tasmania slides backwards one more step.

The knowledge is out there, well documented. The practices are out there. The benefits are being experienced on a large scale. The wheels have long been invented. All we need is enough humbleness of all players to sit down, study the work and then quietly but swiftly leap frog into the real world without trumpeting the “we will be world leaders” tune. Tasmania’s population’s health, wealth and mental vitality depend on Local Councils updating their policy making structures fast.

Lesley and Peter Brenner are authors of PIA Planning Award winning “Liveability Slide Show, Wake-up call for Tasmanian urban planning”