Our Rutland: Raising the Bar on Public Engagement
A neighbourhood project in Kelowna shows what small communities can do
This story is part of a series about the changing role of municipal government in Canada — the factors influencing the change and the creative opportunities it offers.
It was originally published by Axiom News on September 25, 2014.
Smaller Canadian communities with limited budgets are using new tools and methods for public engagement — and raising the bar on what is possible.
A project underway in Kelowna, B.C., “Our Rutland,” makes a good example.
Rutland is a neighbourhood on the edge of the city’s core that has been renewing and redefining itself over the last few years. This year, the city made $100,000 available for an improvement in the Rutland Town Centre.
Instead of proposing one, Kelowna launched a community engagement initiative to ask for “$100K Worth of Ideas.”
Open-ended consultation is not something people are used to when city planning decisions are made, the city’s community engagement consultant Kari O’Rourke freely admits. Cities don’t normally seek this level of input. “We’re often just ‘informing’,” she says.
Open-ended consultation is not something people are used to when city planning decisions are made, the city’s community engagement consultant freely admits.
The city prepared for the project by collaborating with an exiting collective of local stakeholders: the Uptown Rutland Business Association, the Rutland Residents Association, and members of the Rutland Parks Society.
Together these groups called themselves TRUST — The Rutland Unified Stakeholders Team. They formed a citizen panel, under city-created Terms of Reference, and were involved in all aspects of the process until the final project was chosen.
TRUST members played a lead role in promoting the project during a three-week idea generation phase in February. City staff kept the discussion focused by giving examples of what $100,000 could buy: street furniture for a park; lighting; maybe a multicultural garden.
And the community responded. 123 citizen ideas were submitted.
At this point, a friendly, low-cost online engagement tool called MindMixer played a part in the project’s success. Kelowna was one of the first Canadian cities to adopt the tool. All the submitted ideas were organized, commented on and rated with MindMixer.
The number of submissions was well above what the city anticipated it would evaluate. Staff heard from the community that people enjoyed being involved, and being asked.
The city identified the five top-rated ideas. It did a feasibility analysis to make sure they could be delivered within the available budget, and then opened up the finalists to more comment using MindMixer.
Again there was strong response. The winning project is widely discussed, community-driven and community-selected. It combines two of the most-favoured ideas: a public market, and related improvements to the city’s Roxby Park, where the market will be held. The new market will be a substantial expansion of a flea market that now runs weekly.
Improvements to the park will include a gateway feature, signage, electrical work, outdoor furniture, attractive lighting and a colourful resurfacing of a portion of the parking lot.
The winning project is widely discussed, community-driven and community-selected. It meets a goal area residents have expressed for a long time: a vibrant people place.
Overall, the project meets a goal area residents have expressed for a long time: a vibrant people place that gives more life to Rutland Town Centre. The work is now in detailed design, and will be delivered in the spring of 2015.
The planning process felt different to staff. People were more engaged, informed and appreciative. A combination of full engagement with neighbourhood leaders and wider public participation through new online tools shifted the “Our Rutland” project to the top of the spectrum of public participation: collaboration with the public on many aspects of the decision, and leaving the final decision in the hands of the public.
In fact even the name of the project changed. The city originally suggested it be “My Rutland.”
It’s a result that Kari, and her supervisor, Kelowna’s city manager, Ron Mattiussi, have both enjoyed. “As a planner for thirty years I’ve always said my biggest issue was a failure of effective public participation in the planning process,” Ron says.
The old style is listing three options and asking people to pick one, he says. And that isn’t the same thing as real public participation — in which people are genuinely involved in a project early enough that they know they’re contributing to it rather than just reacting to it.
