On Thursday night many high-ranking City of Guelph officials got together at the Delta Hotel and Conference Centre to pat themselves on the back and celebrate good, sound city planning. This was not the week to do that.
At city council on Monday, the great dog park debacle ended with a three-hour debate about proper procedure and governance policy. Everyone came spoiled for a fight, but instead we got an excruciating glimpse into how the sausage is made.
February’s Committee of the Whole meeting saw the sudden possibility of the complete withdrawal of fenced-in leash-free dog park facilities, both complete and in progress, from the City of Guelph after a couple of people argued against them. To be precise, four out of a total of six delegates were against the parks, which is obviously an appropriate sample size in a community of 138,000 people.
The sample size was significantly bigger at this week’s council meeting. There were 27 delegates, and 257 correspondences, plus a petition with nearly 5,000 signatures.
Naturally, none of this was heard by council because Mayor Cam Guthrie did what should have been done back during committee, which is ruling that the motion to flush a plan down the toilet was out of order.
At the time, the justification for not having a motion to reconsider was that there was more to the plan that was passed in June 2019 than just the approval of the first three fenced-in leash-free facilities, but the whole point of the plan was to lay down the ground work for developing additional facilities throughout the city.
When you take out the directive to build the fenced-in parks, all the June 2019 plan did was enshrine the status quo for people walking their dogs in the city. It did nothing to answer the needs of a growing city and a population looking for amenities that other municipalities seem to be able to build with relative ease.
At the same time, the committee motion ended up framing these issues as a decision between siding with poor, put-upon area residents, or siding with lazy, uncaring dog owners that don’t want to be good neighbours. It also set up this impression that the people living around Peter Misersky Park are under siege from people in other parts of Guelph, and that no one in the area was enjoying this new amenity.
Anecdotal evidence is, at best, imprecise, but the correspondences to council painted a much more complex picture of who’s using the park and why.
One of the letters to council was from a mother who just received a service dog to assist her autistic daughter. Service dogs need to be able to interact with other dogs regularly in a contained environment like a fenced- in dog park so that they’re not distracted by other animals while they’re “on the job.”
Another letter was from a young woman who’s a veterinary student at the Ontario Veterinary College who trains service dogs. She, and her fellow dog trainers, use the dog park at Peter Misersky for similar reasons, and would gladly use a more local park if a fenced-in area was established closer to her home.
There was another story I found compelling written by a woman that lives with her mother and her brother who had both in the past exhibited a bit of Cynophobia, aka: fear of dogs. They live near the dog park, and you would think that they would be among the loudest dissenters, but this woman noted that her mom and brother had started to warm to dogs because of the park.
What I found disturbing in the correspondences was the repeated reference to people being harassed and bullied for using the park, and if I have one regret in not hearing the delegations, it’s that the person in question doesn’t have to answer the allegations that levelled against them.
Why is council re-writing policy on the fly period?
Two points make a line, not a pattern, but it’s the second time in the last couple of months where council has heard from a handful of people and decided that their well-laid plans don’t work after all.
That’s why Thursday’s celebration of planning felt so off-kilter. City council as shown itself wilfully vulnerable to a small group of loud people, and then feel justified to undo hundreds of hours of staff time, and then, in this case, redirect staff to spend hundreds of hours more to come up with a new plan.
Are we seriously a city that loves planning so much, that we’ll happily keep going back to the drawing board and never act on a finished plan? It’s starting to look like it.
