The Vision 2050 Project
A $180,000+ Boondoggle
Boondoggle:
A Work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of
having value.
Vision 2050 is the quintessential definition of a boondoggle - an expensive
project undertaken by City Council and paid for by Owen Sound residents
and businesses. Two years later, our local paper The Owen Sound Current, had to
petition for and pay over $500 to get access to the actual answers to the Survey
through the Freedom of Information Act. To date, Council still has not made the
thousands of responses available to the public nor have they posted them on the
city's website.
What council has provided to its constituents are
Summary Presentations prepared by Jay Pitter Placemaking, with no solutions laid
out by Council, and Briefs that point out the already obvious needs of Owen
Sound. The overwhelming majority of council-members tone-deaf response to
resident and business owner concerns has permeated the running of our city for
more than a decade. The idea that this expensive project of navel-gazing has
resulted in no real plan to immediately address residents concerns is
astounding!
We would like to be clear on one point. We are not
questioning the quality, reporting and professionalism of the company that
conducted the Vision 2050 project. Jay Pitter Placemaking, based in Toronto,
"focuses on mitigating growing divides in cities across North America."
In her report, there are many observations and commentary on the issues facing
Owen Sound that are valid. For example, "the strained trust and lack of
engagement between residents and the city itself... was another common theme."
and "When asked how likely they would be to recommend Owen Sound as a place to
live, just 25% of respondents were labeled as enthusiastic promoters, while 40%
were detractors." And finally, the glaring absence of the words tax¯
or property tax¯ is truly remarkable. That was a significant topic
throughout the Survey answers, but appears nowhere in the Summary. There have
been lone voices on council who have questioned the study, but they have been
swiftly overridden.
The observations and comments from Vision 2050 have
been made by the citizens of Owen Sound for more than a decade. At
$180,000+
price-tag on a 3 year study for a city with 21,612 residents is entirely
wasteful. The boondoggle is council's commissioning of an expensive study to
provide us with information that Owen Sounders already knew.
The actual
dollar cost paid out for the Vision 2050 Study by Owen Sound residents and
businesses so far is $180,000. But we also need to consider the cost of
countless hours of city staff devoted to this study over the past two years. The
addition of City Hall staff hours spent on Vision 2050 may indeed balloon the
cost into the quarter of a million dollar range ($250,000)!! And what is
to be said about the past two years of no growth, no median income improvement,
a deteriorating downtown core and nothing but increases in our property taxes?
What has that cost us?