Part 2: The Role of Administration—Advise Council
The role of administration is to:
Provide stable, effective, service delivery.
Advise council.
Implement council decisions.
What I loved about my time on council is the sheer complexity of political decision making. Municipal decisions require subject matter experts to provide context, effective public engagement to understand community impacts, and then a decision maker—council, to make the final, hard judgment call.
If we are disappointed in council every four years, there are deeper problems than the specific people around the horseshoe. We have to recognize how the structures in place affect political decision making.
Right now municipal councils across Alberta ask their administrations to provide a recommendation for every ‘Request for Decision.’ This places administration in an unfair, impossible position.
Removing recommended options from administration won’t solve everything, but it’ll protect staff by returning them to their role as a neutral advisor and it improves accountability and transparency to council decision making.
What does it mean to ‘advise’ council?
The role of subject matter experts
Our cities depend on complex systems requiring specialized skills and long range planning. Clean water, life saving emergency response, complex infrastructure projects require strong organizations to support that delivery. You need subject matter experts to plan and execute those projects.
City Hall has engineers, lawyers, project managers, contractors, police, firefighters, social workers, human resources personnel, and high level administrators to name a few. We need them because each of these areas operate in complex legal and regulatory environments. I’m as frustrated as you with the over regulated world we live in, but it’s also the current reality.
These experts are able to use their experience to outline risks, benefits and tradeoffs for every decision our community must make. But they don’t make the final decision. Council does.
The role of council members
There are no qualifications to be a council member. Democracies don’t choose their leaders from some pool of aristocrats. Anyone can be mayor, premier or prime minister. Their job is not to be experts, but to understand and communicate community values.
That’s what political decisions are. They’re about values.
There is no expert political advice
When people lament we no longer listen to experts in politics they misunderstand the role of experts. During the pandemic, some people were always saying ‘we need to listen to doctors!’ But public health was only one factor provincial politicians had to consider. If public health was the only thing we cared about we would reduce highway speeds to 30km/hour. That might reduce traffic fatalities to zero but also comes with tradeoffs we may not accept.
Political decisions seek balance between equal, opposite values. In the case of highway speeds we try to balance efficiency of travel against safety.
We shouldn’t speak of political decisions in terms of right and wrong, but in terms of risks, benefits and tradeoffs. Political decisions are calculated risks. Just because a council decision goes sideways doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. What matters is that council and the public understand the risk.
Understanding risk is what experts are good at. Understanding the values of a community is what council members are good at.
The structure of council ‘Request for Decisions’
There has been lots of discussion these last four years about role clarity. The format of council ‘Request for Decisions’ is a good example of where this separation of roles has been confused.
Each ‘Request for Decision’ comes to council with the same components:
The background of an issue
Options considered
A council requested, recommended option from administration.
This is where the problem is—the recommendation.
As soon as administration recommends one option out of the many—they enter the political arena. They cease to be neutral experts. A council motion for a particular option is a political opinion. And now administration has their thumb on the scale.
If you watch city council meetings you’ll notice how often discussion flows between council and staff. When staff recommend a motion, staff are now in the uncomfortable position of having to defend their recommendation. They are pulled into the political debate. Asking staff to recommend decisions is not a fair request.
When I was on council from 2017-2021, I occasionally found myself arguing against the recommended option. I not only needed to convince my colleagues, I also had to argue against administration. This format creates unnecessary confrontations between staff and council.
Council discussion should primarily take place horizontally across the table between council members, not vertically between council and staff. Staff need to participate in order to clarify facts and projections, which are necessary for productive debate. But we don’t need a tenth council member.
A suggested fix: No more staff recommended options
This is not administration’s fault. This format is common across the province. There is a simple, straightforward fix. Change the format of ‘Request for Decisions’ to stop including recommended options.
Council chose this format at some point in the distant past. And council has the power to choose a different format.
Staff’s job is to support council deliberations by developing fully fleshed out options. This suggested fix returns staff to their neutral role and places the spotlight squarely on council, where it should be.
Leave the political fight to council members.
Accountability
When staff recommend an option for council it creates confusion around accountability. One of the reasons it’s hard to hold City Hall accountable is due to this decision-making structure. Staff will say, ‘Well, council made the final decision’. City Council will say, ‘Well, our expert staff recommended this’. Both are right and now neither are responsible because responsibility is diffused.
There are no expert political opinions. Council needs to own their decisions.
Council needs to practice debate
This format hurts council’s ability to communicate their decisions to the public because they don’t get to practice. The better the debate around the horseshoe, the better council would be able to sell their decisions to the public.
Recommended options create a political debate around a Yes or No, instead of a debate centred on A, B, or C (and any combination in between).
9-0 Votes
When I ran in 2017 I complained about the amount of 9-0 votes from the previous council. I didn’t realize at the time how much the ‘Request for Decision’ format contributed to this.
Developing options through better engagement
Public services, land use planning, and economic development are no less important than our core services, but they are harder to execute because there are more variables to consider.
I attended council meetings for three years before I ran. What bothered me was not that I disagreed with some of council’s decisions during that time. Disagreement is to be expected. What bothered me was that often there was an obviously reasonable option or some key information that wasn’t listed in ‘Request for Decisions’. That absence impoverished the debate. That’s what transparency means to me—that all the options are on the table.
Making better decisions on these issues requires a higher, more productive level of engagement with the public. There are no perfect solutions. Every option comes with downsides, which the public and staff are good at identifying.
Whether to build a $150 million water park, or build an apartment building in Harlow, or increase incentives for economic development all carry risk. We need to make sure council has all the options.
Then let council make the final, hard, judgment call.
Working in these complex environments requires its own kind of creativity to understand how things could be different.
Additional reading:
I wrote about this issue previously in 2020.
