Ralph Segal: On a Director of Planning

Worth bringing forward: Ralph Segal’s viewpoint on the role of the Director of Planning in the City’s hierarchy.  (For Ralph’s bio, go here.)
 
Prior to (Planning director) Brian Jackson’s stint, there was a Director of Development Services position responsible for managing the day-to-day processing of permits (while seeking greater efficiencies in these operations) and liaising with the Director of Planning and his staff (primarily Development Planners) when, under the Director of Planning’s exclusive purview, Vancouver’s unique Discretionary Zoning system’s qualitative design considerations on development applications came into play (which was frequent).
The Director of Development Services’s oversight of permit processing did not include reviewing the content of these qualitative design considerations. Escalating complaints from the development community some years ago that the process had become too demanding and lengthy, what with additional energy and other requirements tagged on, led, at the time of Brian Jackson’s hiring in 2012, to amalgamation of these two positions into a single General Manager of Planning & Development in the belief that this move could address these complaints.
Experience over the last 4+ years has shown that this arrangement generated its own problems, w.r.t. the city’s long-term healthy growth, all of which were exacerbated by the top-down management style of the since fired City Manager. A head-long pursuit, driven through her office, of too many ill-advised ultra-high density spot rezonings that often over-rode concerns raised internally by Planning staff, has eviscerated long-held proven Vancouver principles of urban design (this was discussed in my Feb.12, 2016 Price Tags post on CACs). Not coincidently, it has been during this same period that Vancouver lost a disturbing number of its quality experienced staff.
As Architect Joost Bakker points out in the Vancouver Sun article, this contingent needs to be built back up, along with a recapturing of the principles of urban design that had served Vancouver so well over the previous two decades and remain in place within the City’s Discretionary Zoning. Under a new Director of Planning these principles can be once again applied inventively and collaboratively by a resuscitated professional staff that will be given back the latitude to do their job with the vision and creativity required in today’s challenging environment of mistrust and cynicism over needed densification. And led by a Director freed up from the heavy administrative duties of permit processing overview. Along with the appointment of a new City Manager skilled in the art of facilitation rather than micro-management. A new dawn!