My vision of Calgary is a sustainable, thriving, culturally rich network of great neighbourhoods.
Before becoming a member of City Council in 2010, I spent 10-years in professional practice as an award-winning urban design consultant, as a deeply engaged community advocate in East Calgary and as an academic involved in community-based action research.
Today, my mission as an elected official remains the same: I will work relentlessly to be your voice, to use my leadership and professional skills to carry on with the task of transforming Calgary into a sustainably prosperous, democratically engaged and culturally vibrant city.
I have our best future forever on my mind. This is my passion and my life’s work.
My Great Neighbourhoods mission has been focused on transforming our approach to planning and development to allow mixed-use neighbourhoods by right. With the Developed Areas Guidebook supporting the Main Streets Program, the GreenLine TOD work, and a next generation of local area plans, this is underway. Additionally, the next four years will see the revamp of the MDP with the lessons learned from this work, and, finally, a new Land Use Bylaw that will for the first time ever integrate policy and market aspirations with the law of the land. Finally, and along with this work, we need to completely streamline our development permitting processes, eliminating change of use permits and other wastes of time and resources.
While we are seven years into a successful program of cutting red tape, zero-based reviews, intentional management, the reform of our audit function, and sporadic departmental reorganization, my Great Neighbourhoods mission is working towards a city-wide reorganization in line with Community Services' successful refocusing on geographically located interdepartmental teams. Additionally, the commitment to transform our civic facilities into multi-use hubs, the de-cubicleization of our workforce into a mobile, neighbourhood-based civil service, and the community-by-community development of neighbourhood-specific service packages are the pathway we're on towards better and more efficient/effective program delivery.
Unfortunately the reform of our revenue framework is a longer term project than is ideal. Fortunately, with the Big City Charter we've maneuvered ourselves into a position to be able to have this conversation - right when it's now abundantly clear that we absolutely need to. My Great Neighbourhoods mission has been adamant that our revenue collection should move from a property value-based assessment (which creates perverse subsidies/incentives) to a blended approach between ability to pay and cost of servicing. I also stand with the Chamber that a 1:3.2 residential to non-residential assessment is unsustainable.
Our Civic Innovation Lab needs to fire on all cylinders as an intake for, and operationalizer of new ideas.
I think the Baldwin Plan for a one-stop get your business up and running shop is a winner that needs to be executed.
I'm hugely supportive of the establishment of a City of Calgary Real Estate Board (populated similarly to the Calgary Planning Commission) to expedite city real estate decisions as an outcome of the pending departmental zero-based review.
We have to remain focused on delivering the ecosystems of innovation and economic diversification that are Great Neighbourhoods.
As per my my answers to 1 and 4.
In the immediate term, the city-wide expansion of the program we rolled out in the centre city to eliminate change of use permits and expand allowable uses.