Two weeks ago I wrote about frustrations people are having getting permits at Vancouver city hall. I had been collecting horror stories from applicants, but I wanted to let the city explain its side. I knew that a senior bureaucrat was working on improvements, so I called her to find out what she was doing. Sorry, not allowed.
All media inquiries have to be routed through the city’s communications department, which insists on emailed questions.
When you start in on a column like this, you’re not always sure where it’s going. So I submitted a shotgun list of questions in the hope of covering all the possible bases, not knowing which ones were key. For all the good efforts of the communications staff, there were too many to be answered before my deadline, so I had to run the column without any response from the city.
This was my personal biggest bump up against a City of Vancouver communication strategy that has been frustrating virtually everyone covering city hall since Vision Vancouver took over.
In Business in Vancouver reporter Bob Mackin’s estimation, secrecy is its goal. He describes it as a provincial-style strategy brought in by city manager and former provincial deputy minister Penny Ballem, reflecting a cynical federal strategy perfected by Prime Minister Stephen Harper: “It’s corporate-style communications built around a permanent campaign, where the party in power controls the message and prevents opponents from questioning them. It feels like you’re dealing with a corporation, not a taxpayer-funded civic government.”
City hall reporters I talked to uniformly agree.
Darah Hansen, who has been covering city hall for the Vancouver Sun since November, says the communications staff always respond, but there’s always a delay. “Nobody has explained to me why I can’t talk to senior staff directly. You run the danger of getting things wrong when it has to be routed through various people.”
Veteran city hall reporter Frances Bula says every reporter in the city is “mad” about this.
Vancouver Courier reporter Mike Howell agrees: “It’s been extremely frustrating. It’s just ridiculous. We take a big deep breath before taking on a city story.”
That assessment is in stark contrast to the city’s emailed doublespeak statement to me that “[close to 40 designated] spokespeople are equipped to provide the response that the media expect.”
To make a command-and-control policy like this work takes more than a small communications department. It takes a big one. In 2006 when staff department heads were trusted to talk to the media, the city spent $636,110 on communications. By this year that budget had soared to $1.9 million, with the biggest jumps coming after 2010, although the city says new functions have been transferred to that budget from other departments, so year-over-year comparisons are unfair.
Mackin cautions where all this can lead. “This kind of secrecy was behind the corruption in Quebec. Surrey publishes on its tender page the names of all the companies that bid, the value of all their bids. You can’t get that information out of Vancouver city hall.”
As it turned out, the day after my deadline, I got an email saying the city had just completed a four-year review on permitting. Council has since voted to spend $26 million to reduce the number of permits from 636 to 98 and consolidate 11 customer service counters into one.
I would have put that good news in my previous column if I had been allowed to have a simple 10-minute adult conversation with the senior staff member in charge.
Apparently that was a risk worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid.
