Community safety, modernization: Whitehorse's council has adopted a roadmap for its term
On Monday night, councillors officially adopted their strategic priorities for the next three and a half years — broad goals such as infrastructure investment, community safety and supporting growth.
Mayor Kirk Cameron joined Yukon Morning's guest host Joseph Ho to chat through the priorities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does council decide on its strategic priorities?
Our strategic priorities become the framework, if you will, for this council moving forward. Unlike the Legislative Assembly, you don't have one singular platform following an election — you get seven people, all elected independently with their own ideas, their own thinking about issues that are important. They've all been out knocking on doors, listening to Whitehorse residents, and then we all come into council chambers with different perspectives.
So our first priority is to get alignment among the seven of us on where we want to take the next four years.
What kind of public feedback went into the setting of these priorities?
It started at the election. It starts with all of us knocking on doors, listening to Whitehorse residents talking about where they see our city going.
I think the big one I heard is the need for infrastructure. First, we're being impacted by growth. This city is, I think, fifth fastest growing in Canada. We're built around municipal infrastructure that, in many cases, goes back to the 1940s and '50s. And then we have climate change. We have the Robert Service Way escarpment to worry about. We've also got our aging water treatment facility. These things are all colliding at the same time to drive the cost up for us quite dramatically. So these strategic priorities connect exactly with this topic around infrastructure drivers.
The word 'modernize' comes up a lot in these priorities. Why is renewal such a big theme?
Whitehorse has this really interesting journey, starting out as being a pretty quiet little stop on the Yukon River, to becoming a major transportation centre in 1952. We ended up the capital city of the Yukon because of how much that transportation meant to the territory. But throughout all of that history, we kind of cobbled together Whitehorse.
We had that Second World War expansion from new federal programming in the 1960s that drove a lot of infrastructure. And so it's been kind of piecemeal over time — growing, but not necessarily all growing in the same direction. We also had a mine here, Whitehorse Copper, which again, drove a certain way and a certain approach to how this city evolved through that period in the '60s and '70s.
Now is a time we believe where we can get focused.
We can look at all of those drivers and we can say, 'OK, what makes the most sense over the next five to 10 years to build a community that we can rely on for a future which could very well be 70 to 100,000 people?' We don't know where it's going to ultimately top out. But you look at other communities like Kelowna and how fast that community grew over the '60s, '70s and '80s, well, we have the same possibilities here in Whitehorse, and we have to prepare as city council to be able to meet those demands.
So it's not only alignment internally within our own organization, our own departments. It's also alignment with our partners, whether it be the two First Nations here in Whitehorse, federal government or the territorial government.
Under the priority of good government, you have 'Modernizing City Council processes.' How do you see the council working differently?
Okay, this is near and dear to my heart. Our Procedures Bylaw is substantial and nitpicky in terms of how to manage and guide our council proceedings, and especially as they relate to our community, it's a fairly formal process. For example, if you come to the council table as a delegate to speak to us about something that's important to you, it's a pretty intimidating place to be. It kind of feels like you're in a courtroom and you got a judge sitting up there, and there's certain rules about how we are to behave within the context of asking those questions.
So those kind of hard and fast rules are centuries old, and this council is looking to see if there are ways we can break those down a bit, to soften up the way in which we do our business to make council a more inviting place for citizens to come and talk to us about issues that are important to them in our city.
You also mentioned that community safety is something that you heard a lot about, especially during the municipal election. You mentioned a Whitehorse community safety plan. What kind of action would that lead to?
We don't know yet, and that's the value of having an initiative like this, which is being supported by federal officers and territorial governments in a very big way.
When we first took action, it was the minister of Justice and myself who met with officials about moving this forward and getting this out to start, what is really a conversation with the community. We need to get input and insight from our community to give us the horsepower to put in place the plan that's going to make the most sense.
And it triggers another theme that's significant in our priorities document, and that's the notion of our partnerships. We have to really rely on federal but also territorial governments when it comes to policing, and when it comes to other supports within the community, to drive at that community safety.
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