Council chambers overflow for public hearing

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This article was published 20/08/2024 (634 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Council chambers at Brandon City Hall were filled to capacity for a public hearing on the proposed new city plan on Monday evening, forcing some attendees to stand near the door and hang out in an adjoining hallway.

After almost two years of development and public consultations, Monday’s hearing was the final opportunity for the public to chime in before the plan is submitted to Manitoba’s municipal relations minister for approval and then passed back to council for its final OK.

The meeting was not complete before the Sun’s print deadline. Both those opposed and in favour of the plan had approached the podium to speak.

Even before the regular meeting started, chatter in the hallway from residents waiting to come into chambers was loud enough that it started to drown out speakers during a preceding special meeting on the reconstruction of 26th Street.

At the beginning of the hearing, Mayor Jeff Fawcett reminded guests of decorum rules, warning that speakers would only get five minutes each to speak and the entire hearing was only scheduled to last one hour.

A recent hearing in Niverville on the Winnipeg Metropolitan Region’s new development plan titled “Plan 20-50” was recently postponed after the meeting venue was filled beyond capacity.

In an introductory presentation, Nickel said that the plan under discussion on Monday was for Brandon alone and no other communities.

He said Brandon is required to have a city plan under provincial law and that it is good practice for a municipality to plan for where and how the city will develop.

Summarizing the 80-page document, Nickel said it focuses on three major ideas: “growing city,” which focuses on land use and infrastructure; “moving city,” which focuses on transportation; and “healthy city,” which focuses on health, housing and well-being.

Nickel emphasized that the active transportation elements in the plan are not aimed to prevent people from driving private vehicles but instead provide a variety of safe options for navigating the city.

At one point during the presentation, Fawcett interrupted to request that people in the hallway speak more quietly so that everyone could hear Nickel.

The first public speaker, Leila Praznik, said she and her partner navigate the city on foot and bicycle and are in favour of more active transportation options.

While what she described as 15-minute city conspiracy theorists think that the ability to drive will be restricted, Praznik said non-motorists’ movement within the city have already been restricted through car-centric decisions and designs. She also spoke in favour of the city plan’s methods to boost the supply of affordable housing.

Some believe that there is a plan to implement 15-minute cities where residents are unable to leave a portion of their community beyond a 15-minute drive from their home.

Lorraine Hackenschmidt, who pushed for the formation of a committee to review and potentially ban books in Brandon School Division libraries last year, spoke about Edmonton’s implementation of its own city plan.

She said that Edmonton is raising taxes to implement some of the items on its plan and said the same thing would happen in Brandon.

Afterwards, she called climate change a hoax perpetrated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and China, decrying climate change action items in the city plan. She said the city plan’s item about monitoring traffic counts is an authoritarian breach of privacy.

At the end of her speech, Hackenschmidt received a loud round of applause from people in and out of chambers.

Fawcett asked residents not to clap or cheer to keep proceedings moving smoothly, but it did not stop further outbursts from the crowd.

Debbie Dandy introduced herself as a climate activist and lauded climate items in the city plan as communities to Brandon’s north and west deal with wildfires made worse by climate change. She also expressed a desire for more transportation options in the city, the replacement of aging infrastructure and resources for the unhoused.

Kara Morrice, who ran for a spot on the Brandon School Division’s board of trustees in a byelection last fall, said the proposed plan does not adequately address how Brandon will pay for the renewal of aging infrastructure.

Kathy Smitzniuk, who served Brandon School Division trustees with pseudo-legal “notices of liability” regarding supposed pornographic material in school libraries last fall, claimed city council does not have a mandate to implement a 30-year plan when only elected for a four-year term.

She said it was unfair for the hearing to be the final chance for public input when not everyone who wanted to hear the presentation in chambers was able to, calling for another hearing similar to what happened in Niverville.

The mayor responded by pointing out that there have been public hearings for almost two years.

Violet Joss directly asserted that the city plan is an attempt to implement a 15-minute city in Brandon, complaining that the document was too long and filled with word salad.

She also cast doubt on the city plan’s claim that growth would pay for growth and spoke out against the idea of housing density as it would lead to people “living like packed animals on a factory farm.”

Then, she called for a referendum on the city plan.

Quentin Robinson, who ran for the NDP in Brandon East during last year’s provincial election, said he had been to previous city plan meetings where the public was given the chance to speak in a large venue. He said the plan’s active transportation elements aren’t going to take people’s ability to drive away but offer them the freedom to travel in the way they want to.

Phil Dornn, president of Samson Engineering, said while he agrees the city needs to plan ahead, he didn’t think what was prepared took local realities in mind. He said the idea of 15-minute cities comes from the World Economic Forum, an economic think tank that is a frequent target of dissident groups.

On top of the speakers, one letter of opposition to the city plan was received.

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