Its a fairly standard political tactic. Indicate change in direction by knocking off a top bureaucrat and hope, as he heads out the door, he takes some of your baggage (as well as any hes responsible for) with him.
In a nutshell, thats what has happened with the citys director of planning Brent Toderian.
Its hard to pin down the exact point when it entered the minds of the folks in the mayors office to fire Toderian. Long before the last election, I suspect.
Ironically, the official announcement that he was getting the boot came as delegates gathered in Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»this week for a global forum looking at the future of cities sponsored by Mayor Gregor Robertson.
You could say Toderians entire career with Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»has been bookended by these types of conferences. Six years ago, just before the then 36-year-old relative stripling from Calgary was hired to replace planning department co-directors Anne McAfee and Larry Beasley, delegates were arriving here for the World Urban Forum. That, by the way, marked the beginning of the baggage build-up for Toderian.
Sam Sullivan was mayor and wanted to impress those delegates, so he cooked up a proposal his chief of staff tagged EcoDensity. Sullivan ignored the public and his council and ran it quickly under the noses of Beasley and McAfee before announcing it to the world.
By the time Toderian turned up, EcoDensity was a done deal; Sullivan even patented the term. And to make matters worse, the citys neighbourhoods were in an uproar; for the past several years, many had gone through a lengthy and difficult visioning process to develop neighbourhood plans. Now all that work was being thrown out and they were handed EcoDensity fully believing it would destroy their communities.
It was Toderians unhappy job to convince them otherwise.
His reputation with community groups would never recover. And it was only made worse when Robertson and Vision took over. Their project that put noses out of joint was called STIR (Short Term Incentives for Rental). It was and is an incentive program for developers to encourage them to build affordable rental housing.
Again, there was little or no public consultationa chronic feature of Robertsons first term.
The first opportunity West End neighbours had to voice their concerns at council led to Robertsons notoriously unfortunate open mike condemnations of those f**king hacks.
It was left mostly to Toderian on the staff side to try and massage the program.
While all this was going on, Toderian was building up baggage of his own with developers. Planners know the relationship between developers and city planning is central to the power of the whole planning department.
And so here was Toderian expected to fill the shoes of Beasley, a man who was either feared or revered by the development community. It wasnt that Beasley would give in to developers, although at times he took private meetings with them and undercut decisions by his own planning staff. And it wasnt that he would read them the riot act, although he would take time to explain why what they wanted could not be done. It was more that he was undeniably a guy they could deal with.
Toderian left no such impression. He would never bend. More often he would lecture. One former staffer told reporters, Brent has a personality that didnt help.
When Robertson came to power, developers were already demanding Toderians head. The mayor and his council cut him some slack to see how things would go. But that problem didnt go away and only added to the ones Visions policies created. He was a dead man walking.
When Robertson thanked the audience at the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Convention Centre Wednesday morning for taking on the challenge of city-building, it was conveniently clear that would be happening without Toderian on the citys staff.
