The late, great American comedian Milton Berle once said “a committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.” Two years ago a sleepy driver behind the wheel of a pickup truck obliterated the Squamish entrance sign. In most jurisdictions, that mishap would result in a quick signage restoration.
But not in this neck of the woods, where attention has been diverted from the prompt replacement of a plain wooden display to the broader, more time- and resource-hungry focus on branding. What should have been a simple procedure became an elaborate, committee-driven production with an elastic time horizon.
The Signage and Downtown Gateway Task Force segued into the hiring of a branding consultant, the establishment of a Brand Development Committee, and more recently, a spin-off Brand Leadership Team. Even with all those deliberative resources, by the late spring of this year, there was still no sign of a sign.
If we look at the bigger picture, although some inroads have been made, the District of Squamish has yet to hatch a comprehensive economic growth strategy, despite having a catalogue of economic development committee iterations in place for as long as anybody can remember.
On another front, nine years ago a comprehensive document called the Squamish Affordable Housing Strategy was produced by a consulting firm amid lengthy deliberations by the Squamish Affordable Housing Task Force. Nearly a decade later there are still an estimated 200 homeless people in town. The newly created Affordable Housing Advisory Working Group has been delegated by council to review the problem.
Recently, a bulky, 13-member committee, sporting a halo of political correctness and inclusiveness, was created by the district to navigate the technical shoals of the Woodfibre liquified natural gas proposal. That assembly will be under some fairly rigid time constraints, so the services of a professional facilitator have been enlisted to keep participants on track.
Still, those proceedings could end up mired in a deluge of flip-chart musings and PowerPoint animations. For many observers, a broader concern is that the panel will just fine-tune the existing proposal, as opposed to assessing whether the LNG facility should proceed at all.
One of the major goals of the Service Squamish Initiative was “to shift and transform the current organization to a higher performance level.” On too many occasions, that hasn’t happened. Instead of taking performance to the next level, the over-reliance on consultants and committees by successive municipal councils has deferred decision making and entangled the process in another layer of bureaucracy.
