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Originally Posted by counterfactual
I worry that the Staff have no interest in a Centre Plan that operates like HRMxD, providing development certainty (I don't believe City staff were ever happy with HRMxD, as it removed a lot their hard and soft power in development decisions about height, etc).
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It depends who you mean by "city staff" - they don't think as a bloc. In my experience the younger/newer staff members that I have met are really supportive of initiatives like HRMBD and generally wish there were more things like that and that they'd go farther. Some of the older staff who have been part of the system for decades might fit your description, but even then, certainly not all. HRM's urban design department is quite progressive and generally the staff wish they could do MORE "progressive, different-from-status-quo" stuff, not less. Most of them are happy to be rid of the "hard and soft power in development decisions about height" because having to constantly second-guess and negotiate things was extremely tedious and from what I understand basically everyone hated having to do that all the time.
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Instead, the Centre Plan has sat dormant for years, while HRM staff, instead, try these one-off "proactive" approaches, which have all ended badly, giving too much power to local NIMBYs.
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I'm not sure if you're intentionally framing it this way or if it's just how I'm interpreting it, but the Centre Plan hasn't sat dormant
so that staff can try one-off approaches, they are trying one-off approaches
because the Centre Plan is not complete. I forget the exact reason why it stalled, but two major factors were that resources were spread thin and that there was some conflict between the direction CP was going and other planning goals (obviously not ALL other planning goals, but enough that it was a problem).
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Another example of the City mucking up proative planning-- Imagine Bloomfield. Literally a decade of hard work by a community group was destroyed by idiotic City staff who awarded the project to an inferior bid just because it was backed by the financial dollars of the (then) NDP Provincial Government. Now that is sitting dormant too, after NDP lost. There were several far superior private sector bids, all ignored... was it a wink, wink, from Government to Government? From NDP political back channels?
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The bid was by Housing Nova Scotia, not the NDP government. Not the same thing. In 2014 Lydon Lynch Architects were brought on board to do preliminary designs for the development (which included extensive public consultation). To my knowledge the designs are not complete.
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And I'm not really familiar enough with what has/had been proposed for Bloomfield to comment on which bid was better, but can you give any concrete examples of how the other bids were objectively "far superior"? Or do you just mean that you preferred them?
As an aside (and directed at everyone, not just you), I would think twice before you call "city staff" things like "idiotic". Most of the ones I know are very smart and progressive and generally wish that policy was more progressive as well, and generally want most of the same things that we want (although "what we want" as a group here seems to be an increasingly fleeting concept). There's a reasonably good chance that some of them follow this forum regularly, and it's pretty discouraging to have your efforts dismissed as idiocy by people who don't actually know what you've been doing.
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