City of Brantford Council has decided to move ahead with the next steps of constructing a new Sports and Entertainment Centre in the downtown core.
Council approved proceeding with the next several steps of building the facility during their special Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday, October 8 and while many residents are discussing whether or not this was the right decision or the right time to proceed with this project, there is a much graver discussion that needs to happen.
I don’t want to get into whether or not the Sports and Entertainment Facility should be built, now or in the very near future, I want to focus on the mistakes made by Council as they came to their decision on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
I want to take readers back almost one year ago as, at that time, City of Brantford Council voted in favour of conducting a public consultation campaign regarding the proposal for the new Sports and Entertainment Centre during their regular meeting on Tuesday, November 28, 2023.
Shortly after this announcement, the municipality held their, one and only, public consultation meeting at the Brantford Civic Centre on Monday, December 18, 2023. Approximately 60 people were in attendance to listen to three presentations, the first from Ron Bidulka, Managing Director of KKR Advisors, followed by Maria Visocchi, the City’s Director of Communications and Community Engagement, and Brian Hutchings, CAO for the City of Brantford.
Members of council were in attendance but none of them spoke during the meeting, and they were the ones that were ultimately responsible for the decision made two nights ago.
Fast forward a few weeks to early in 2024, Brantford Council unanimously voted to formally consider the new Sports and Entertainment Centre a priority project for the City of Brantford during its Special City Council meeting on Tuesday, January 23, 2024. During that meeting, Visocchi provided Council with an update on a survey, conducted through Let’s Talk Brantford, which was held from December 1, 2023 to January 5, 2024 and was completed by 575 participants.
“We asked what the impact on Brantford’s local economy would be, and 80.7 per cent of participants said it would be positive, 8.1 per cent said it would be negative, 3.3 said there would be no impact and 7.9 per cent of participants said that they were unsure,” said Visocchi, during the January meeting. “Based on those numbers, there was overwhelmingly positive sentiments, suggesting endorsement from those that participated in the survey.”
Visocchi went on to address the public meeting that occurred on December 18, saying “over 100 people attended that public meeting and there were mixed sentiments.”
“Some people fully supported the initiative and gave us comments not unlike some of the comments we heard from the delegations tonight,” said Visocchi, during that same January meeting. “But there were others present that questioned how the city would pay for the project, as well as if it fell within what the city’s priorities should be.”
As far as I know, that was the last and only time there was any sort of public consultation regarding the proposed Sports and Entertainment facility until two nights ago when Council graciously allowed three residents to voice their opinions. During the special meeting on October 8, the delegates were only allowed ten minutes to speak in favour of the proposed facility or against the the proposed facility but not get any sort of clarification from Council or have any of their questions answered.
City of Brantford staff and Council held one consultation meeting where somewhere between 60 and 100 people attended and “handed” out one electronic survey that 575 residents completed. So, approximately 700 people expressed an opinion on the construction of a new $140-million facility but there are nearly 110,000 people living in the municipality.
In full disclosure, I wholeheartedly respect anyone who runs for municipal government. It is not an easy job as councillors need to balance the needs and wants of every constituent and, in this case, the job is even more difficult due to the size and financial implication of the Sports and Entertainment facility project.
Under normal circumstances, I truly believe we elect councillors to represent all ratepayers, aiming to do what’s right for all residents of a community and that we should trust them to make the right decisions, remain fiscally responsible and manage the day-to-day operations of running a municipality, from maintaining and improving infrastructure to finalizing operating and capital budgets.
This new sports facility is the exception. As I was watching the events of October 8 unfold, I couldn’t stop thinking about how disrespected I would feel if I was a resident of Brantford. Council making a multi-million dollar decision with very little public consultation, very little transparency on every facet of the proposal, and only a handful of residents voicing their opinions.
I couldn’t help thinking how I would have done things differently if I were a member of Brantford Council. Starting back in late 2023, I would have made a motion to have council hold a series of ratepayer meetings in all five wards with every single member of council on hand, as well as CAO Hutchings and Mr. Bidulka, and let the residents ask everything and anything they would like as it pertained to a new sports and entertainment facility.
When a municipality is considering a nine-figure expenditure, there is no doubt that it will have lasting impacts on their taxpayers (whether Council believes it will or not), they have a responsibility to keep their residents fully informed and residents have the right to ask council as many questions as they would like. Truth to be told, councillors have one boss and it happens to be the estimated 108,554 people that make up the population of Brantford in 2024.
After these ratepayer meetings were over, I would have made a second motion to allow the residents to approve or deny the construction of a new sports and entertainment facility through a plebiscite. A plebiscite by definition is “the direct vote of all the members of an electorate on an important public question.”
If spending almost $140-million on a sports and entertainment facility isn’t an important public question, then I truly don’t know what is. This was a decision that should have been left in the hands of the residents, not in the hands of 11 people who, for one night, forgot who they actually work for.
