Councillors with the City of Cambridge are paddling in both directions when it comes to the future of the city’s water, seemingly split on who should decide how the supply should be divided up across future developments.
The back-and-forth stemmed from a recent public meeting centred around a proposed water allocation policy, which is working to make clear who should be the final decision-maker around where that water should go from project to project.
That decision is whether it should be a task for city staff or for city councillors.
A presentation that was made during that meeting pushed that city staff should be the ones to make the final decisions, but under certain guidelines that would be established by city council.
Councillor and Cambridge Mayor Jan Liggett largely sided with the findings in the presentation, saying that, oftentimes, council can have their personal biases skew what would be impactful decisions for the community, pulling their favour in different directions.
She argued that, in this case, due to the complication centred around water allocations, city staff are in a key position to better understand and better respond to those possible projects as they arise.
“It depends on who is chattering in our ear at any given point in time, which developer is talking to us or lobbying us. I am confident in leaving this issue, because it is a very serious issue, in the hands of staff who are qualified,” Liggett said.
“At some point we have to let go of that thought that we are the end-all and be-all of these decisions. This is a totally different type of decision.”
The presentation followed a similar suit to others in Kitchener and Waterloo, where council would agree upon a general guideline and policy that would govern city staff in regard to how they would go about making water-taking decisions.
Not all of council agreed with the views of the presentation or with Mayor Liggett.
“Council is elected to make these decisions, and we are accountable to the public for how our finite water resources are managed,” said Councillor Helen Shwery.
“It doesn’t mean that we need to be experts or engineers. We can do the same thing, like we do with every other item here that council has to make decisions on. I just feel this is no different.”
Shwery went so far as to say that taking the process away from councillors would also, likely, take much out of the hands of the general public, adding that, “The public needs to be part of the process and removing that authority from council just strips us of our responsibility.”
Staff, on the other hand, argued that decisions made by council could give the public the thought that decisions being made were solely with potential bias and political agendas in mind, rather than sending the water where the community really would need it to go.
They argued that having city staff make the final decisions could eliminate that perspective from coming to fruition.
The policy, while discussed by councillors, was not finalized during that public meeting, with council set to talk about and vote on that water allocation policy on Tuesday, July 21.
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