Brian Jackson, the city’s manager of planning and development, announced Sunday that he will retire at the end of this year. The Courier caught up with him Monday morning by telephone to ask him about his decision and discuss his three years at the city.
Why are you leaving?
I did it entirely for personal reasons. I’m 60 years old. I thought to myself, if I’m lucky enough to have 20 to 25 years left on this planet, how do I spend that time? I want to spend more time reading and writing, and travelling and spending time with my family and friends. So it was a selfish decision, I know, but it’s something that I felt I had to do. And when you look at what we’ve done [in the planning department] and what’s coming up, this is now a great time to be leaving.
A great time?
I’m going to be bringing forward the report on the [Georgia and Dunsmuir] viaducts in September. We’re going to be bringing forward the next set of recommendations on the heritage action plan. So the next wave of policy work, the next wave of major developments is all going to happen in 2016. So now is actually a very good time to leave.
There’s got to be something more to you leaving. The chatter on social media is that not everybody agreed with the way you ran the department, or that you had conflicts with Mayor Gregor Robertson and city council. So what do you say to that?
Absolutely not – no conflicts with council. The comments I’ve been getting back from council have been just lovely, to be perfectly honest. I believe that planners should be very apolitical and I try and give good service to Vision, Green and the NPA, and respond accordingly in a very neutral way to all of them. I really have an incredible management team that is very, very strong and I enjoy working with all of them.
You’ve made a lot of changes at city hall. You’ve reorganized the planning department and the development services side of things, increased the profile of the urban design division. So I’m sure not every member of staff thought this was a good idea.
There were people who didn’t like the pace of change, didn’t like some of the decisions. I’m not here to be popular. I’m here to do what I think is in the best interest for the citizens of the city, for council and for the staff. So decisions have been made but not everybody agrees.
As you’re aware, a large group of former planners have been critical of your decisions and your objectives related to development. Did any of that enter into your decision to retire?
This is not about former planners and what they have to say. But it is a distraction at a time when you’re trying to implement council’s ambitious agenda. It’s a significant distraction. This kind of scrutiny of a director of planning role has never fallen to this level before. I’ve had lots of support from people who can’t understand why people would do that.
What about the accusation that you and your planning staff are cozy with developers?
People say we cozy up to developers. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve had to say no to Bruno Wall [of Wall Financial], no to Ian Gillespie [of Westbank Projects], no to Concord. And those are things that the public does not see. I understand their perspective but I will always do what’s in the best interest of the city.
You’ve worked in California, Toronto, Richmond and now Vancouver. How much influence has politicians in those cities had on your work, and what is that relationship like?
Politicians in this city actually play a much smaller role than in a city like Toronto, where the city is organized into wards and the ward councillor plays a significant role in determining not only what type of development they’ll support but also the type and size and everything else. Plus in Ontario, it’s also determined, to a great extent, by the Ontario Municipal Board. But here, where you have councillors elected at large, they don’t have a personal stake, so much, in individual neighbourhoods. So whether it’s Raymond Louie or councillor[Heather] Deal or Andrea Reimer, or the mayor…I have to shoot down that balloon that’s out there, but they’re not here on my doorstep suggesting ways to move forward in terms of land use, density or heights. They’re just not.
You worked in Richmond before you took the job in Vancouver. How are the municipalities different?
In Richmond, the development scene is obviously much smaller. So when you go to a public hearing in Richmond for a development that might have 1,200 units in it, the public hearing will last for 10 or 15 minutes. Because people know that was anticipated [as part of the city centre plan], they know that the city made a conscious decision to concentrate the majority of its growth in the city centre and, so far, they appear to be supportive of it. Getting development through in Richmond was much easier, it was less small “p” political than it is here in Vancouver. Here, the citizens’ groups, the advisory groups all play a much stronger role in development than they do in Richmond. Also in Richmond, social media wasn’t as active as it is in Vancouver. And so both the official channels of trying to get things done and get a message across were much easier than dealing with both the official channels here, as well as the unofficial channels.
Am I right to assume the controversy surrounding the city’s initial plan to add towers as part of a new Grandview-Woodland plan was your biggest challenge?
Yes, I would say when we brought forward the emerging directions report in 2013, I had clearly misread the community’s understanding of what high density at Commercial and Broadway meant. We had to apologize to the community, indicate that we knew that there were other ways to land high density without going to a tower format. The narrative, the message and the wave of concern and outrage was such that we couldn’t get ahead of the message. So we agreed to re-set and create the citizens assembly. We’re listening, we’re determining the validity of their recommendations and we’ll be coming forward with a plan sometime next year.
Vancouver always seems to be under construction, even more so than previous decades. Am I right with that observation?
We are clearly at the highest rates of development that we’ve seen in decades, if not forever. The construction value of development is the highest it’s ever been. We hit $3 billion last year. Our rate is going to be the same this year. The number of development applications we’ve had last year, in some categories, was at an all-time record.
With that development, though, there seems to have been more neighbourhood groups form and complain about the changes in the city. Were you prepared for that?
What I said to council when I first started, is that all the easy decisions about where to accommodate growth have been made. We can accommodate them in North False Creek, we could accommodate them in the older industrial areas that are converting. The harder decisions about how to accommodate growth that we cannot do anything to stop are going to be coming to you as council over the coming years and decades, and we’re going to be going into those areas that have not experienced a lot of growth before. So that’s the kind of controversy that we’re seeing in Vancouver now, with communities that hadn’t experienced very much of any growth are suddenly experiencing some to a lot of growth.
I hear the term “transit-oriented development” a lot these days. So if council is set on developing around transit routes and hubs, has there been any thinking to getting developers pay more to fund more transit?
Yes. To be honest, with the referendum result, the mayor has directed us to look at different funding options and that includes contributions from developers to help make that happen. But we’re also looking at other funding mechanisms because one funding mechanism won’t be enough.
What do you hope your legacy to be?
I’m very proud of landing three very complex area plans [Downtown Eastside, Marpole and West End]. It’s also landing plans that actually have implementation strategies attached to them. It’s really looking at planning, not only in terms of doing bubble diagrams and pretty pictures, it’s devising plans that set out what the future land uses are for an area, set out what the community benefits could be and who’s going to pay for them and when they’ll occur. That kind of comprehensive approach to local area planning I don’t think was part of the paradigm for area plans before I came. I am also very proud of my heritage action plan. We hadn’t undertaken any work on preserving heritage since 1986. So the work that our consultant and our staff are taking on now is going to better protect our heritage resources than we have over the last 20 or 30 years.
What advice do you have for the person who will replace you in 2016?
They have to be available and on their game 24-7. They have to live by their phone, their email, and their texts because the council is very ambitious, the administration is very ambitious and you have to be at your game 24-7. You have to be thinking not only of implementation of plans and on the development side, but you also have to be thinking, generally, about how to accommodate growth in the future. You have to be thinking strategically, but you also have to be thinking about everything from the largest conceptual plan all the way down to how to get someone an occupancy permit. Because that’s what the portfolio involves.
This interview was edited and condensed.
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