After 'verbally aggressive' residents prompt pause, Brandon resuming moderated engagement on city plan
CBC
City planners in Brandon, Man., say they're taking extra precautions for an upcoming meeting about the city's future after some residents became "verbally aggressive" at the last public meeting.
A March 24 public meeting about Brandon's 30-year city plan took an "intense" turn when around 40 people attended, the city's new principal planner said.
Sonikile Tembo said some of those in attendance raised concerns about the "15-minute city" urban design concept, which promotes the idea that communities should be designed to allow residents to have access to their main daily needs within a 15-minute walk, bike ride or transit trip from their homes.
The concept has become the focus of conspiracy theories in other cities, such as Toronto and Edmonton.
"Suddenly there was a big group coming in saying that this is … part of a government agenda towards, like, lockdowns and enforcing restrictive measures and digital identity," Tembo said of the March 24 meeting in Brandon.
"As you can imagine, we were kind of caught off guard."
The concept of 15-minute cities, which dates back a few years, has been picked up by many cities to guide urban planning and design.
But some people have also recently claimed the concept is an elaborate conspiracy intended to limit individual freedoms by restricting people to movement within barricaded sectors of a city.
Brandon's 30-year city plan — a vision intended to guide growth in the city of roughly 51,000 over the coming decades — emphasizes the need for ease of access to services through walking or biking, giving it similarities with the 15-minute city idea.
That's meant what would normally be a mundane public information session boiled over in March, with residents coming out to air their concerns.
The March 24 meeting quickly became derailed by residents criticizing 15-minute city plans and interrupting staff, according to city officials.
City manager Ron Bowles was not present at the public engagement session, but was told by staff that "people were just very passionate" and "verbally aggressive."
"It was not a comfortable situation for our staff that were present at the event or for our councillors that were present," Bowles said. While the city welcomes public feedback, it needs to be conveyed in a safe and respectful manner, he said.
Mayor Jeff Fawcett, who was also not at the meeting, said city staff were caught off guard by the "aggressive approach of a crowd that came in."
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure.