Crestwood Plan: Bad Decision Based on a Flawed Process

Special Report: Education

Crestwood Plan: Bad Decision Based on a Flawed Process

It's not too late for the Board to step back and reconsider a decision on which future Hamiltonians will look back with amazement and disgust.

By Ryan McGreal
Published February 14, 2012

As the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board reluctantly reveals its planning documents, it is increasingly clear that the Board's plan to sell the Board of Education building and move to a new facility on the site of Crestwood School is a bad decision formed under a flawed process.

So far, we have access to an evaluation matrix comparing 18 prospective sites against 12 weighted criteria and detailed evaluations of the 18 choices.

Several glaring issues are immediately obvious.

No Option to Stay

First, the list of alternative locations under consideration does not include the option to stay at 100 Main Street West. This makes it difficult to assess whether and how any of the alternate locations is better than the option to stay and renovate.

Also confounding the issue is the fact that the cost estimate of $16 million in capital expenditures and $28 million for cumulative operating costs is not broken down by facility but provided as a lump sum.

Accessibility

Second, the weighted scores for the various criteria are suspect. For example, Crestwood has a higher score for "accessibility" than Jackson Square, which seems dubious at best.

Both sites have excellent automobile access with abundant nearby parking, but Jackson Square also has excellent transit, walking and cycling access. Crestwood is a relatively short distance from the Limeridge Mall bus terminal, but is poorly accessibly by other modes.

More fundamentally, a central location is intrinsically closer and more accessible city-wide than a peripheral location.

It may be that Jackson Square's lower score is due to the "Terrible" rating it received for "Off site parking rates" and "Sufficient for parking needs" - categories that carry the second-highest and highest weighting ranks, respectively.

Given that downtown Hamilton has some of the most abundant and affordable all-day parking of any large Canadian city, including a large lot directly under Jackson Square, this assessment is difficult to take at face value.

Two Equal Candidates

Third, even if we set aside these questions about the weighting and scoring, Crestwood is not significantly better than the next highest option, Jackson Square. They have nearly identical scores: 86.69 and 86.49 respectively.

Given that the weighting must necessarily have an element of the arbitrary to it, the Board has a responsibility do better than naively pick the highest score when evaluating the results.

Jackson Square Removed

Even though Jackson Square is effectively tied with Crestwood, it was removed from further consideration without any explanation in the published documents.

The October 18, 2010 presentation to trustees lists the sites with overall scores over 80, but drops Jackson Square from its site review even though it scores higher than the other sites that were carried forward.

Community Feedback Ignored

According to Ward 1/2 Trustee Judith Bishop in a recent essay, "There were community consultations and the Board heard clearly that staying in the downtown core was seen as important."

However, community feedback is not even one of the selection criteria, which leaves me wondering why the Board bothered.

Poor Transparency

Too much of this process was conducted away from the public. Even the reports on which Trustees made their decision were withheld for several months before the Board finally published them.

Similarly, the video recordings the Board was supposed to have made of the presentations and delegations related to the Education Centre process in 2007 appear to have gone missing.

Not Too Late

It's not too late for the Board to step back and reconsider a decision on which future Hamiltonians will look back with amazement and disgust.

Please make your voice heard:

tim.simmons@hwdsb.on.ca, robert.barlow@hwdsb.on.ca, studenttrustee@hwdsb.on.ca, judith.bishop@hwdsb.on.ca, ray.mulholland@hwdsb.on.ca, todd.white@hwdsb.on.ca, laura.peddle@hwdsb.on.ca, lillian.orban@hwdsb.on.ca, wes.hicks@hwdsb.on.ca, alex.johnstone@hwdsb.on.ca, jessica.brennan@hwdsb.on.ca, karen.turkstra@hwdsb.on.ca, dlcouncil@hamilton.ca, lbroten.mpp@liberal.ola.org, ahorwath-co@ndp.on.ca, presdnt@mcmaster.ca

Ryan McGreal, the editor of Raise the Hammer, lives in Hamilton with his family and works as a programmer, writer and consultant. Ryan volunteers with Hamilton Light Rail, a citizen group dedicated to bringing light rail transit to Hamilton. Ryan wrote a city affairs column in Hamilton Magazine, and several of his articles have been published in the Hamilton Spectator. His articles have also been published in The Walrus, HuffPost and Behind the Numbers. He maintains a personal website, has been known to share passing thoughts on Twitter and Facebook, and posts the occasional cat photo on Instagram.

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By Borrelli (registered) | Posted February 14, 2012 at 14:06:16

Thank you for highlighting the deceptively "objective" evaluations process. As with any overly technical approach to legitimizing a decision, this one successfully obfuscates the process by breaking it down to a large number of component parts.

This may sound face-valid, but it belies the simple reality that someone still arbitrarily chose weights for each factor.

Which is to say, if daddy wants parking, daddy's gonna get parking.

Raise the Hammer

Special Report: Education