Karen Mackenzie
Northern News Services
Monday, July 30, 2007

IQALUIT - Iqaluit's city council hopes to build a long-term vision for its future with a short-term addition to its staff.

Councillors voted late last month to bring Isabel Budke, a senior associate of the not-for-profit International Centre for Sustainable Cities (ICSC), on board for four months to initiate its first long-term planning process.

"I understand my position in this as a sort of a catalyst, starting things out and preparing the ground for somebody else to take over," Budke said.

The city committed $58,500 to the project, with ICSC covering her travel cost.

Once her term begins on Tuesday, she'll work with city staff, local residents and other stakeholders to begin formulating a sustainable action plan for the city.

"We're talking 50 to 100 years, we're not just looking at five years or 10 years," she said. "In our mind a healthy, vibrant and sustainable community is one that provides the best quality of life for the present generation as well as for our children and grandchildren, making sure they inherit the same quality life as we want for ourselves today."

Such a plan can help a city adjust to long-term trends such as global warming, she said.

Michèle Bertol, the municipality's director of planning and lands, said, "this project is one that the mayor has championed for long time now, and I think it's a major tool for any city to hold a good long-term plan that is based on a collective vision of its residents."

After generating communications material to create awareness of the project, Budke will work with the city and its residents to assess how sustainable the city is in three key areas: socio/cultural, economic and environmental.

The assessment will examine things like municipal service delivery of waste management or recreational programming, and the city's financial and human resources capacity to address these issues.

"Infrastructure is a big one," said deputy mayor Al Hayward.

"The city has doubled and doubled again since the air force base was established in the '50s. Also tourism, maybe ways of attracting the tourist population. We're already the transportation and government hub of the territory, but maybe we need something special, to really boost our profile," he said.

The final major component of Budke's term will be to establish a local planning team to continue the work after she has left.

"This is not a process that can be completed in the four months that I hope to have. It's not like I'm coming in and carrying out the assessment and then telling people, 'This is what it is,'" she said. "It's about working together and finding people to take over that role."

Before joining the ICSC, Budke worked for five years as a treaty process adviser in British Columbia.

Her interest in city planning was "partly influenced by the treaty process, because if a community doesn't really have a plan for where they want to go in the future it's really difficult to make decisions in the present on what will be good, and be good and beneficial for the community in the future," she said.

She also worked with Indian and Northern Affairs Canada to develop a handbook on comprehensive community planning for aboriginal communities.

Budke proposed her upcoming secondment while visiting the city in March as a representative of the PLUS Network (Partners for Long-Term Urban Sustainability), of which Iqaluit is a member.

An avid outdoors person, she said she hopes to take a little time out to enjoy her surroundings in Nunavut.

"I did that a bit when I was there last, and I'm really looking forward to taking in the land," she said.