Speaking Municipally

Mack Male:
How Taproot is approaching the election. This week, I'm talking with co-founder Karen Unland about Taproot's election project.

Karen Unland:
Plus, we'll hear from Councilor Michael Janz for his perspective on infill.

Mack Male:
Hi, I'm Mack.

Karen Unland:
I'm Karen.

Mack Male:
And we're...

Mack and Karen:
Speaking Municipally.

Mack Male:
Hey, Karen. We got it.

Karen Unland:
We did.

Mack Male:
Welcome back to Speaking Municipally. This is episode 317. It is the first of Troy's election hiatus. If you missed last week's episode, I really think it's worth going back and giving that a listen. You know, some changes to the podcast. Essentially, Troy is doing his Troy thing-

Karen Unland:

Mack Male:
... and he's taken a little bit of a break from the show for, the duration of the election. It's mutual. We had a good conversation about why. You listened to that last week, Karen.

Karen Unland:
I did, yeah. It was very informative. I love behind-the-scenes peeks. Hopefully, the listeners did too.

Mack Male:
Yeah, that's right, a little peek behind the curtain. as I said last week, normally I'll be hosting the show with Stephanie Swensrud, Taproot's, one of Taproot's reporters, who you've heard several times in the past. But it's summer. She's on holiday this week, and so instead, we're glad to have you here, Karen. And it's been a while since you've been on the show.

Karen Unland:
Yeah. I looked it up, and the last time I was here was episode 127.

Mack Male:
Oh my goodness. Really?

Karen Unland:
In May of 2021.

Mack Male:

Karen Unland:
I bel- that's the last time I was in the show notes at least, so, and talking about the election, so.

Mack Male:

Karen Unland:

Mack Male:
We'll have to have you on for something else, like when we do a wrestling episode or something.

Karen Unland:
Yes, absolutely.

Mack Male:
For those of you who don't know, Karen is a little bit of a wrestling fan.

Karen Unland:
I'm, I'm wrestling adjacent. I lived with wrestling fans, but yes.

Mack Male:
I have to ask since we're on the topic of wrestling, what did you think about Hulk Hogan's news? It seemed like a lot of support for him.

Karen Unland:
I-

Mack Male:
Even though he's gone the MAGA turn, you know?

Karen Unland:
Yeah. No, my opinion on Hulk Hogan is good riddance. Sorry.

Mack Male:
okay. There you go. I was never really into wrestling. A little bit for a while as a kid, and Hulk Hogan was the one that-

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
... kinda got me into it, which is, I think, the case for a lot of people. I didn't stick with it, obviously, so.

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
But we're not talking about wrestling. We're gonna talk about the election again. Here we are, four years later, another municipal election about to happen. and once again, Taproot has undertaken an election project for this municipal election. So, I'm sure some of our listeners have been around since the beginning and have... a- are somewhat familiar with what we did last time. Although, you know, four years is a long time. Even I forget some of what we did. We've been revisiting our old notes and-

Karen Unland:
Mm-hmm.

Mack Male:
... documents and all the things we did to plan last time, and it's like, "Wow, yeah, we actually did a lot." So, we're gonna talk a bit about that and then kind of shift more toward what are we doing this time and how is it different. Last time, it was called The People's Agenda. Give us the high-level overview. What was The People's Agenda all about in 2021?

Karen Unland:
So, it's inspired by this idea by Jay Rosen, a media critic who used to teach at New York University, called The Citizen's Agenda. And the idea is to make election coverage not about the horse race, not about who's winning, not about who's positioning themselves better vis-à-vis the others, but to ground that in what is important to the voters and how do we make sure that those voters know where people, that the people that are competing for their votes, as Rosen would say, stand on those things that are really important to them. So, we embarked on that. We called it The People's Agenda in 2021. It's The Citizen's Agenda kind of way of covering an election, which begins with a simple question, some variation on, "What is important to you?"

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
And then figuring out what to do with that information afterwards.

Mack Male:
This year, we tweaked our question a little bit. so, "What issues do you care about as you head into the election?" To reflect that's one of our core values at Taproot, care. but similar kind of process to that broader Citizen's Agenda project. And if I remember correctly, we called it People's because citizen implies something different.

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
Especially, you know, in the United States versus in Canada.

Karen Unland:
Yeah. Yeah. So-

Mack Male:
A little broader.

Karen Unland:
... I mean, wordsmithing. Who knows? In the end, I don't know that it was... In the end, it was our election coverage.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
And so, that's why it made sense to me this time to... It's called the election project. It's about the municipal election. This is what we're working on helping you with.

Mack Male:
Yeah. So, we built a microsite, edmonton.taproot.vote. We had a bunch of components there, candidate survey, a voter matching engine, information about the candidates who are running and where you'd, where to vote and all that kinda stuff. As you look back, you know, what are the sort of core components that stood out that we're gonna bring forward again for this time?

Karen Unland:
Yeah. Like, in 2021, all we knew is that we wanted to have The Citizen's Agenda approach-

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
... to ground our coverage in what was important to people, but we didn't really know what to do with that information other than what organizations like ours usually do, which is, "Well, let's do stories about it." And, you know, that is what we will do.

Mack Male:
We write the stories.

Karen Unland:
We wrote stories about it. We will continue to write. We already, the team has already started to write stories about it.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
But, the, insight that we came to along the way, and I don't know if we even figured this out as of May 2021, last time I talked about election stuff-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... was that there, that we had the power, thanks to you, because you know how to build things on the internet, to actually ask the candidates where they stand on these issues and then create what we call now, we didn't call then, a voter matching engine to make it possible for voters to take the same survey, see where they line up with the candidates, and go into...... the voting booth more informed with not that much effort, right? Which is important because not everybody, most people are not plugged into politics all the time.

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
That's why people listen to Speaking Municipally, because this podcast makes it easy for them to find out what's going on in 45 minutes instead of having to pore through the agendas or read a whole bunch of stuff. So-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... that's, that's kind of where we felt our way in the dark towards in 2021, and are being much more intentional and, organized about it in 2025.

Mack Male:
Right. Our candidate survey last time had 30 questions. We've decided upon 10 categories. We had three questions per, which was a little forced and a little artificial, but I think pres- produced a survey that was quite varied-

Karen Unland:
Mm-hmm.

Mack Male:
... and covered a lot of the different topics. Some of the questions were super high level, some of them were very specific, things that are no longer relevant. We've just done an exercise internally here to triage all of our past questions to see which ones might be relevant. and then as you pointed out, we could take that same survey as a voter and also answer those questions. So as if you were gonna be a councilor almost, in some cases, what would you have done?

Karen Unland:
Mm-hmm.

Mack Male:
Or on this topic, what do you think is important? And all of that was intended to, as you say, equip the voter with more information so they get into the voting booth, sure they've heard maybe the people on the radio or on the TV or they've seen the ads or whatever, but they also know something about where those people stand on issues. Do you think we succeeded at doing that? Do you think when we look back at 2021 that we had the impact we set out to?

Karen Unland:
sort of. So in the end, we had about 21,000 completions of the, of the survey, and we had about 80% of the candidates fill out the survey in the first place.

Mack Male:
Yep.

Karen Unland:
so that is more impact than I think anything else Taproot had ever done to that point, and was significant. But there's-

Mack Male:
And we were, we were surprised-

Karen Unland:
yeah.

Mack Male:
... at how many people used the voter matching tool, or how many completions we got.

Karen Unland:
Yeah. So that was a good data point.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
That's... A million people live here, so that's ... Not all of them are voters, but significantly more than 21,000 are. So, it's really important I think this time to kind of take that... You know you guys like to talk about pilot projects.

Mack Male:
Yes.

Karen Unland:
That was us, our pilot project, and then apply the lessons from that and make it bigger, better, more deeply informed by more people and used by more people.

Mack Male:
Yeah. I think one of the other things that stood out to me from last time was w- we didn't have the capacity to do everything we wanted to do, including following up after the fact. We did do some stories, right? About here's what people said on the survey, and here's where this issue is, but I found it interesting that other folks screenshotted the responses and would use that at the time on Twitter to, you know, share, "Hey, you said you... This is what you said you were gonna do, why are you voting like this?" So there was a little bit of accountability that came out of that. So that was I suppose not the intent of our project. Our intent was to help them make an informed decision, but it turned out to be pretty useful to have candidates on the record.

Karen Unland:
It did. I don't want to scare candidates away from doing it.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
I mean, candidates who are trying to get elected in good faith are gonna s- be honest on the survey and stand by what they say. That... As they should be doing on the doors. So, I don't think that it is a bad thing to fill out the survey. And I f- in fact, I think it's a really important thing to fill out the survey. It is h- especially if you're... Well, for all of them, but it is hard to knock on every door. It's impossible if you're running for mayor, and it's really difficult if you are running for council, and even knocking on a door doesn't get you know, in front of those people. This is one more way for voters to find you-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... if you are running for office, and the ones that believe in what you believe in to cast their vote for you.

Mack Male:
Right. The other thing I'd say about it is, it is a point in time.

Karen Unland:
Mm-hmm.

Mack Male:
So we know there were questions from last time that just don't make sense anymore. They're not relevant. It is a point-in-time kind of survey. It doesn't mean that things won't change and that you can't change your mind about something. I think especially if you're running for council, it might be that you're well intentioned but not as informed. And then once you get on council, you learn a lot more. You have a lot more context, a lot more information than you would have as a candidate. And so, you know, being able to explain, "Well, here's why my position changed," I think that's one of the things that Taproot does consistently in our, in our reporting that's fair, and we try to give people the opportunity to help us understand their positioning better. So we're not doing drive-by, "Hey, you said this and-

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
... now you're doing that." It's, it's like to help convey that understanding, that shared understanding that we have. And so I think there's opportunity for the survey to aid in that work.

Karen Unland:
I also think that we're, better at question design having done this once.

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
I mean, also we were kind of under some real significant time pressure last time. At a certain point, you just put it out because you can't wait any longer. We started working on this sooner and with greater intention, and it's really important for people to understand that the questions on the survey are gonna be designed to differentiate people.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
And differentiate them in a fair way, not sort of have one right an- quote "right answer" and two wrong answers or whatever. It's just like, are you the kind of person who thinks this or that-

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
... or this?

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
And, do our best to try to just sort people instead of doing anything that either accidentally or on purpose puts our thumb on the scale.

Mack Male:
Well, I'm feeling time pressure because it's already the end of July.

Karen Unland:
Yep. Yeah.

Mack Male:
And, we gotta get this survey out, but you're right. We did start a lot earlier. The first thing we did as part of this project was ask people, ask Edmontonians, ask people in our community, "What issues do you care about?" We gathered, I think, about 800 responses, written responses. We held five listening sessions where we gathered hours of recordings and transcripts and whiteboards and stuff. Can you give us a sense of, like, what we've heard so far? You've been looking at some of this analysis, I know, so w- what have we captured so far? Probably no surprise, there's things like infill and other things, but anything stand out to you?

Karen Unland:
Yeah, a lot of planning-related issues, a lot of, like, infill is coming up a lot, zoning, and, just how a city is put together. land use is a thing that people care about. They might not g- use that word, but-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... they- it comes to their mind when they're thinking about their experience of living in a city. Homelessness is a thing that is on a lot of people's minds, and there's people that are kind of seeing that issue as a problem for them because they feel unsafe or feel like there's an economic bad result because there's 5,000 homeless people here instead of 1,500.

Mack Male:
Yes. Yeah.

Karen Unland:
And then others are saying, like, that housing is the solution for homelessness. What is city council gonna do about that? So there's, like- I would say this year-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... with the- from the ones that we've got so far, which is much more than the 270 some that we got last time, there is more ideological diversity-

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
... within the responses from people. we are n- have not just reached people who live in tap root world, I would say, a certain kind of centrally living, progressive people, which were our early adopters.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
so that's, that's interesting. bike lanes are an issue. surprising number of responses around e-scooters and e-bikes.

Mack Male:
Hmm.

Karen Unland:
I wasn't expecting that. Lots of thoughts about property taxes, lots of thoughts about transportation and infrastructure, transit, all those things that city council is gonna have to tackle.

Mack Male:
Sometimes in elections it feels like there's a defining issue or a headline issue or whatever, you know, the city center airport or the arena downtown or something along those lines. I'm not feeling that there is now, in this election, a similar issue. I don't know if that's true based on what you've been looking at, but when I ask people about this when I'm out and about, sometimes it's housing, sometimes it's affordability, sometimes it's bike lanes, you know, sometimes it's safety and perceptions of safety or real safety. it doesn't seem like one thing is jumping out as the thing.

Karen Unland:
Mm-hmm.

Mack Male:
Is that what you're seeing in the responses?

Karen Unland:
I would say if we were gonna pick one thing-

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
... it would be a tandem of homelessness and infill.

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
And, in a way, these are all connected.

Mack Male:
Yeah. Of course.

Karen Unland:
one of the interesting things that we found out through the listening sessions this time around is we did less of a, "This session is about this topic," but in the first one, we did try to say, "This kind of discussion group, this roundtable is about a topic."

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
And what we learned is people come with a certain bee in their bonnet, and then they'll come around to that anyway.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
Right?

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
And so a- and that's not just because people are just super focused on their own thing. It's because these issues are all related.

Mack Male:
They're all connected.

Karen Unland:
They're inter... like, there are trade-offs in all of these things, and if you fix something over here, it's gonna break something over there. And so, that is actually the project if you're going to be on city council, and so I kind of like that what we're seeing there is mirroring how it actually is.

Mack Male:
It reminds me of our housing project that we did last year, where all these things ended up being interconnected, and what I... One of the things I really took away from that was when we make this decision, it might do this, but it might also do that.

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
And there's sort of this, like, unintended consequence of most of the decisions that you make, which has r- gotta make it really hard to be on council-

Karen Unland:
It does.

Mack Male:
... and be faced with those kinds of k- kinds of decisions that need to be made.

Karen Unland:
And actually, last time, one of the interesting things I did not expect, and I hope we can mitigate this time-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... is some very thoughtful candidates had a really hard time filling out our survey.

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
Because it is multiple choice. It is multiple choice because that's how we can make the matching engine, and we think that the trade-offs of that is still worth that really powerful way of figuring out who you agree with the most on the things that are most important to you. But some really thoughtful candidates said, "I don't know if I can fill out your survey because my answer is in between A and B."

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
"And you're not capturing that." And we were able, in most cases to persuade them that, "Yeah, but this is not an essay question. This is multiple choice, and can you do your best? Because it's gonna make it easier for people to find out if they mostly align with you."

Mack Male:
Yeah, we've had some conversations about what we might do differently this time to help make it easier for people to express the perceived or real nuance in their positions, so you'll see that as a candidate when we send the survey over to you in the next, few weeks. You mentioned that we've been able to reach outside of tap root world, outside of our early adopters. I think some of that comes from election partners-

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
... which is something new that we did this time. So, I've mentioned it on the show a few times, but we're working with more than two dozen organizations now to spread our election tools to their communities, so recognizing that we don't reach everybody. There's lots of organizations in our community who reach people that we don't, and so why don't we work together?... and in exchange for sending our question out, they get a little bit of awareness, and we're gonna equip the candidates and voters with those organizations' own key messages.

Karen Unland:
Oh.

Mack Male:
'Cause come election time, everybody's got, you know, ideas, about things they think are important or they wanna get their message out there, so I'd say that's going well so far.

Karen Unland:
Oh, I love this program, and you get, like, so much of the, most of the credit for doing it. That's been a thing that you really made happen, but, to have, I think, 28 on the website so far of all kinds of organizations from, in terms of size, in terms of whether they're kind of a one-issue or many-issue kind of-

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
... advocacy group, whether they are an advocacy group at all or not-

Mack Male:
Right. Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... or whether they just wanna make sure that what's important to them and their members or constituency is getting on the election agenda, I think is really powerful, and I hope it ought to make it even harder for people to say, just to pass on the survey because it really does have the weight of all of, like, thousands and thousands of people who belong to all of those organizations, and they wanna know where you stand.

Mack Male:
Yeah, absolutely. We're coming to the end of the first phase of the project where we're focused primarily on gathering input from people, but there's still opportunity for, election partners to help make a difference, to help make sure that their communities are equipped with this information. So, if you're listening, you're part of an organization, you wanna join, you wanna be, listed on that website and help us inform our people, we'd love to talk to you. There's no cost to the program, so, please get in touch about that. Where are we going now, Karen? What's next?

Karen Unland:
well, we gotta get that survey written-

Mack Male:
Yep.

Karen Unland:
... and ready to go. We are aiming to get it into candidates' inboxes in August, the declared candidates-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... ones that we know are running, and so that will happen as soon as we can, as soon as it's ready. And then, there, our observation in the past is that there's always a few that we didn't know they were running until nomination day, so nominations close on September 22nd, so we will, see who we didn't get and send their survey to them as well. Think it's really important for people to understand that this is a survey that we want every candidate to fill out, and it's, we're very ecumenical in this. This is not we're just going to the perceived front-runners.

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
We want everybody to fill it out, and so we'll get the ones that we didn't know about yet on, September 23rd, and then when possible, as soon as possible, we will get that voter matching s- engine out into people's hands so that they can take the same survey, see where they align. You're probably going to find that you don't agree with any candidate, even on the majority of the questions.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
And I find that a very interesting thing about municipal politics.

Mack Male:
Absolutely. Yeah, that's why all the votes are so varied at-

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
... city council, right?

Karen Unland:
Yeah.

Mack Male:
Not along any sort of political or party line. What do you hope is the impact of what we're doing? I mean, you kinda kicked all of this off five years ago or six years ago. I mean, we started pretty early last time, but what are you hoping that we can achieve with this project?

Karen Unland:
Well, I will, I will zoom in and then I will zoom out. I was thinking about a story I've never told you before, so you get-

Mack Male:
Oh.

Karen Unland:
... listeners to see this.

Mack Male:
Love these stories.

Karen Unland:
Yes.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
In 1989 was the first municipal election that I voted yet. I had just moved to the city to go to university in 1988. I was just newly 18, or 19 by then probably.

Mack Male:
I was six years old.

Karen Unland:

Mack Male:
Probably not even. Probably five.

Karen Unland:
now you know our-

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
... age gap. and I walked into the voting booth, and I didn't know who to vote for, and I had heard of Lillian Styrzak and Patricia McKenzie. That was in Ward 5 at that time, that we voted for two aldermen. And so I voted for them, and then afterwards, because I was like a person, like, who read the newspaper and that, I realized I didn't agree with them on most things.

Mack Male:

Karen Unland:
And I just never w- I had heard of them. That's why I voted for them, and I don't think that's just the reason that people should be voting.

Mack Male:
Right.

Karen Unland:
so I want to equip as many people as possible to go into, to first of all, go into the voting booth because they believe that e- it's important to vote for their municipal, for their, for their city council, and then to feel like they know what they're talking about when they mark their Xs or circles or whatever the ballot is gonna look at. So, that's, like, the zoomed-in version of that answer.

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
My zoomed-out version is that we're actually in a moment when democracy itself is in question, that there are people saying, "Maybe that's not the best way to figure things out." And I think it's, it's a, way of figuring, deciding how to get along in this world in a very problematic sometimes and imperfect way, but I like it better than the alternatives.

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
And I think that democracy works better when the electorate is informed. That is part of why CAPREIT exists in the first place, and this is, like, our, you know, a bigger example of how we can help contribute somewhat to that project.

Mack Male:
Well, thank you for sharing a news story.

Karen Unland:

Mack Male:
That's always interesting, and then it really brings home the impact of this for people. You can really get a better sense of who you should vote for. It's not the only factor probably that's gonna go into your decision, but it's nice to have that issues-based aspect to it as well.

Karen Unland:
Mm-hmm.

Mack Male:
Thank you, Karen, for coming to talk to us about this. We'll have to have you back sooner than another four years.

Karen Unland:
well, if you want.

Mack Male:
do you have a call to action for our listeners, aside from...... keep paying attention to TapRoot's stuff. We'll, we'll send you the voter matching tool and all that kind of stuff.

Karen Unland:
Yeah. I think there are some Speaking Municipally listeners who may not be on our mailing list.

Mack Male:
Mm-hmm.

Karen Unland:
And you sh- you should just go to taprootedmonton.ca/join and get there-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Karen Unland:
... so that you don't miss out on, what we're up to. edmonton.taproot.vote is where all the micro-site, where all of the work is going to be. I would also say if you meet a candidate, if they come to your door or you go to their meet and greet or whatever, please encourage them to take the survey. Every little bit helps as far as making sure that people do that. And candidates, please fill out the survey. It's gonna help you find your voters. And that's what, that's what you're doing right now. That's the whole thing. And then you're not supposed to, put more than one call to action, but I have so many things to ask people and I haven't talked to them for four years, so-

Mack Male:
We can do whatever we want.

Karen Unland:

Mack Male:
It's our show. Yeah.

Karen Unland:
why don't you become a member of TapRoot? Become a paying member if you can, if you, if you have the means to do that, because it helps us do this work. It's, it's a significant amount of work to do this. It, we take it on gladly, but we also have to pay pe- the people that do it. also, you will get free stuff. Like we've started this biweekly, member giveaway that, people have got to, they're gonna go to wrest- some of them are gonna go to wrestling on, this Friday, the day that this elec- this, episode comes out. And they've gone to music and theater and gay days and all kinds of things. they're gonna get a Fringe offer, at the beginning of August. and you get access to insights and perspectives that only members get, which you're gonna hear about later in this show. So become a member at taprootedmonton.ca/join.

Mack Male:
Amazing. Thank you, Karen.

Karen Unland:
Thanks.

Mack Male:
All right. Well, if you have taken the plunge and you have become a TapRoot member, you may know that we've started experimenting with something new. we've been doing a member's only live stream for the past few weeks, with our publishing break in the middle there. And the idea here is to offer members a little bit more perspective on the various issues that we're paying attention to. So last week, managing editor Tim Querengesser and I spoke with Councilor Michael Janz about infill. Super hot topic right now. I thought it would be useful to share a few clips with you. But before I do that, we've got an ad that I want to tell you about, The Workup. Here's a conversation I had with Adam Nashman, the founder of The Workup. We're back with Adam Nashman, who's the founder of The Workup, the hip, cool, bright, and green co-working space located downtown in the 106th Street tower. Welcome back to the show, Adam.

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Mack Male:
All right. Well, as I mentioned, we had this really great conversation with Councilor Janz, so thanks again to him for making the time to come and do this member livestream with us. we spoke for about an hour, mostly about infill, but we covered a broad range of things, and I thought it would be useful now to just highlight a few things, that stood out to me. So, of course, we talked about some of the things that have been in the news recently, what happened at public hearing, you know, the conversations around council, and we got a bit of a better understanding from his point of view about how that all, went down. but we also talked about some things related to infill that come up again and again, and one of those is enforcement. And so, here's Councilor Janz talking about how the city does have a literal jackhammer, to help crack down on bad actor builders.

Michael Janz:
And if we can have more bylaw control over bad builders, bad trades, bad activity, that will go a long way in terms of helping make sure that, the construction process is, better for everyone. We have some builders who are great and we have some others who leave a lot to be desired, and we're adding more tools to our toolbox so we can... It's not just the what, but how and making sure it's, properly regulated.

Mack Male:
And maybe just people feeling confident that there are some systems and some structures in place. Like, do you think part of it is not even so much the how is a problem, but just that they feel like there's nobody looking after this stuff. Is that fair?

Michael Janz:
And sometimes it's... Yeah, like, you never know that's the problem sometimes. You call 311 and a builder might be fined, a builder might be going to court. I heard of an example where a builder, poured a whole, like, basically concreted, put concrete over the backyard, and that's not allowed. They were doing it as, like, lots of extra parking.

Mack Male:
Hm.

Michael Janz:
So the city went, the city went, warned them, directed them to change it. They didn't change it. The city gave them reasonable limitations, the ci- reasonable timeline to do it. The city eventually went and jackhammered it, redid it at the cost to the owner, and it's slapped onto their property taxes now.

Mack Male:
Hm.

Michael Janz:
So, like, the city does have a sledgehammer, a liter- a literal jackhammer to use. It's just those... I want to see more of those cases in the news, because I think if people heard that, I think they'd be like, "Oh, something is being done."

Mack Male:
You know, later on in the conversation, the debate about unit counts came up and we asked about his motion to go from, you know, eight units down to six, which of course didn't pass, and Councilor Janz talked a lot about, six to eight stories rather than units. He says we're having the wrong conversation. And of course, since then, he's launched some, policy positions as part of his election campaign related to transit-oriented development, and he made quite an impassioned call for that in our conversation. Here's a clip.

Michael Janz:
I thought it w- I thought it was a sensible compromise. really, I think we're having the wrong conversation though, and I'm, I'm going to be launching some policy in the next week or next week or so that we shouldn't be talking six to eight units. We should be having more conversations about how do we build six to eight stories. We need to get back to the conversation here that we as a city have invested billions in the LRT. We're going to have all these new stations coming online. And if you look at who's complaining about the infill in the west end, like Crestwood or Laurier, Glenora, or Grosvenor, or others, some of them are within, like, less than, you know, less than half a kilometer to a train station. That shouldn't be six units or eight units, that should be eight stories. We need to get-

Mack Male:
Yeah.

Michael Janz:
... serious about TOD, and we need to get serious in a big way.

Mack Male:
We talked about action and inaction and what the city can be doing, and we talked about consultation and whether or not we need to do more consultation on infill. And I thought what, Councilor Janz said around just making motions, he's just started making motions, was pretty illustrative of some of the frustrations around delays and, you know, his decision to try to be more proactive. Here's what he told us.

Michael Janz:
And that, and that's whe- that's why I'm a little frustrated personally, and that's why I've just started making motions. That's why I moved the eight to six. That's why I moved the architectural controls. That's why I moved the other things. So they can... They're gonna... Like, Sohi had this i- Mayor Sohi had this idea to get everybody in a room together and try and talk about some of the common ground and pieces, and maybe there'll be some good outcomes from that. But, you know, I wonder... Yeah, I won- I wonder what the... That will bear fruit. I know for me, I'm just not gonna stop. I'm gonna keep moving motions . I am going to use my power as a legislator to keep bringing things forward, whether it's point access blocks to allow for more family-friendly units and more single stair buildings, whether it's this, whether it's the TOD motion I'm going to be launching, whether it's these other pieces. I think there's, Like we don't... I feel like we know what we have to do, and I feel like I'm in the eye of the hurricane in my ward.

Mack Male:
So this whole conversation about infill, you know, quite varied, super interesting. One of the things that was interesting about the way Councilor Janz framed it is that, you know, it's coming no matter what, right? This is a financial necessity is his point of view, and it doesn't matter who you vote for, infill is coming. So here's what he said about that.

Michael Janz:
It's the dirty secret, though. No matter who's mayor, no matter who's on council, infill's coming. It has to.

Mack Male:
Right.

Michael Janz:
It is a financial imperative. There are buildings that are falling down, that are, that are collapsing sideways. It's a question of just how we do it. So anybody who says we can put a moratorium or stop it or go back to the old zoning bylies, they're blowing smoke. It's not possible.

Mack Male:
One of the l- last things we talked about in the conversation was, you know, infill versus sprawl. You know, some of the positioning we hear out in the world is that we need to do both. We need to continue to grow, and we also need to build up. We need to build up and out. It's not up versus out. Councilor Janz has a different take on that, as you might imagine. He reminds us that we've got 75,000 vacant lots inside the current growth boundary and that there's a lot of room to continue to grow up. So, here's his take on sort of infill versus sprawl.

Michael Janz:
We still have 75,000 vacant lots, according to the City of Edmonton, within our current growth area. 75,000. We have a lot of lots still undeveloped. We haven't even built out the areas we have. So to be talking about...... more sprawl before we filled in the areas. and we're not talking infill. We're not even talking zoning bylaw. This is, this is empty dirt lots that could be homes, single family homes even. There's 75,000 of them, so we have a lot of capacity still in the existing areas that we haven't finished yet. What they want to do is to be able to sprawl in all directions at once, and that, and that's the problem, because that's, that's not, that's not sustainable. We need to be able to, build out what we have, and when that is, when that is done, when we've really built in density, when we've really leaned into, the TOD and the filling in what, filling in the vacant lots, then we can talk about, "Okay, what's the future pattern?" But to do that now is premature. It's putting profit over good policy.

Mack Male:
All right. Well, as I said, these are all clips from the member livestream that we did last week with Councilor Michael Jenns. we're doing another one again this Friday for members. You can find the link to that in your inbox and the member newsletter that came out on Wednesday. By the time this episode comes out, we'll have recorded it already, I suppose, but, we'll be continuing to do these livestreams, you know, through the election period and beyond. It's part of our new offering around membership at Taproot, and so we're really eager for your feedback. We wanna hear what you like about it, what's useful, what you'd like to see, you know, the kinds of conversations and, perspectives that we might be able to bring to you to help you understand things. So if you're a member, please get in touch with us and let us know, and if you're not a member, maybe this is one of those things that, might push you over the edge and have you consider becoming a member. We'd love to have you join us for those conversations. Well, a bit of a different episode of Speaking Municipally this week, and my thanks again to Karen for, coming on the show and talking about The Election Project. I hope you found the clips from the livestreams useful. No Troy and no Stephanie, of course, so no rapid fire this week. Karen also said there's no fun allowed, so I apologize. No rapid fire for you this week. We'll see what Stephanie is able to come up with when she returns, next week on the show, and I hope you'll join us then. Until next week, I'm Mack.

Karen Unland:
I'm Karen.

Mack and Karen:
And we're- Speaking Municipally.