It is duly noted that Metro Vancouver chief administrative officer Jerry Dobrovolny is suddenly participating in what the human resources officials term an “administrative transition.” We should all wish for such a pleasant description when our time comes.
Dobrovolny will leave after seven years in the job, a period that included the catastrophic escalation of the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant from roughly $700 million to $3.86 billion (not to mention the decommissioning costs of the existing plant, and the interest changes on the total project that appear to make it a $5.5 billion escapade) and an increasingly uncomfortable public examination of how Metro Vancouver governs itself.
The temptation will be to treat the departure as accountability achieved. It isn’t. Not yet.
Changing the person at the top matters only if it changes the culture beneath. I’ve called for reforms galore, including a smaller mandate and board, a more credible inquiry into the wastewater plant overrun, and an expert oversight group to guide projects.
I’ve also said, as my competitors won’t, that I’ll decline extra income from Metro Vancouver as mayor. Double dipping is an embarrassment if you consider representation as public service.
Metro Vancouver has developed habits that have not served taxpayers particularly well: too much institutional defensiveness, too little curiosity when projects go wrong, too much information moving upward through staff before moving outward to the public, and a governing structure in which responsibility can become so dispersed that everyone is involved and no one quite owns the result.
Look, it even has a “misinformation and disinformation” part of its website, and a witch hunt on the leak of information to a journalist. That doesn’t ooze confidence.
I’ve talked to elected official upon elected official who says the same thing: we can’t understand what we have to decide upon, and we have neither the time nor the skills nor the assistance we need to properly vote on matters that affect the region.
The wastewater plant exposed the danger of that culture. The problem was not simply that estimates were wrong. Large projects go wrong. The more troubling question is how long problems can grow inside an organization before someone feels both able and obliged to say plainly that this is failing, this will cost vastly more than anticipated, and the assumptions on which we proceeded no longer hold.
That is cultural, not merely administrative.
A healthier Metro Vancouver would reward bad news delivered early rather than explanations delivered late. Its board members would be encouraged to challenge staff rather than regard questioning as disloyalty. Major projects would be subjected to outside scrutiny before they become crises.
Most significantly, financial information would be understandable enough that a director did not need to be an engineer, accountant and procurement specialist to know when something had gone badly off course.
And the organization would remember something bureaucracies sometimes forget: transparency is not a favour granted once decisions have been made. It is part of how good decisions get made.
Dobrovolny should not become the convenient vessel into which every failure of Metro Vancouver is poured. The wastewater project involved many people, many boards and many decisions over many years. Our own West Vancouver representative has been complicit.
But leadership changes offer institutions an unusual opportunity. They can replace a nameplate and carry on, or ask whether the behaviours that produced the problem are themselves part of the problem.
Metro Vancouver badly needs the latter. The directors (our mayors, including our own in West Vancouver) need to stop defending what even the premier calls a “Gong Show.”
The significance of Jerry Dobrovolny’s departure will therefore not be determined by why he left.
It will be determined by what changes after he is gone.