Meet Ana Bassios
Writing for Members of Council
I was so fortunate to start my planning career with the formidable Ana Bassios. As manager of our research unit at the City of Toronto, she assembled a team of clever, funny, independently-minded planners who set a high bar for excellence and creativity. No surprise, Ana went on to several municipal leadership positions, including as a Commissioner of Planning for a municipality in the Toronto region. Today she is Vice Chair of the Toronto Local Appeal Body. As a city planner with more than 30 years of experience in the municipal sector, she has led large-scale public consultations and major municipal policy plans, and negotiated resolutions to contentious development applications.
Lisa: Throughout your career, you’ve written and signed-off on countless staff reports to local Councils, I’m sure. What did you look for, from staff, in those reports? And how did you ensure they were strategic, that they were going to get the outcomes you wanted?
Ana: It is a challenging thing to get right because you're not just writing for Council. Council is one of your audiences, but that staff report is also a reference, particularly if it's a development application, or sometimes a policy issue.
You know, there are some general principles that tell us what good planning is and what isn't. And we get our [planning] degrees and we spend our time. But Council and the public are not going to step back for us in terms of what they like and what they don't like. It's a difficult thing to get right because Council has to make a decision and we need to give them good advice.
A report has to be understandable in its principles and its purpose. What are we trying to achieve, for the general public, who are profoundly invested in the success of their community, however they so define success?
And then, often, you're writing defensively for an appeal; staff will be thinking about that, too.
The feedback I heard most frequently from Members of Council was that the jargon was impenetrable to them. It's used as a shorthand because the jargon is not, if you pause to explain to somebody, mysterious, and is actually quite accessible, because we’re inherently all planners. But the style that has developed around planning has built something of a discipline mystique or an impenetrable barrier.
It’s not only the technical terms, but the density of what's being said is difficult for people to understand, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s not just Members of Council who are overwhelmed by this. When I started, staff were even using legal and Latin terms in planning reports, which is ridiculous. My intent was always to make the concepts accessible, because what you want is good decision making. You want the decision makers to understand why it matters what you're telling them; not “the official plan says this, the zoning bylaw says that, and it does or doesn't comply.” That's not profound to them. So, they feel “I like it, and it doesn't comply, fine, I'm going to approve it.”
But if you tell them that, once this happens, it's a key piece that then causes a cascade and will cause more of these things, and then you've got a problem with water runoff, or whatever the knock-on effects might be, whatever the purpose and intent that’s lying behind the policies, are generally more understandable to people than the instruments that embody them.
My intent in conveying the consequentiality of whatever the staff report was dealing with, was to get behind it, so if the official plan policy says this, the reason why you put this policy in place was to achieve these kinds of outcomes. And, if it gets worn away, maybe not with this one, but if there is an accumulation of wear under this principle, this is what it will fall apart.
For example, if you've set density caps in a certain area, you want to explain to Council that those density caps help us plan for infrastructure. And if we're going to invest in infrastructure, on the basis that the density will go here, well, if you put it somewhere else, then you're investing either twice as much or not enough to support the level of functionality that you need. So there are very simple principles about why we concentrate density.
But the other thing I would also say, is when you have a sitting Council, and most of them are reasonably sized, as a commissioner or a CAO or a leader in the organization, you can maintain an ongoing conversation with them as a group or as individuals. It's impossible at the City of Toronto, it’s just too big, and they're just too many.
It's helpful to work with your Members of Council, including when you're answering questions on the Council floor, to build their knowledge over time. Often they come in completely not understanding why things are the way they are and how things are connected. if you can sustain an understanding with them, then you can write for that level of understanding, not about the technical things, but about what the plan is trying to achieve and whether they're on side with that or not.
Lisa: As planning staff, it’s easy to forget about that human interaction and how well that can actually complement our efforts. We don’t always get face time, but it’s useful to be able to get to know what an influential Council member understands or is focused on. Now we can follow them on social media, and it’s easy to look up voting records, so I often recommend that staff do some digging; talk to their senior managers about what they know about the Council members, find out what's happening in that particular ward, what their take is on things, so that they can write for the person.
Ana: But also, the leaders should be feeding that contextual information into the staff group, as well. Regular communication and understanding of the ongoing dynamic is important. Even my planner level staff would be up to date on the key applications and how they were viewed in Council. I think most places are so, even if it's not something that's consciously done by the leaders. If you work on a major application or an update of the official plan, almost everyone will know what Council’s reaction was, which were the core points. That knowledge is necessary in order to anticipate the reaction that your recommendation is going to have. Not that you tailor your recommendation, but you need to have some foreknowledge about what you're going to have to explain better.
There's a lot more to a successful staff report than just the words on the page, but the words on the page are also important.
Lisa: They really reinforce each other. If you don't get that face time, necessarily, there's still a lot you can learn that can inform your report and that can make it more effective.
Ana: Introverts do this all the time. They sit back and watch everybody's reaction, and they can predict, they don’t actually have to be talking.
Lisa: Very true. I can speak to that! Do you have any examples of when something didn't go well with Council? Something that just did not go the way that was expected?
Ana: By the time you get the staff report, you should have most of that in mind. I can remember times when I was really quite concerned that the staff recommendation wasn't adopted and Council went a different way. But no amount of positioning or rewriting or explaining would have made a difference.
For example, the parkland dedication rate. There was a parks plan. There was a service level. And then we recommended that Council institute a parkland dedication at the maximum that the Planning Act allowed, which was at the time was one hectare per 300 units. And there was intense pressure from the development community, that that it was way too high, they couldn't plan for that, they wouldn't know what the cost of that was going to be until the day the building permit was going to be issued. And that's what the Planning Act says, it's the value of the land at the time the building permit is issued. They preferred a $10,000 per door rate that they could put into their proforma, that that was going to be secured before they got to the permit stage.
No matter how I explained that that amount wasn't in the public interest, Council at the time was not going to pick that kind of fight with the developers. They did eventually. Because that's the other thing about it. Staff reports are seldom your last piece of conversation, especially on policy issues. You’re writing to them, but they’re talking to you, and it gets to be an ongoing conversation, because very seldom does a municipal issue ever die. It is helpful sometimes to think of it in a long-term perspective. And so the next time you go back with a park request, there is an opportunity to remind them that we need the parkland dedication fees in order to be able to support reinvestment or land acquisition or whatever it is.
Lisa: So there is a history and a future attached to one idea. And even if it doesn't go the way you expect, there might be another opportunity to put to put it forward because of that first report.
Ana: I think the failing is that staff want to put everything in the report. And if there is one lesson that I have learned, it’s that a plan is about what you're going to do, but equally, it's about what you're not going to do. And conveying the framework for a particular decision that they're going to make is a really careful sifting of what's pertinent to that decision.
You tell them what came before: What's this decision that has to be made? And you tell them what will happen afterwards: this is what you did when you refused this application; it would have undermined your official plan policy to protect environmental lands. Now, it's been appealed to then the Ontario Municipal Board [now Ontario Land Tribunal]. You point them to the decision we have to make: Is there a compromise that protects our interests sufficiently and gives them something of what they want; is a compromise to be found? Then this is your decision to make right now: yes, or no. Find some other solution, suggest something else, whatever. And then, usually, you're going to say, we'll come back to you to confirm that this is what you want to do.
As long as you identify the chain first and the chain after, then you can just confine that substance of your report to the immediate decision that needs to get made. Because while we might live and breathe it, they have a million things and a million people to deal with. And it has to be in bite sized chunks for them to make good decisions, step by step by step.
Lisa: Do you have any tips for how to do this best?
Ana: First of all, some Members of Council honestly won't even read it, so the trick is to make full use of the first page. Put your key pieces of information or your key foundational pieces on the first page, because they will have the report open at that page in the Council meeting. I guarantee if they've got an agenda, they'll scan it, and it’s thick. They identify the things they care about, and the rest go through on consent. But if it comes to the floor of Council, those who haven't caught up, you want them to get the gist of it. The principle of it, right up front. Not the detail of it, the principle of it, upfront.
Lisa: To try to do this, planners get really wedded to their templates, which I understand serve a certain purpose, but do you think that that should be reconsidered, that municipalities should be revisiting their templates, to make sure that decision makers are getting the information that they need, as you suggest, with everything on the first page?
Ana: I'll say two things about templates. First, they are a useful checklist. Without the template, key foundational pieces can get left out, just because people are frantically trying to get stuff done.
The template is also a reminder of what's associated; what came before, what came after. The unfortunate thing about templates is that people use them as “cut and paste” resources. I understand why people do it. They have a model that they've written, and they just kind of put it in. It's convenience. And it's laziness. They don't have to rethink each one: What's the priority here? What matters there? It gets you a whole lot of stuff that doesn't need to be explained; it was relevant somehow, at some point, and then it becomes the standard thing. The recitation, as I used to call it. But I don't want to hear that poem again. Tell me this story.
Lisa: I find, especially as each new generation of planners comes in, they do tend to just pick up the style and do the cut and paste because they want to sound professional. They want to sound like the organization rather taking a risk, stepping back from their work and being really critical about how they're expressing their recommendation.
Ana: I've come to understand it's a matter of confidence in somebody starting out. They need to find their sea legs and be confident. So generally, they put everything in the bucket. And then the important stuff gets lost.
Lisa: Maybe because they they're not certain about what is most important? But hopefully through the revision process they would get guidance on that.
Ana: That also becomes problematic because then that becomes the way things go; that “I put everything in and you take out what you don't think is necessary,” which is a not a good use of that person's time.
Lisa: So tell me, what is a good use of your time? What do you need from staff when you're in a leadership position?
Ana: I think that answer is different for every senior manager. I wouldn't give in to my impulses for my own preferences because their style might be just as effective. It's just not the way my brain works, but everybody's brain works slightly differently. I'm “draw me the outline,” and then we can colour it in. But I need to understand the outline of what we're dealing with first, before you give me the minutiae. Other people go pixel by pixel by pixel. They need to explain everything about the first step before we can move on to the second step. I tried to resist imposing my kind of cognitive framework on the presentation.
The other mistake that staff would sometimes make is they would give me a staff report that was chronological in the way that they worked through the problem. But you don't want to take decision makers on a journey about how you processed. If you do that, then you have to convey the issues on the resolution. As humans, we tend to think “walk with me on my journey.”
Well, that's actually not what they need at that moment. What they need is, there's a fire starting here, these are the consequences, these are the things we can do, this is what I recommend, you have these kinds of choices, this kind of flexibility. You want to empower them; they're not in the same journey that you're on.
Lisa: I think we all get lost in the details of our own stories, rather than thinking about what the reader or the listener actually needs to take action.
Ana: Much of my awareness of the audience that I deal with comes from the first part of my career. I worked in for a non-governmental organization in the squatter camps of South Africa. I was a young, white, professional, working with largely Indigenous Black people living in squatter camps. So immediately, there's less commonality; it takes an awareness to put yourself on the receiving end of whatever this person is telling you. I had to put myself in the position of the people who were receiving us.
First of all, there was no level of trust with me, so there's an imperative to establish a respect, if not a trust. And then you're conveying in language something that matters to the person that you're talking to, and how do you do that? How do you find your way into their perspective? Because in some cases it was life or death for them. You'd have to actually understand the level of concern and suspicion, it's a question of, how are you going to build a level of respect, of trust? We’d ask, “how can we help, what is important to you?” And it would be a school, or a safe place for the kids, or a water tap, or housing upgrades, or whatever it was. And you’d work with the community. You can’t go in with a prescription. You have to go in with a perception of the people that you're dealing with, in this case illegal at the time, in desperate poverty, threatened constantly by the police. It was a real, foundational lesson in understanding, in putting yourself in somebody else’s position. When you're talking to somebody, you need to be thinking about what they are hearing from you, and how that gets absorbed.
Lisa: A lot of planners don't have that type of experience, and don't understand that, regardless of who they're dealing with, that ability to reflect on where they're coming from, and how it might be heard, and the importance of listening.
Ana: But I think if they take their planners hat off, we all have that skill to a lesser or greater degree in the personal relationships that we have. I'm not suggesting that we condescend to people. We explain concepts to them on the basis of where they're at. And I'm not suggesting we explain to Council like they’re children, but an awareness of where they're at, what pressures they're facing, what the community is screaming at them, again, about, what the developers have tried – it’s about an awareness of these things that helps you communicate more effectively.
Really anything that has to do with people in decision making is as much about the people as it is about expertise.
Lisa: Do you have any particular pet peeves about how planners communicate? And are there any challenges that you would note that we have not touched on?
Ana: Bad grammar, it drives me mad. I don't like sentences that don't have a point, or poorly constructed writing. I don't like fancy language, incorrectly used. But I would refrain from editing people's work, as long as we're able to convey the foundations of what we needed to convey, I would refrain from editing their work, because I'm not paid to be the copy editor. And I don't know that it's encouraging or supportive for staff if Captain English is dotting their i's and crossing their t's, so I would physically restrain myself. My rule was, if I found two mistakes, two grammatical errors or typos in a page, then I’d rewrite it. I would fix the most egregious things. If it was style, I would leave it alone.
But otherwise, I would say a certain level of literacy is necessary for people to take you seriously. But you know, it's demoralizing for people to be treated like they're uneducated or haven’t done a good job. Many times in my career, somebody would correct my writing on the basis of a style preference, which I resented.
We're not writing literature. But writing in a clear way is not dumbing down. It's actually very smart to write for your audience. Whether it's putting yourself in their position or understanding what their purpose is, the language has to be accessible to them.
Lisa: What do you wish that you knew earlier in your career, about communicating your own expertise?
Ana: I have certainly learned to be more economical in my language and in the content. My writing is now more purposeful, to the objective. Whereas earlier in my career, I would be less confident, and therefore I would set the table much more extensively. I think it just comes with experience and confidence.
I was agonizing for half an hour over a paragraph that nobody was going to read. And by the time you get to 20 pages, you've lost everybody, except maybe three people. I learned to be clearer about the purpose, and tailoring the report to that, rather than documenting history or so fully setting the table. I think the realization that you've got a limited allocation of attention from whoever you're trying to reach… in some cases, you want to be more fulsome, because you're perhaps doing an update, or you want people to have an important discussion, like if you're doing a position paper on multiplexes, for example, you want to be able to tell a story.
Lisa: Last question. Are there any books or podcasts or other resources you’d recommend to planners?
Ana: I enjoy reading a lot of different perspectives.
I enjoyed James Ridge’s book, who was the City Manager for Burlington, and I worked with him when he was at the City of Toronto. He wrote about his experiences in municipal government, and I thoroughly enjoyed it because I have common experiences, and now I'm seeing it from his perspective. The lessons learned are hilarious. Some of it is very serious and very painful, too, but there are lessons for anybody who wants to be in municipal government.
Lisa: Thank you, Ana!
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