Winter Trail Conditions – Muddy, Changeable

A group of about 30 people met last night at the NCC’s invitation to talk about winter trail use. About 20 of these people were dedicated representatives of park users with the remainder being NCC staff and their contractors.

The enthusiastic attendance by winter trail users was motivated by their strong feelings, mainly about cross country skiing. But the issues that these attendees brought to the meeting really didn’t get aired because the point of the meeting was, as one attendee put it, not to discuss the issues, but to discuss how to discuss the issues.

The NCC is looking to create “an on-going dialogue mechanism …a collaboration-based mechanism” and had invited people to discuss “ideas on the mandate, make-up and good functioning” of this “mechanism.” Which is to say they are open to collaborating with the public and want to collaborate so far as to have the public help them decide what the mandate of such a public group would be, who should be included and how it should work.

Unfortunately not all participants who came to the meeting appreciated this in advance and many had hoped to explore the issues themselves. The meeting never really got into these (presumably saving them for when the actual “dialogue-mechanism” is set up) so it was impossible to know what the breadth of issues were as represented by those in the room.

The process used to discuss the “dialogue-mechanism” (aside – there must be a better word for it than this; “round table” and “committee” were offered; what appeared as the tentative NCC title was “Park Dialogue: Winter Trails.”) Resuming – The process used to discuss the “dialogue-mechanism” was to have three different tables discuss the three different aspects of

• Mandate
• Composition
• Functioning

The intent was then to report back to each other, iterating the ideas and narrowing each aspect toward a more commonly agreed resolution.

I sat at the “mandate” table and unfortunately in the time allowed we were unable to hash through what the mandate of such a group might be. We also freely wandered into the territories covered by other tables, such as frequency of meetings which the “functioning” table was dealing with.

Despite the potential for rancour the mood was light-hearted and people were cooperative, even though polite but pointed criticism did surface about such things as clarity of purpose and the use of people’s time.

I was certainly glad I went, if only because of the people I was able to talk to, but I didn’t leave feeling clear about either what range of issues needed to be discussed, nor about whether the mandate/composition/function of the planned group has solidified. Certainly no progress on issues themselves was made.

Still, I felt the NCC sincere in trying to involve users. They had invested time and resources and plan to continue to do so.

Participants placed some emphasis on the engagement of people in such a group, how volunteers often have full time jobs and other volunteer obligations and how this needs to influence meeting frequency and whether mandate is “big picture” or “detail” oriented. The fact is that if a group can actually achieve something, it will attract participants and find its own appropriate meeting frequency. If it hobbles along, dragging out a process that achieves little, participants will be few and impatient.

Let’s hope this initiative moves toward the “achieve something” category fairly smoothly.

I’m only too happy to hear from others who were there, on what their opinions are.