10 Tough Questions with Herman Turkstra

Herman Turkstra is a lawyer, businessman and a founding member of Turkstra, Mazza law firm. Herman is currently on sabattical from his law practise and serving as President of ZIYP Inc. ZIYP is active in the use and development of business directories on the Internet and in print. Herman founded 701.COM and 701 Media Group which were purchased by the Toronto Star and now publishes directories to over 2,500,000 households in Ontario communities. You can read more about Herman here .
When I asked Herman to be a guest on The Hamiltonian and 10 Tough Questions, he asked me if he could write the questions as well as the answers. While the request took me off guard initially, I had a feeling that honouring Herman's request could only lead to a very interesting 10TQ, ala Herman . I wasn't dissapointed. And, as you can see, while constructing both the questions and answers, Herman managed to stay true to the spirit and intent of 10TQ.

I thought it best that I not edit any of the questions. So, here it is verbatim. Enjoy 10 Tough Questions (or 10 Easy Questions, as Herman refers to them) with Herman Turkstra.

Herman Turkstra's 10 Easy Questions:

1. Can you name 10 major current Hamilton success stories, listing them in priority of success?

Sure:

Number One With A Bullet: Louise Dompierre's magnificent revival of Hamilton's Art Gallery.

Number Two with a Bullet: Max Reimer who as Managing Artistic Director from 1996 to 2006 took Peter Mandia's foundation and made Theatre Aquarius flourish, eliminating its debt with an unbroken string of operating surpluses, record ticket sales, increased Arts Council support based on excellence as assessed by peers, and winning a Lieutenant Governor's Award for Business Excellence in the Arts and an Outstanding Business Achievement Award from the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce.

Three: Tom Beckett's and Ben Vandenberg's Hamilton Conservation Authority which preserved the waterfalls, forests, fields, and beaches that make up the principal natural resource attractions that bring talented people here. The current Authority seems to have meandered into a somnabulent state but that may be because the big job was done years ago.

Four: The unattached duo of Dave Braley and Don Fell who quietly and consistently took modest family assets and built hugely successful private companies with real jobs in Hamilton through creativity, dogged perseverance and skill. We could use about 40 more like them.

Five: The Sisters of St. Joseph who have found it in their souls to move ahead of the times and turn a parochial institution into a health resource that shows at nearly every bed and desk that healing involves people helping people.

Six: Don McLean and the volunteers at CATCH, who have heroically filled in the gap left by curtailed local media budgets and kept an window open onto City Hall. I wish I had their stamina and perserverance.

Seven: The move of Hamilton's City Hall staff into the Eaton Centre where they see and meet the people they work for every day.

Eight: The local risk takers who managed to build our great inventory of loft condo conversions, like the Bell Canada building on Bay Street South, the Allen Candy factory, and other assorted remnant schools.

Nine: The first lunatic who thought that James Street North might be a place for art galleries to grow and thrive.

Ten: Hamilton's downtown, a great place to visit, work and shop.

Question 2: Can you list 10 particularly impressive failures in this City:

Sure. Number One with a bullet: Hamilton's Economic Development Department. Today more than half of our workers are paid by tax dollars or on minimum wage. From the days when Gennum founders would leave Hamilton in desperation and start up in Burlington to the city missing the computer revolution, the telecom revolution, the internet revolution, and now maybe the green energy revolution, all because of our reluctance to attract those unpleasant, abrasive, egocentric, demanding, individualistic neanderthal entrepreneurs that start new businesses and make them grow.

Number Two: Our inability to clean house by failing to elect new city councilors en masses every ten years or so.

Number Three: And subject to whether or not Innovation Park is real or a figment of our imagination, the failure of McMaster University to produce any significant entrepreneurial energy in this City. Bred to build workers for industry, the university still has huge problems getting above the mediocre.

Number Four: Hamilton's transportation experts who are still devoted to moving vehicles as fast as possible from point A to point B.

Number Five: And because they can't even do that right, the abysmal condition of Hamilton's most important Street, Industrial Drive running from Wellington to the QEW, currently a mess of rotten pavement.

Number Six: The Ferguson Avenue Boondogle, from the Pigeon Palace at King and Ferguson (a million or two) to the Ferguson Bridge over the CNR (ten million or so) dumping cars into a quiet residential street a bridge built to kill a pedestrian or a cyclist in the neighbourhood.  Proof that planning by dreaming can be dangerous.

Number Seven: The continuation of the Cannon-Wilson Expressway which has simply ruined neighbourhood after neighbourhood with not so much as bandaid offered in comfort or consolation.

Number Eight: The use of the Red Hill Valley to build a road that should have been built at the Fruitland Road extension and mostly for the purpose of enhancing the profits of a small group of east mountain landowners.

Number Nine: Thinking that Hamilton's airport would work for passengers.

Number Ten: HECFI, even allowing for difficulties caused by the Canadian dollars fluctuation, the three buildings should have been given to an entrepreneur years ago. If the outsides looked as bad as the financial results of the insides, Property Standards would have issued a demolition order long ago. The problem is they look too nice so we think they are successful. They are an embarassment. The whole damn package.

Number ten plus one: (Because it has to be said) Actually not a failure, since it was done deliberately, but the pile of bricks on the corner of Barton and Wellington Street called the Hamilton General Hospital which demonstrates that with real skill, you can indeed construct a building that is ugly, intimidating, discouraging, friendless, boring, harmful to the human spirit and remote from any concept of healing.

Question Three: What do you think Hamilton can do successfully in the next decade that would make a difference?

One: Strictly adhere to the mission statement unanimously approved by Council in 2008: Judge all our actions by four principles: Make Hamilton the best place to raise a child; Engage our citizens; provide jobs; clean the environment.

Two: Change the system so that any expenditure over one million dollars has to be approved by vote of the citizens.

Three: Give all the communities who want to opt out of the City, the right to do so. (And I am a strong supporter of a unified centralized government and the elimination of regional government. But what we have currently is simply not accessible to any resident without deep pockets.)

Four: Take a three year holiday from municipal consultants and hire department staff and department heads who are personally qualified in the area of expertise that they administer. We have been hiring and promoting on abstract management skills rather than on hard technical skills. The consultants love it.

Note- I think Herman may have inadvertently missed the number 5

Six: Give municipal awards every year based solely on the number of jobs created by the recipient.

Seven: Triple our municipal spending on the visual and performance arts. No better still, spend ten imes as much. We are talking about the heart of a community here.

Eight: Close King Street between Wellington and Bay.

Nine: Get the Waterfront Trust back to the Waterfront, which for the unitiated, lies just east of the QEW. If they don't our real waterfront will be nothing more than a 12k jogging trail in two or three years.

Ten: Think about the proposition that with every ten thousand people in growth in this City, we have regressed in quality of life. More people now leave Hamilton to work in other cities than come into Hamilton to work. Unless we change that,we will be nothing more than a bedroom community. Growth has been bad medicine for Hamilton. We need to find alternatives.

And Ten plus one: because again I can't resist: Convert the repaired City Hall to condo's and leave the City Staff where we can see them, thus eliminating the ivory tower complex for once and for all.

Question Four: Is there one problem at the heart of all the failures?

Answer: For sure. There is a clear sense in City Hall that by preaching we are missing something, or failing in comparison to some other city, or that there is some dream we are missing, the denizens of the City will respect our leaders because they seem to be working a variety of dreams to make big changes. In fact those dreams rarely make any real difference. Change comes in tiny steps, at the margin of where we are today. Building strong neighbourhoods, really tough parent councils, aggressive business groups, non-governmental agencies with strong Boards of directors, in other words, starting at the block and building up rather than in the sky and building down. Things like the Pan-Am games are sort of silly, probably not too harmful, and their impact is in the window-dressing rather than the substance which disappears when the show closes. We showed strong comunitiy building really well with the Vision 20/20 exercise which was promptly put on the shelf by every councilor and bureaucrat because, well because it started at the grass roots and built up and interfered with the dreams and the fantasies.

Question Five: Any other quick fixes?

Yup. Set term limits for Council and reduce the current City staff by some significant percentage, say 38.3%.

Question Six: Any forecasts?

Yup: Hamilton will continue to grow a bit because the federal government brings about 225,000 immigrants into the GTA every year and they have to be housed somewhere. That has nothing to do with building a city. But even with that, the current population projections for Hamilton are all too high. Steel production will decrease and our ability to nurse off the two steel companies will decrease. The owners of the three or four million square feet of prime industrial buildings in the lower city will find a new use for them. We will never see a light rail car on a track in Hamilton in this century, no matter how much I like them.

Question Seven: What's going to happen at City Hall?

Zip. Nothing. Da Nada. Every Councillor who stands for re-election will be re-elected.

Question Eight: Why are you this grumpy?

Because when you get this old, and remember when Hamilton was the fifth ranking trading community in Canada with one of the best live performance venues in this Country with a real opera company and a real orchestra, you tend to ask how the Hxll did we get to this point? And of course the answer is that people are working much harder now to survive and retail trends killed our local merchant class who provided much of the political spirit of the last century. Volunteers drive civic success and we are running shorthanded at the present time.

Question Nine: Do you think anyone is still reading these questions?

Not a chance.

Question Ten: Any other questions?

Yup: Who is Hamilton's real Mayor?

Thank-you Herman for your insights, your stylish presentation of them and for the unique, self-made interview ;-)