No one knows more than Calvert about the City's Official Plan or the various revised city centre plans, which culminated in the recent Downtown 21 Plan.

"We're going to miss him," says Ward 9 Councillor Pat Saito with an audible sigh of regret. "He has all of that historical knowledge that's irreplaceable, not just about what happened, but about why things happened. That is just so helpful. He was a great resource and support person for all of us."

Planning Commissioner Ed Sajecki says Calvert "has a ton of corporate memory. He's really seen it all, from the greenfields development until today."

One of the keys to his success is the planner's "collaborative" nature, says Sajecki. "He has a very calming influence on people. He could see the different sides of an issue."

Calvert's greatest challenge has been the city centre.

The layer of shale that underlies the downtown core also undermined the City's ambitious hopes of easily attracting prestige commercial office towers to the area.

Because underground parking was required and drilling to install it was so expensive because of the shale, much-desired tenants, such as RBC, moved into the Meadowvale financial district and other outlying areas where cheaper surface parking was abundant.

Things got more complicated when the City made a couple of strategic "mistakes" in its third version of the downtown plan, says Calvert. It eliminated height and density restrictions and pre-zoned many properties to encourage quick development action.

All the action happened on the residential side, however, without the desired balance of office commercial development.

The first downtown concept also included major swaths of parkland which never materialized. While the LRT/BRT transit connection is coming to fruition, the major pedestrian connection through the heart of the centre is still just a proposal.

And the key concept of creating a line of prestige head office towers between Rathburn Rd. and Hwy. 403 never materialized at all. The towers of power the City envisioned were, instead, replaced with "temporary" entertainment zonings, which persist to this day.

"We would really like to see more intense uses there, not a go-track cart and batting cages," says Calvert wryly.

But all is not lost yet.

One day, Calvert points out, Mississauga could be in the enviable position of being one of the last places in the GTA able to offer first-class office tower accommodation in the heart of a built-out city centre.

Ever the optimist, he says that will be possible when it becomes economical to build underground parking — or when the City bites the bullet and provides some of that parking itself.

A soft-spoken, articulate man who is apt to answer a question with a small history lesson that ensures everything is placed nicely into its overall context (in order to minimize the chances of misinterpretation), Calvert says his lengthy career afforded opportunities that few planners ever enjoy.

He helped plan the communities that filled in the so-called "hole-in-the-doughnut" in the centre of the municipality. He helped oversee the transition of Mississauga from its agrarian roots to the sixth-largest urban centre in the country.

It's been a long and rewarding career, watching Mississauga roll out before his eyes under guidelines that he and the City's planning team carefully put in place, says Calvert.

Yet he still seems just a bit bewildered that he was afforded such a unique opportunity.

"There were thousands of empty acres of land that we released for development," he says. "It was almost like an academic exercise — but it was reality."