It was a lovely day on the deck of the Parcel 2 building at the Olympic village today.  The media were there getting shots of the city from the 12th floor on a beautiful, sunny day, and of the village itself, as workers raked dirt on the ground or crawled around outside decks doing finishing [...]

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It was a field day for media today in trying to report once again on the very complicated Olympic village project. You could tell people were a little overwhelmed by the material today, as city manager Penny Ballem gave an update on the project and presented the KPMG audient results that had been ordered last [...]

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I’m just analyzing the information this myself, but here is the city information that came out this morning with details on where the Olympic village is at, what interest rates have been negotiated with the Olympic-village developers, and what the audit report has to say.
City ended up giving Millennium Developments a bit of a break [...]

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I apologize that it’s taken me so long to put this up, but here, at last, are the campaign finance disclosures that mayoral candidates Raymond Louie and Allan DeGenova filed with Vision Vancouver. (My late-night struggles with blog technology are finally paying off.) They aren’t available at the city clerk’s office because the city clerk [...]

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Vancouver has spent we don’t know how much money to get lawyer Richard Peck to come up with recommendations for how the city can avoid future leaks of embarrassing documents. One of his main recommendations was that Vancouver hire a full- or part-time integrity commissioner. But it didn’t sound to me yesterday as though Vision [...]

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Okay, he put it in more lawyerly language than that, but essentially that’s what Richard Peck said about Vancouver’s “code of conduct,” its definition of “confidentiality” and its whole process for reporting on misconduct at the city. It’s in his eight-page report due out tomorrow on what to do about the city’s in-camera meetings, in [...]

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Mike Howell, the hardest-working reporter on the civic beat and someone who makes me feel tired whenever I look at the volume of stuff he produces on a weekly basis, has been keeping on top of the city hall investigation into the leaked document on the village’s finances last fall. His story is here.

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Here’s the latest from city hall, from those of you not already in the loop from the twitterings, blogs, news flashes and what all emanating from the media horde there. More later on some of the interesting Q and A at the council meeting, but I’m at work on other projects right now.
STATEMENT FROM MAYOR [...]

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That’s the latest fun news from city hall, as per this report that just got put up on the city’s website.
The cost of the 250 housing units has soared from the original estimate of $65 million to $110 million. Now the city is facing the question of what to do — put in millions more [...]

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It was one year to the Olympics yesterday, but for the city and the Olympic village developers, the deadline is much closer: Oct. 31 to be exact, except for a couple of buildings that are going to be delivered Nov. 30.
The city is still working on finalizing its financing, and it’s also taking extreme precautions [...]

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