The comments section is open here for anyone to post anything they like related, however vaguely, to urban issues. The comments will be monitored from time to time for general civility. I decided not to have guest moderators as that would allow access to the email addresses of people who post here and I want to ensure their privacy.

Finally, before I disappear for this bit, I wanted to thank everyone here for making this blog a part of your day. It’s now been a few days over two years since I started it. In that time, it’s grown from 30,000 page views a month (I use webalizer as a counter) to, last month, just over 130,000 page views. That means well over two million in the two years. I’ve put up 940 posts in that time and had 13,662 approved comments.

I’m grateful for all the passionate conversations you’ve carried on here and the (mostly) thoughtful, informed comments, along with the occasional falling-down-funny interjections.

A new round of layoffs at the Vancouver Art Gallery has prompted staff and their union rep to speak out even more vocally this past week than the unhappy mutterings I’ve heard for the past few months.

As my story says in more detail, they are wondering how the gallery will fundraise the $350 needed (okay, only $260, subtracting the province’s $50 million and private donors’ $40 million) for a new building when it can’t even keep operations going now without laying off people and running a deficit.

The gallery says the layoffs and deficit are a result of the recession, which won’t last forever. And the money that’s going into advertising, PR, and contract staff to plan the new building are from special money donated just for a new building so it doesn’t affect the operating budget one way or another.

That all may be true, but it doesn’t look good to have this kind of unhappiness within your own staff ranks when you’re out trying to convince the public to give big.

I know this has already generated some comments elsewhere but for those who missed them …

(Apologies to those whose comments were held in limbo, waiting for me to moderate. All up now. Everyone please go back and read, as they were very good.)

On other notes, I have two interesting news stories coming out tomorrow, watch for them. (I’ll post.)

Secondly, I am going to try to take some holidays, which means not writing stories, not writing blog posts, not answering emails, and generally not doing nerdy things like Twittering on the ferry or holding lengthy conversations with policy wonks while sitting on my towel at the beach. (It’s harder to do these days, because so many around are doing it — the Cardboard Bakery had three laptops running already when I got here and the naked guy next to me at Little Tribune was solving some kind of data problem on the phone while I was there this morning. In answer to your question, no, I was not.)

Soo .. what to do for the next two weeks. I could just shut everything down and disable comments, but I fear that would drive some people to have to leave their houses and we couldn’t have that.

My idea is to have a post called Holiday Comments, where anyone can post on any urban topic while I am gone. I’ll have someone monitor for violations of my blog policy — no stupid name-calling, no labelling people as mindless partisan hacks without some piece of specific evidence or analysis, no gratuitous meanness. You know, the Frances Bula Be Nice, or If You Can’t Be Nice, At Least Be Thoughtful policy.

Aye or nay?

Here’s the city news release.

Hornby bike lane open house welcomes public input

City of Vancouver transportation staff will be at the Pacific Centre Mall rotunda Wednesday to meet the public, provide information on the proposed Hornby St. separated bike lane and receive public input.

Staff will be in attendance from 11 am to 7 pm. The rotunda is located just inside the Howe and Georgia streets entrance to the mall.

The open house is part of an on-going public consultation for the proposed bike lane. City staff are meeting with Downtown businesses and key stakeholder groups such as the BC Trucking Association, Translink and the Vancouver Board of Trade, more than 4,000 info cards with surveys have been mailed to residents and businesses on or near Hornby, an online forum has been set up for people to comment on the bike lane proposal and an online survey is available for people to provide their views.

Input is being taken until mid September.

Under the proposed plan, a separated bike lane on Hornby Street would connect the existing Burrard Bridge and Dunsmuir Street separated bike lanes and also connect with the seawalls in Coal Harbour and off Beach Avenue on the English Bay end.

When considering which street to implement a north-south separated bike lane, City staff evaluated factors like safety, truck and transit use, existing bike routes and use, traffic flows as well as the presence of on-street parking and loading zones. Staff evaluated Burrard, Thurlow, and Hornby streets.

Hornby Street is the preferred option for a cross-town separated bike lane because:

• it already has a one-way bike lane;
• there is high bicycle and medium vehicle use of Hornby; and,
• it is not a transit or designated truck route.

For more information on the proposed plan, visit Cycling – City of Vancouver. To fill out a survey on the proposed bike route visit Vancouver.ca/hornbysurvey. The online discussion forum is at Blog | Open Dialogue – City of Vancouver

That always puzzled me because a lot of money seemed to go to enforcement, in the millions every year spent on police doing nothing but drug busts and street patrols. Prevention, yes, I could see how that was underfunded for sure. But treatment — well, I just didn’t know. How much treatment was there really?

My story this month in BCBusiness is what I found when I went looking. It’s true that there’s a tight funnel when it comes to getting a provincially funded treatment bed. 

In my research, I found that according to national surveys, about three per cent of people in B.C. report having serious drug problems, which works out to more than 120,000 in the province.

Yet in a region like Fraser Health, for example, the biggest health authority in the province serving 1.2 million, meaning potentially 36,000 with drug problems, there are 155 residential treatment beds that can serve up to about 1,000 people a year. Not everyone needs a residential program — in fact, too many times people spend far too much money on a residential program that is not needed — and the province’s research is showing that walk-in treatment programs can be as effective as residential for many.

But 1,000 spots for 36,000 people still means enormous waiting lists for those who need the intensive boost of residential treatment.

That’s just on the government side, though. When it comes to what’s available if you have an employee-benefit program or a family willing to pay the bills, B.C. is swarming with addiction treatment. Only problem: no one has a definitive answer on which works and which one doesn’t.

Figures released by TransLink today show average weekday ridership exceeded 104,000 for three months in a row.  In May, an average 104,682 people rode the Canada Line every Monday through Friday.  In June, it hit 106,320 per day and July’s total was 107,198.  Daily averages (for all seven days a week) were 94,223, 97,969 and 99,210 for the same three months.

Original ridership projections forecast that the line would reach an average 100,000 passengers every day, including weekends, by 2013.  According to TransLink’s CEO Ian Jarvis, should this strong ridership trend continue we will easily beat the targets set when the line was approved the annual breakeven point will be reached earlier than 2025 as originally projected. The business case for the Canada line assumed that the additional system revenues it generated plus the savings from bus runs that it replaced would cover the operating and TransLink capital contribution over the 30 year agreement. .

But I didn’t know what until I went to a community meeting Thursday night, where David Negrin of Aquilini talked to local residents about the company’s desire to build an ice rink/community centre for the area. The rink is needed for Canucks’ practice but, since they’d only use it on weekeday mornings, when ice-rink use tends to be at its lowest, it would be available for the community the rest of the time, along with other space that Negrin said would be part of the centre.

As I note in my story today, residents like the idea so far. And obviously developers would rather see the money they’re required to contribute to community benefits to go to the immediate area where they’re building — it helps them sell their products. But the city is saying it wants Aquilini’s community-benefits fees (along with any fees the other property owners in the area will have to chip in) to go to helping pay for the Aquatic Centre renewal and central library upgrades.

This is an interesting tussle and the first time I’ve seen a developer openly at odds with the city about where their community benefits should go. Usually they just hand over the money and the city decides. Not so this time, and Aquilini clearly has residents onside with this. I await further results.

So lots of places are trying to figure out what they can do instead. Can they learn to recycle enough so that existing facilities can handle the little bit that’s left over? If that doesn’t work, are modern-day incinerators that use new technology to reduce pollution and toxic chemical formation the answer? Is there anything else?

Green types prefer the recycling/alternative options. But they’re not the only ones. Incinerators are tough political sells, even though all kinds of science says they’re light-years safer than they used to be.

Metro Vancouver’s directors clearly had a hard time answering those questions Friday and essentially opted for: let’s explore both incineration and alternatives in more detail.

Some saw it as a pro-incineration vote. But Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart (a former Liberal MLA and not someone prone to extremes) saw it as more of an anti-incineration vote, since his motion (the one eventually passed) called for staff to ask for bids on alternatives and also called for an independent reviewer to assess them. More verbiage on this in my story here.

Below is the news release summarizing the figures and I’ve got a complete copy of the donors attached. I’ve given this a quick look and, yes, lots of development money on this list. For all those scrutinizing the list to prove that councillors are in the pockets of developers and that’s why they created the rental program, what’s interesting to me is the big chunks of money from developers who actually have shown no interest in STIR projects.

What I did find interesting is the size of the donations ($15,000 from the Walls through their main company and also Yaletown Park), 10,000 from Intracorp., etc., and also the donations from groups I haven’t seen before, i.e. Terasen, Newway Concrete (they did the Olympic village concrete) and others.

I look forward to the close analysis of this list by faithful readers here.

VISIONVANCOUVER.supplementaryreport

Vision news release:

Vision Vancouver files supplemental report; retires campaign debt
July 29, 2010
Vision Vancouver announced today that its 2008 campaign debt has been retired, and has reported on its financial contributions for the period of March 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010. The report goes beyond the requirement of the Vancouver Charter by disclosing both campaign contributions as well as expenses related to paying off the campaign debt. Vision Vancouver is now the only civic party in Vancouver to have disclosed a full list of donors since the last election.
“I’m pleased to announce that our campaign debt has been paid off,” said Ian Baillie, Executive Director of Vision Vancouver. “It is clear from this report that Vision has strong support from people across Vancouver, whether they’re in business, the labour movement, or politically active citizens.
“With this report, we are continuing Vision’s commitment to financial transparency, and we are now the only municipal party in Vancouver that has disclosed its donors since the last election. In the interest of accountability, I encourage the other parties to provide a list of their donors to the public as well.”
Key areas of the report:
Total donations: $433,560.83
Total contributors: 1488
Total number of individual donations: 2925
 
Breakdown by sector:
Corporations: $285,849.49
Labour: $27,620
Individuals: $95,805.64