Councillors, with the exception of the NPA’s Suzanne Anton, said that it wouldn’t approve a policy that would allow planners to give a developer bonus density in exchange for preserving a tree if the owner of adjacent land, where part of the tree’s roots live, wouldn’t agree to a similar deal.

Arborist Norman Hall made a passionate case for the tree, saying it had managed to survive Hurricane Frieda in 1962, the winter storms of 2006/2007 and could easily live another 100 years. “We think this tree could outlive the structure that’s going to be built beside it. It’s still going strong. It’s got a long life ahead of it.”

Apparently not. Heeney said after the meeting that the landowner will likely take it down to build the mere 12-storey condo that he’s now permitted. (City planners had been proposing to give an extra six storeys in order to compensate the developer for the difficulties of building, especially building parking, around it. Yardley McNeill said that had been calculated in 2007 as worth $4 million to the landowner, just enough to cover the costs. The neighbour had been offered a similar deal but, as planners noted, was someone not familiar with the city system, just a regular person, and intimidated by the idea of a legal encumbrance on the land.)

Councillor Geoff Meggs said that while council wants to protect heritage, it has to be able to actually protect it. If there isn’t agreement from all landowners, there is no protection. Councillor Andrea Reimer said that the city should look at strengthening the tree bylaw to protect trees. “It’s very difficult to take a policy meant for bricks and mortar and apply it to living things.”

Anton had argued that voting to allow staff to explore the idea would not have held council to anything. They could decide at a later date if they weren’t in favour of the building’s height, the deal, the fit with the neighbourhood. Her dire warning: “If this tree comes down, that will be an extremely unfortunate consequence.”

The end.

But

One topic for sure that is going to come up in the debate, as I outlined today in the Globe, is a reallocation of the existing road space. The city has had a policy since 1997 of not creating new road space. Now it will be looking at who should get which part of its current road network among the groups competing for it: car drivers, commercial truck traffic, buses, future rapid transit, cyclists, pedestrians, taxis, car co-ops, skateboarders, motorcyclists, electric-bike riders and probably a few more categories that I missed.

Other cities have talked about “road diets” — squeezing cars into smaller spaces to make room for the other modes. Wait for that term to appear here.

I went down to Commercial Drive yesterday, where they had their first non-car-free day of the summer (Main also scheduled a break in theirs, because it was too hard to get policing/barricades for the Summer Spaces when there were so many other things going on this weekend) and did this story for the Globe and on the dissatisfaction on that street with how it’s going. It also seems to be very much in question whether the originally planned car-free Sundays in August will take place.

However, the message didn’t seem to be that car-free days don’t work at all. Instead, it seems to matter who’s involved in organizing, which streets and how many blocks are closed, whether there’s an activity for people to come out to that they normally wouldn’t have, and other factors.

I went down to Gastown’s first Summer Spaces yesterday, which is planned to continue throughout August and September Sundays. It was only a block on Carrall Street and the Gastown business association has partnered with the Vancouver Farmers’ Market people, so I happily dropped all my available cash to get cherries, sweet peas, heirloom tomatoes, corn, small English cucumbers, field strawberries, onions and garlic. Tragically, that left me with not even enough change in the bottom of my bag for pistachio macaroons or something at the soap/nice smelly stuff booth.

It felt nice. It’s on a great block of Gastown (the block of Carrall between Water and Cordova, in front of the Irish Heather and Boneta) that feels intimate and historic. There was an older guy, clearly one of the area’s social-housing or SRO residents, buying some corn and a few out-of-area visitors like me. Leanore Sali, the Gastown business group’s longtime director, was watching from the sidelines and pleased to see what looked to her like a lot of local residents.

The Main Street people have told me they’re happy with how things are going there. They’ve rotated their Sundays among different sections of Main so that businesses share the impacts of the closures.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Commercial Drive organizers and businesses go forward from here, and what kinds of different solutions they can come up with to enhance the Drive’s already energetic street life but without actually making things even more inaccessible to regular people. (One of the problems was that buses got rerouted to Clark, even further away than the previous detour route of Victoria, making it a long uphill hike for anyone trying to get to the street by bus.)

The visible city: Will public data end up online?

Vancouver’s technologically hip new council wants you to be able to see the city naked – data-wise, that is.

It is working on a plan that would throw open the doors to as much city information and statistics as possible, putting it online in a form that people can pick up and use in their own computer programs.

The ideas is that everyone from programmers to curious citizens could use city data to do anything from tracking where your garbage-truck driver on his route to mapping where the worst landlords’ buildings are.

The notion – being pioneered in cities like Toronto, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco – is that the more information people have, the more cities can tap into the collective energy of their residents to develop new applications for the data or just to get more involved in the way the city works.

“The city collects and records a phenomenal amount of data. If we want the city to run well, people need access to it,” said Vision Vancouver Councillor Andrea Reimer, who is working on an initiative that would radically alter the course of the city’s information-technology department to promote what is called “open-source government”.

“The interest will become not so much protecting information but in getting it out there so it can be used,” Ms. Reimer said.

Washington put on a competition last fall called Apps for Democracy where it released city statistics and challenged amateur and professional programmers to come up with interesting ways to use them. People developed programs that matched up the city’s crime statistics to areas around city bars (located through liquor-licence data) and maps, so that party-goers could check whether a particular area around a bar was a likely crime spot.

Toronto is installing GPS trackers in subway cars and trams, and eventually will post their data, and anyone can develop a system that lets the public track the vehicles on a map. San Francisco is allowing Google to blend city statistics with its online maps.

To bring that kind of experimentation to Vancouver, Ms. Reimer and others have been developing a motion to set out the goal that “the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns.”

Vancouver already provides a considerable amount of data on its own VanMaps system, which allows viewers to mouse over maps and get information on a variety of topics from the traffic volume on major streets to the location of social housing. But those figures aren’t in a form that can be lifted off the system to be used by someone who might want to create another use.

The council motion, to come later this month, will also ask staff to consider possibilities for using open-source software, which is software developed collectively, rather than a privately licensed product such as Microsoft’s.

The move to liberate government records is a trend was welcomed by the provincial organization that monitors the state of information more closely than any other, the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

“There is more and more information available in computer files, but the trend, unfortunately, so far has been that increasingly that information is restricted,” said Richard Rosenberg, a computer-science professor who is the association’s president. He started working with computers in the 1960s, and there was hope that computers would be a great tool for democracy.

Instead, governments have become more wary about releasing information, especially in B.C.

“There’s this underlying feeling from bureaucrats and politicians that releasing information would come back to haunt them.”

]]> http://www.francesbula.com/uncategorized/vancouver-moves-to-open-source-government/feed/ 9 http://www.francesbula.com/uncategorized/vancouver-green-plan-not-about-being-your-nanny/ http://www.francesbula.com/uncategorized/vancouver-green-plan-not-about-being-your-nanny/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 18:50:29 +0000 Frances Bula http://www.francesbula.com/?p=1561 One of the aims of the city’s plan for becoming the Most Greenest City, though it wasn’t spelled out anywhere, was not to moralize about how everyone should be a better environmental person. To that end, they focused on incentives and opportunities rather than scolding and penalties, as I note in my Globe story here.

Interesting the sudden jump to this drastic new approach to the budget. Apparently it all came about pretty quick. The ink on the news release was still wet — okay, that’s not really true, since they were using a laser printer but you get the point — when it was handed out to council as Raymond stood up to make the motion.

I ended up hanging around until the end of the meeting (all the way through bylaws, new business, new motions, etc), which allowed me to get bummed out all over again about how unpleasant council can be at times. As one new councillor remarked to me recently, there’s a whole lot of a lot of dysfunctional “pattern behaviour” going on.

Mr. Mayor seems to be trying to exert a bit more control over the fractious proceedings, especially over Suzanne Anton. In the first couple of meetings, Gregor Robertson sat there kind of stunned-looking as she attacked him and his council, as though he couldn’t really believe it was happening. He hardly said anything — I couldn’t tell if it was because it went against the grain to hit back or he was too taken aback to think of anything to say.

In this meeting (as Suzanne went on the attack over Firehall 15, of all things), he cut her off after she’d had her say a couple of times. She kept talking over him, saying it was outrageous that he was stifling debate or something like that.  He said there’s a rule that allows him to end debate once everyone’s had their say. She said there’s no such rule. He said there is, etc etc. Eventually, he prevailed.

You can watch the crazy scene yourself on the city hall website if you want to see it live.

I have to say, it would be great if this mayor and all future mayors would enforce that rule, for people from all parties. You can’t imagine how much time gets wasted as each and every councillor feels the great need to stand up and explain their his/her position and then stand up again five more times to rebut every other point that the opposing councillor makes.

And on that note, here’s three things I’d love to see change at city hall.

1. I think it’s beyond inappropriate for councillors to make negative comments about staff people and their performance at public council meetings. Both David Cadman and Kerry Jang berated the city’s facilities manager for, they claimed, having allowed staff to deliberately let Firehall 15 fall into disrepair. They didn’t sound as though they had any definitive proof, from what I heard, just comments that had been passed on to them by residents lobbying to save the hall as a heritage site. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; it was hard to tell from what was said. But I don’t think responsible employees harangue their staff in public, especially when staff, for obvious reasons, are in no position to challenge them. The mayor or city manager should step in and ask for a report back on staff efforts re the firehall or whatever so that a. there’s some facts at hand and b. it’s not turned into a public whipping with claims that “you ignored what the city asked you to do.”

2. It would be great if only two designated hitters at a time beat up on Suzanne Anton. I remember how distasteful it was when Jenny Kwan was the lone COPE representative on an NPA council and, every time she tried to make a point, the 10 other councillors would each solemnly stand up and give wonderful speeches about how wrong she was. It’s just as distasteful this time around. There should be a system so that only one Vision and one COPE councillor gets to stand up, per issue, and declaim about what a misguided, misinformed, dangerous bubblehead their opponent is. We really don’t need to hear it multiple times, phrased in slightly different ways. (To be fair, several councillors seem to be staying out of the fray on this, notably Andrea Reimer, Heather Deal, Ellen Woodsworth, and George Chow).

3. To repeat what I said above, we would all cheer if council could move to a system where councillors made their points once, but weren’t allowed to come back three and four times to say essentially the same thing. We get it, you know. As a wise editor of mine used to say, “You don’t have to hit people over the head with the point you’re trying to make in the story. Telling them once is usually good.”

On a (somewhat) positive note, it’s nice to see Geoff Meggs seconding Suzanne’s motions, even though he goes on to criticize them. But his seconds help her to get them on the floor for discussion.

Now, Mayor Gregor is creating a Greenest City Action Team that will be headed by him and David R. Boyd, described as an environmental lawyer, professor, author and former special adviser on sustainability to the federal Privy Council Office. They’ll be appointing nine other members and, of course, former Green Party member Andrea Reimer, now a Vision councillor, and David Cadman, COPE’s travelling environmental councillor, will be part of the group. For those of you too lazy to Google, here’s one link to a little more about Mr. Boyd.

I’m waiting to see what this group will come up with. The mandate is to kickstart some new actions with a “quick start” report and then come up with a longer-term report. This is an issue pretty near and dear to the mayor’s heart — I first started hearing from him back in 2006, shortly after Sam Sullivan was elected — because he was alarmed at the tug of war going on about sustainability issues on the Olympic village site. He said to me frequently back then that Vancouver had lost its position as a leader on sustainability and that it should be acting aggressively to take it back. I’m betting that this is a committee that will come up with some strong new ideas.

In the meantime, how about that media advisory committee? I really think that it’s time to have one of those, meeting weekly and eating those excellent snacks that city hall typically provides.

We could have started with one of those hushed-voice golf types for the first part of the meeting, when motions were being punted gently here and there to this committee and that. It felt like the new council was, possibly, going to be civilized.

Then one of those tennis commentators might have been good for the next round. Things started to warm up a little as Lonely Girl NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton started questioning why the Visionistas had to get reports back so durn fast on everything. How would staff be able to take proper holidays, she kept asking, when they were being asked to produce reports on arts councils, car-free days, sustainability and Nationalization of All Private Apartment Buildings (okay, that last one not true — just said it to get those apartment owners going again) by only January or February.

Staff, likely thinking they’d rather have no holidays at all than a super super long one like Judy Rogers is enjoying, kept reassuring everyone that they’d have no problem getting those reports done by January, so Suzanne had to give up on that one.

Round Three probably needed a soccer commentator — you know, the kind who can keep things going for the viewers as the ball just gets pushed around the field, no one really ever scores, and players occasionally fall over their own teammates.

In Round Three, things got testy for a bit, when the new COPE bloc (David Cadman and Ellen Woodsworth) suggested that the motion for car-free neighbourhoods be expanded to talking to everyone, not just three neighbourhoods, and making sure that businesses were included in the discussion because not all of them think car-free days are an unmixed blessing.

It looked like a fight might break out between them and the Visionistas, but it turned out in the end that actually they all agreed on everything. And the whole discussion helped poor Tom Timm, head of engineering, who had thought that Andrea Reimer’s motion meant he had to do a massive city-wide consultation on which three neighbourhoods the car-free Sundays should go to, along with studies on the possible impacts, like rerouting trolley buses and finding people to run the car-free days (now done by volunteers, but unlikely to be the case in future if car-free days are every Sunday for three months instead of once a year). As it turns out, Andrea’s motion meant his over-the-holidays report should set the stage for going out to consultation to find the best neighbourhoods.

But then it got to Round Four. Now that really needed a boxing commentator, someone who could tell you when something was just a vicious jab and when it was the equivalent of a knock-out punch. Round Four was the discussion about putting money into the city’s new homelessness efforts and it started out with Councillor Raymond Louie’s motion to put in $750,000 — not the $300,000 he had originally proposed. (Because they put $500,000 into a plan with the premier earlier that morning for 200 shelter beds.)

Well, people got distracted a little by David Cadman’s suggestion that the city should put all $1.34 million from the remaining money in the 2008 contingency fund into homelessness. There was all kinds of back and forth about that, with Raymond saying they weren’t putting everything in because it wouldn’t be prudent and David basically saying, Well, you said there’s a crisis so why not put all the money in that you have?

But that was nothing compared to what happened next, when former Crown prosecutor Suzanne got up and started popping out the punches.

“Unfortunately, your worship forgot to ask me to the press conference (about the homelessness emergency action team, she meant) and, at the moment, HEAT is only the product of your press conference and not the council. I hate to be churlish (I’ll bet she did), but I don’t actually know what HEAT’s mandate is. And your worship, with the greatest of respect, you cannot create entities on your own.”

And off we went into almost an hour of debate, where Suzanne kept asking them about the legalities and the process of what they had done, in creating a homelessness action team and handing out money to various initiatives.

Along the way, she managed to pin staff to the mat, with deputy city manager james Ridge saying he’d have to consult with the legal department before answering her question. And Gregor, I mean your worship, just kind of sat there taking it, not really saying anything. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was trying to maintain the neutrality of the chair or because he couldn’t think of what to say.

But eventually, the other side woke up to the fact that they were being socked in the stomach and started to hit back.

David Cadman was first up off the floor with: “I have to say, it’s a little bit rich of Councillor Anton” and then went on to list the many announcements former mayor Sam Sullivan announced about his various initiatives, long before he ever presented them to staff or to council formally. David also was the first to trot out the classic line so frequently used post-election: “We won and you didn’t so nyah nyah.” Oh, actually, that isn’t what he said. It was just the sub-text. What he actually said was: We asked the electorate, they said yes and we’re taking action.

Anyway, it went on and on forever until we were begging for mercy in the media-peanut gallery, with councillors displaying many of the idiosyncratic traits that we will undoubtedly come to know and love.

Suzanne kept going on about process and legality, grilling everyone in her prosecutorial way. She also pushed as many in-your-face buttons as your average provocative teenager (“I guess there’s no sense of facetiousness or irony in this chamber.” “I guess I’m an observer of this council and not a participant.” “This is shocking, shocking, shocking.” “This is a remarkably contemptuous way of dealing with this issue.” “I want to be assured that I am a part of this government.” Etc Etc)

And she kept making the argument that Vancouver is now trying to take on all the problems of the Lower Mainland and it already provides most of the shelter beds already, so why is it now throwing its own city money into even more.

Raymond kept interrupting her on points of order or trying to claim that there was nothing out of order with the procedure. Kerry Jang accused her of scare-mongering (before Suzanne rapped him on the knuckles and said he should not be directing comments at her personally). Geoff Meggs and Andrea Reimer mostly stayed out of it except to make succinct points. Tim Stevenson made an eloquent speech that wandered all over the issue of the homeless and why they come to Vancouver. George Chow was mercifully silent. And Gregor, towards the end, quietly said he would take into consideration her remarks about process and that he had been trying to work quickly, but perhaps things could be improved.

On the whole, not pleasant. Suzanne did raise some questions about process that piqued my curiosity and I’ll be waiting to hear the answers on those.

But I wonder how far her attacks will get her. She seemed to be trying to go after the new city manager, Penny Ballem, asking her several times to clarify city policy, which clearly Penny was in no position to do and had to pass off to the deputy, having just started the job last week. It felt like Suzanne was trying to make that point, but in an indirect way. It made me think: If you want to accuse her of being an inexperienced political appointee, why not just say so instead of trying to embarrass her this way?

Also, I’m not sure all the fuss about policy and procedure will go very far with the public. The election clearly showed that the public had little enthusiasm for Peter Ladner’s argument that the city had followed proper policy in not releasing information about the $100-million loan approved for the Olympic village developer. It’s hard to see the public storming the gates of city hall because Gregor didn’t wait to go through public consultations and policy meetings before deciding to take some action on homelessness.

It also seems to me that the public said pretty loud and clear that they did not want a council that was going to say, We’re not going to do anything because the other municipalities and the provincial government should be doing it.

Oh, by the way, the $750,000 for the homeless initiatives got approved. Then all the councillors went into  — tada — an in-camera meeting, where they spent the next four hours. I had to go back to city hall at 9 p.m. because I’d left my bag there by accident and they were all just emerging.

So that was two hours of public meeting, four hours of in camera. Welcome to your first day.

The other is organized by the Renewal Partners/Stratcom/Convergence Partners nexus. It attracts many of the same people, although with more attendance by people whose job titles I can’t quite comprehend, possibly because I am an old linear-thinking fart. (I asked one guy this year what he did and he said he works on “agreement building.”)

They’re both deafeningly loud and must-dos for a certain crowd. They were popular again as usual, but the second one this Saturday night was certainly the gathering of the new power clan in Vancouver, since its hosts — Joel Solomon’s Renewal Partners (along with the many businesses he invests in), Mike Magee’s Convergence Communications, and Bob Penner’s Strategic Communications — form a pretty tight circle around new Mayor Gregor Robertson.

The party spread out over the two rooms and three floors of the cool and arty Canvas Lounge (former Sugar + Sugar) in Gastown, providing a Tom Wolfian-style gathering of the New Green/Enviro/Socially Conscious Capitalists and their associates.

Among those in attendance in the eclectic gathering: theatre owner Leonard Schein, who has supported Renewal and its associated businesses for years; the peripatetic Michael Geller, recently defeated NPA candidate and urban thinker about town, and his daughter Claire; CUPE union leader Paul Faoro; many Vision pols and candidates, including Mayor Gregor, of course, Kashmir Dhaliwal (also with his son along), Heather Deal, Geoff Meggs, George Chow, Andrea Reimer, Aaron Jasper, Heather Harrison, and who knows who else I missed in the crowd of 400 or so; COPE’s Rachel Marcuse, people from Smart Growth, people in social housing, people in real estate, and a few media types such as myself pretending to party but really waiting for people to get loaded so we could pry information out of them. (No luck — I couldn’t get a thing out of any of them, even after holding them down and pouring vodka straight into their gullets, about who might be next on the chopping block around city hall. They just kept trying to tell me about citizen empowerment.)

Lots of talk about Vision’s aggressive new agenda and the previous day’s switcheroo of city manager Judy Rogers for former deputy health minister Penny Ballem. LOTS more talk of why Judy just had to go, no two ways about it.

BTW, the prevailing theory among the NPA or Judy-supporting types is that Geoff Meggs, former chief of staff to Mayor Larry, former B.C. Fed guy, was the driving force behind Judy’s ouster. But, from what I heard at the party, it was a pretty united front on the subject from all and sundry.

And, a sad note I noticed as I went out the door into the falling snow sometime after midnight, a table full of candles in memory of Ben Banky, the natural-foods entrepreneur who was killed at his company’s Christmas party on Friday. Banky had been a supporter of the Robertson campaign.

One of the more amusing double-events of the night was the B.C. Federation of Labour-organized rally in favour of the coalition government (and against Stephen Harper’s politics, hair, and everything else) held at Canada Place, which just happened to be across the street from where the province’s big developers were holding their annual wingding at the Fairmont Waterfront.

The Urban Development Institute party attracts the who’s who of the development world, which includes a LOT of mayors and councillors.

So several Vancouver councillors got to do double-time, managing to attend both the rally and the UDI party. Vision’s Heather Deal, Geoff Meggs and Andrea Reimer, along with COPE’s Ellen Woodsworth, all hustled from one side of the road to the other to make both events, each of which was quite well attended. The UDI event offered yummy dim sum and pasta snacks, however, which the Fed rally did not.

Here’s a precis of the events at the rally. No speeches at the UDI party, just lots of anxious talk about the gloomy immediate future of development.