But it looks as though some of that reorg is actually happening, as I note in my story this morning. The city’s formerly separate garbage crews (city and parks) are being combined into one over the next couple of months. Next up, getting some co-ordination between 17 different IT systems and seven help desks. Plus more. Who would have thunk it?

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

The NPA city council of the day took the public opposition to that and ran furiously with it, holding all kinds of public meetings to allow people to rant about the evils of gambling.

Now, here we are, 16 years later, with that Las Vegas-style casino back on the city’s front door. Here’s what the current council has to say about the issue now: No, they don’t expect anything like the same opposition to gambling. But they do think local residents won’t be happy and, at the very least, will be expecting the city to extract some concessions in return for plunking Bellagio down in their midst. But the city has no bargaining chips, as it turns out.

The issue has flared up again with the news that the VAG has turned down a site on False Creek announced by the premier two years ago and has now re-opened negotiations to move to the empty block next to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

This was a story all week. The latest complication I discovered on Friday was that the city has already committed to using $48 million of the development profits from the site (most if not all of them) to pay for the QE Theatre renovation that happened in the past couple of years. More details on this confusing tale here.

But Vancouver is going to give it a try, as I outline in my Globe story here.

As far as I can determine, that includes all the Vision councillors at the time — Raymond Louie, Tim Stevenson, George Chow, and Heather Deal — and COPE councillor David Cadman. I’ve been able to verify with everyone except Kim Capri from the NPA side that they took the test or were willing to. (Elizabeth Ball was dealing with family issues and hadn’t taken it yet, but had told police she would.)

To add to all the many tangles in this mysterious case, Inspector Les Yeo said it was also clear that any information leaked to the media, i.e. Gary Mason at the Globe, came NOT from that document but from minutes produced after the meeting. For those who don’t recall the timeline — the meeting where the document went missing was Oct. 14. It reappeared two days later in B.C. Lee’s office. Gary’s story appeared Nov. 6, in the heat of the election campaign. Then-mayor Sam Sullivan asked police to investigate Nov. 11 (i.e. after the leak, not immediately after the document went missing)

You can read the entire police report on the matter — well, except for the two-thirds of it that they blacked out — on their website here.

Inspector Les Yeo said police were also not able to come up with any evidence through forensics or video footage that provided enough evidence to lay charges. I guess we won’t find out now until Gary’s Deep Throat decides to provide a confession in his old age, a la Mark Felt. Hope I live so long.

According to FOI officer Paul Hancock, there is no record of her attending any meetings — a finding that several councillors didn’t know what to make of. (Suzanne Anton is sure she was there. Raymond Louie says it seems like she was being sidelined.) He also wrote to me that after an exhaustive search, he found only one email, but it’s a long one.

My story on this in the Globe is here.

Estelle’s email, or as much of it as I got, is here.

estelle-lo-email

The Vision Vancouver council’s latest task force/brainstorming/collective put in place to hone in on an issue — in this case, how to create affordable and rental housing — is going to be meeting at the Celebration Hall at Mountain View Cemetery from 2-5 tomorrow, April 25.

As far as I know, it’s not a public free-for-all but you can listen to the people at the roundtable and their suggestions. Raymond Louie said those invited to the roundtable include people from the development industry, architects, BC Housing staff, CHMC staff, and representatives from tenant groups like the Tenants Rights Action Coalition. A warning, though — there are already 40 people invited to be part of the roundtable, leaving only a few spots in the small room for the general public. 

It’s interesting that this meeting is open, when other task forces (homelessness, greenest city, developers’ group on what the heck to do with the Olympic village) haven’t been. Maybe it’s because this is more about general policy. Maybe because council is realizing that if it’s going to create a task force a month that is giving advice that the city is going to put into action, everyone should get a sense of what the different parties are pitching.

NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton is pretty critical of the way the recent rash of Vision Vancouver task forces have been run — announced without any council approval, some (like the Greenest City one) appropriating money from city departments, held in private. She says that if they’re going to be giving advice to councillors, they should be structured like advisory committees, with public meetings and minutes, so everyone knows what’s going on.

It’s an interesting point, although it seems to me there are more shades of gray than people think at first glance. There are all kinds of meetings that ciy councillors have with various parties on issues that result in motions and votes at council. Former mayor Sam Sullivan had all kinds of meetings with stakeholder groups in the mayor’s office when he was developing his ideas about Project Civil City, the drug-substitution program and EcoDensity. So did Larry Campbell. There have been film task forces and crime coalitions, meetings with the Fair Tax Coalition, input from the arts community, and you name it over the years.

So there’s a question about where you draw the line on what should be open and what shouldn’t be. Should the public be able to sit in on every meeting the mayor has? I think we all agree there’s a logistical problem with that. But should the public be able to understand who is having an influence on an immminent policy decision and what they’re saying? I think most of us would like to know that.

The question is coming up because this Vision council is doing things differently. Staff have always held meetings with stakeholder groups as they develop policies that are eventually brought to council. (See Charles Gauthier’s post in relation to how the city’s Metro Core policy/downtown vision was developed, for an example.) But here, we see the politicians getting more directly involved, by setting up those groups, deciding who the stakeholders are and sitting around the table with them to hear their advice. That’s all part of the Vision view that it should be politicians who drive change, not the staff.

But if they’re going to do that, does it need a new kind of process with new rules? Interested in your comments.

It’s quite a different picture this year, where the statements detail many (though not all) parts of the city’s commitments to the Olympic village and the Southeast False Creek development in general. Much of what’s in the statements has been extensively covered in the media by now. But the statement does provide an update on the mounting city investment in the area. You can read my story here.

Vancouver elections, if you’ll recall, have rarely involved mayoral nominations. Usually the parties agree in the backroom who the mayoral candidate will be (Larry Campbell, Jim Green, Philip Owen, Jennifer Clarke of years past) or are sent out as sacrificial lambs to do their duty for the party (David Cadman, Jean Swanson, Carmela Allevato, et al).

The first real mayoral nomination in recent memory was between Sam Sullivan and Christy Clark in 2005. Neither filed disclosures saying how much they had spent, to my knowledge. (And I’m not even sure anyone asked, we were all so agog in the media with the novelty of the race.)

This time, because of the many rumours about how much various parties had spent — Sullivan, Louie, De Genova, and Gregor Robertson — it became much more of an issue. In spite of that, there is no clear city requirement that mayoral candidates, whether winning or losing, have to file accounts of their campaign donations or spending.

In any case, here at least, Raymond Louie’s disclosure here: Raymond

And Allan DeGenova’s disclosure, remarkable for how much information is blacked out, here: de-genova-mayor

P.S. I notice that my tireless conspiracy-theory friends over at city caucus think my posting of these docs is all part of some “backscratching” between me and Vision. Life really is easier if you never make a phone call to check anything, I guess. Anyway, ALL reporters who asked for these docs from Vision got them. I posted them because I have had requests for me to do so — okay, one request, from Kennedy Stewart. I presume others didn’t because they reported on them extensively/couldn’t be bothered/don’t have blogs. I’ve had them since all other financial disclosures were filed (as have EVERY OTHER REPORTER who asked for them) but due to my staggering technical ineptitude, only put them up now.