Last year, the city’s financial statements came out and no one paid attention to the paragraph buried deep inside saying that the city had provided a loan guarantee of $190 million for the private developers of the Olympic village. Even councillors didn’t notice it. It’s quite a different picture this year, where the statements detail [...]

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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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Not all the financial disclosures are in yet — still waiting for many of the Non-Partisan Association candidates — but there’s now enough in to show that the spending reached unbelievable new levels. Vision Vancouver spent almost $2 million, as I report in the Globe this morning. (The documents will be filed with the city [...]

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That most exciting point in the three-year cycle of any civic reporter approaches, as the deadline for disclosing campaign finance donations for all candidates and parties in the last fall’s election draws nigh. I know that the folks at Beyond Robson will mock me again for beating them repeatedly with long lists of numbers, but [...]

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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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Remember the Vision Vancouver promise to create an affordable housing boom? Here comes the task force to accomplish same, as you can see in this motion coming up next week from councillors Geoff Meggs and Raymond Louie here. It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of solutions they can come up with, given how dramatically [...]

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It looked like it was going to ho-hum day at city council, with councillors Suzanne Anton and Raymond Louie continuing their energetic pillow fighting over the the budget, the Olympic village, the kinds of candies given out for free in the mayor’s office, and so on. But, instead, at the end of the budget presentation, [...]

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Our favourite time of the year — budget estimates — is here again, with the traditional three acts: 1. The discovery that the projected tax increase to maintain the existing budget is not as high as everyone said the previous fall. 2. The wrangling over what gets cut or added, during lengthy public meetings 3. [...]

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My pal Jeff Lee over at the Sun had an interesting story in Friday’s Vancouver Sun with details about the in-camera meeting back in June 2007 where the Non-Partisan Association majority voted in favour of the $193-million loan guarantee and completion guarantee for Fortress, so that Millennium could get its financing for the Olympic village. [...]

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