So council, along with city manager Penny Ballem and various staff gathered around fibreglas eagle in front of the hall and conducted the rest of the meeting al fresco, motoring through all their items of new business.

Sadly, I don’t think anyone brought up the idea of getting rid of the friggin’ eagle — yet another round of appalling kitsch to be unleashed on our city, after the whales and bears painted in various colours have come and gone from our streets. Yes, I realize they’re part of a noble fundraising effort, but really … talk about a good idea gone bad.

The only remotely cool remnant of those invasions is the one I spotted recently at Main and Quebec, sitting on top of the optometry clinic there, where the bear has been spray-painted silver and adorned with a giant pair of very snazzy sunglasses.

It’s hard to remember, but in those days, no one cared about city hall. It used to be me and a couple of Chinese-language-media reporters who would hang out in the pews at city council chambers on Tuesdays. When I went to the committee meetings on Thursday, I was usually the only reporter there. People coming to speak to council issues sometimes thought I was the recording secretary. And it was like that for quite a long time. Years and years, really, although Allen Garr started writing for the Courier after a while so then there was, thankfully, one more person.

This week in Vancouver, when city hall was stuffed like a turkey with news — the budget, cracking down on crummy SROs, whether to allow mixed martial arts events, police budgets being wrecked by gang investigations, Councillor Suzanne Anton grilling the mayor like he was a naughty boy about campaign financing — there were as many reporters and outlets covering the events as at any session of the provincial legislature. When Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts gave her annual addresss to the Board of Trade out there a couple of weeks ago, it was covered like it was a throne speech.

The change started in Vancouver, of course, with the surprise election of Larry Campbell and COPE in 2002, the first of the signs that, with the Liberals in charge in Victoria, the left was going to concentrate its efforts at other levels. The ongoing battle for power between the two major, now more equal, parties and the big issues the city has had to tackle have kept the interest going. But in other municipalities, upsets by new mayors — Dianne Watts in Surrey, Pam Goldsmith-Jones in West Van in 2005; and then Rick Green in Langley, Ernie Daykin in Maple Ridge and Richard Stewart in Coquitlam in 2008 — make it clear that people are paying attention to civic politics and are ready for change. They’re also ready to boot people out the minute they think they’re not performing.

And this is even though big media haven’t always been that interested in civic politics lately. Unlike in the 1980s, when the city hall “press room” routinely had camera crews hanging around and a paper like the Vancouver Sun had not one but two city-hall reporters plus usually a columnist covering city issues, the bigger TV and print don’t always have even one person assigned to the beat any more.

The community newspapers, which are not suffering at all from the same kind of “what do we do now” angst of the big metro dailies, have helped fill that void will their increasingly strong coverage. As well, the surge of interest in civic politics in blog world has also moved in to fill the gap.

It’s kind of weird but provincial politics hasn’t produced anywhere near the kind of blogging that we’re seeing on the municipal level. Bill Tieleman runs the most aggressive blog in covering provincial issues and a few others comment, but really, a lot of the energy is way more local. I keep puzzling over why that is — as the world gets more complicated, it’s easier to focus on the local stuff because we can understand it? where we live right here seems more important these days than out there? Or we now see ourselves more as from our neighbourhoods than as Canadians or BCers?

Jordan Bateman, whose Langley politics blog used to be the main read out there (and an informed one, since he’s a councillor and former newspaper reporter), has seen three other blogs on Langley politics pop up in the last while. Paul Hillsdon keeps up on stuff in Surrey; there’s a North Van politics blog; and, of course, here in Vancouver, there seems to be a new blog every couple of months: me, Mike Howell at the Courier, Charlie Smith at the Georgia Straight, Christine Montgomery at the Province for a while until recently, the two former Sam Sullivan aides, Daniel Fontaine and Mike Klassen at citycaucus.com, and many others (sorry if I didn’t mention you all by name).

That’s all a good thing, I hope, because it turns out that it actually makes a difference to the political process when there are eyes watching and people talking about what happens. In Russell Smith’s lovely column in the Globe recently, where he was talking about how much he loves newspapers (oh, yes, the feel of them and the sense of connectedness to the world), he pointed out that, when newspapers die, it has a direct impact on local politics and how engaged people are in them.

So, even though I now can’t get a seat at the media table these days if I come late to council, and it feels sometimes like everyone is falling over each other to get the latest little tidbit from the city, it’s okay — and even kind of fun — that it’s crowded.

The play kicks off with the preliminary budget estimates from Budget Mistress Annette Klein, out last night on the city’s website. If you want to read the whole thing (those of you brave souls who slogged through the Olympic village reports on London Inter Bank something something rates will likely find this a breeze), it’s here.

The essential points you need to know from all this:

1. They’re now looking at a six-per-cent overall tax increase, down from the 11 that everyone kept talking about during the election. That’s after some serious scraping inside city hall ($26 million worth), where I take it that Raymond Louie was working with staff to do things like trim the amount of money departments get to keep for staff turnover that provides a little cushion when those positions aren’t filled for a few months. They also benefitted from a few advantages, like plunging gas prices, which will save them $1.2 million.

2. But your residential tax increase will be higher than that because the Vision council is sticking to the plan of shifting taxes from residential to business. So they are predicting that the tax increase on the average house of $783,000 will be $128. Of that, $33 comes from the tax shift, the rest is just from the regular increase. As a result of the shift, small businesses worth the same average amount will see their taxes lowered by $155. (Of course, big businesses worth more will get a much bigger tax cut.)

3. There’s no impact from the Olympic village on property taxes this year. But there could be in coming years, if the condos don’t sell for enough to cover the loan.

Not in the report, but coming soon, says Raymond – the Vision council will be using some of the money saved to fund a few of the things promised in their platform: a mental-health advocate, a “green grant” to foster innovative environmental projects, money for an external auditor to review the city’s whole budget, and a chunk of money for child care and youth services.

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.

Tomorrow will be the first council meeting with real business and a chance to see Dr. Penny Ballem in the city manager’s chair.

In the meantime, Vision councillors have a raft of motions on the new agenda to kick off their new era. Among them is Councillor Tim Stevenson’s motion to ask the provincial government to stiffen up the Residential Tenancy Act.

That has apartment owners and sellers in a tizzy, warning that council is “attempting to influence the provincial government.” Uh, boys, that’s what they do every day of the week. It’s their job.

Anyway, my guess is that most of the actions in Stevenson’s are unlikely to go anywhere with this government or even, in a parallel universe, an NDP government. A nice gesture, though.

There is a chance the provincial government might move to provide a few more protection for renters, given that their NPA friends probably told them that, in the recent civic election, the NPA couldn’t even get renters to talk to them. Maybe because they feel like they’ve been thrown out to the wolves the last few years, as they grappled with rising rents, economic evictions, demolitions, a zero vacancy rate, and everything else that strikes fear into the heart of renters. By the way, the latest CMHC report came out today and the vacancy rate is now at 0.3 per cent.

Anyway, this is what’s going around in the landlord-type circles.

From: Mark Goodman [mailto:mark@goodmanreport.com]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:38 PM
To: [deleted]
Subject: The Goodman Report: Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums

Dear [deleted], While The Goodman Team was not planning to publish any further newsworthy items until the New Year, unfolding events dictate that we immediately address issues that we consider vital to our readership. There are growing concerns that Vancouver city council is attempting to influence the provincial government, as predicted by The Goodman Report a couple days ago, wherein we commented on “the spectre of increased government action concerning evictions and renovations.”

In today’s Vancouver Sun, in the front page article Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums, columnist Don Cayo writes, “Specifically, it calls on the province to amend the Residential Tenancy Act to require landlords to allow tenants evicted for the purpose of renovations to reoccupy their units once renovations are completed at the same rent as they were paying prior to the renovation.” David Goodman is on record in the forgoing article decrying the fact that Vancouver city council is advocating that landlords “subsidize tenants by making new investments that are guaranteed to show no return.”

Read: Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums >>

Further, Mary Francis Hill writes in The Vancouver Sun today on the same topic.

Read: Councillor Stevenson urges eviction protection for tenants >>

Included in Councillor Stevenson’s and Mayor Robertson’s motion to go towards Council next Tuesday, Dec 16th include:

• “First right of refusal” for rental tenants whereby landlords cannot raise rents even after substantial renovations
• Giving the City the authority to demand improvements on apartment buildings wherever and whenever they deem necessary
• Eviction notices to extend from 60 to 90 days
• Landlords to report to the Residential Tenancy Branch annually all turnovers, rent increases, and reasons for eviction.

To better appreciate the serious ramifications of Council’s initiative, please
download the MOTION ON NOTICE >>

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Be proactive and write your MLA, write the City of Vancouver, write the media and to the Mayor Gregor Robertson and Councillor Tim Stevenson.

Mayor and Council as a group: mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca

Mayor Gregor Robertson
gregor.robertson@vancouver.ca
Phone: 604.873.7621
Fax: 604.873.7750

Councillor Tim Stevenson
clrstevenson@vancouver.ca
Phone: 604.873.7247
Fax: 604.873.7750

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

British Columbia Newspapers

Vancouver Sun
sunletters@png.canwest.com

Vancouver Province
provletters@png.canwest.com

Local Newspapers

Vancouver Courier
editorial@vancourier.com

Westender
editor@westender.com

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CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report To further assist our readership in setting their suite rentals at appropriate levels, we are delighted to share with you the just released CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report. Vancouver Highlights: Strong Demand for Rental Housing Vancouver’s rental apartment vacancy rate moved lower in 2008, after two years of stable but already low vacancies Same sample rents increased at a slightly slower pace than last year The stock of purpose-built rental apartments declined in 2008, while the number of rental apartment condominium units increased The rental condominium vacancy rate rose slightly compared to 2007, but remained below one per cent Vacancy rates will stay below one per cent in 2009, while rents will continue to edge up in the 3-5 per cent range CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report >>

Yours sincerely,

David & Mark Goodman

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.

As people in the Downtown Eastside know too well, those who have been sleeping on the streets are often the most troubled. So there’s often a lot more to housing them, even in shelters, than just opening the doors. Those who live in the Gastown area will remember the difficulties caused after the COPE council, in another quick move to house the homeless shortly after being elected in 2002, put 200 people who had been squatting around Woodward’s into the Stanley New Fountain and left it to the Portland Hotel Society to run.

With few resources and an extremely challenging group to deal with, the Stanley turned into a nightmare for all concerned. There were police calls, neighbourhood disruptions, and burned-out staff trying to do too much with too little.

The situation finally eased after a couple of years when the Portland got more staffing and resources for the building. The Portland, which manages several hotels in the area, was also able to cope with the situation better than some because it could deploy staff over to the Stanley from other buildings, if there was a real emergency, and its staff had also had years of experience in dealing with some of the Downtown Eastside’s most difficult residents.

She’s right on that. However, the city has been pouring money in recent years into social housing, an area that it also used to say was the provincial government’s responsibility.

Most people don’t realize it, but the city has shelled out enormous amounts of money for social housing in the past couple of years. It used to lease its land to the provincial government for social housing projects. It’s now giving it outright and also throwing in, at least in the case of the downtown hotels that the province bought, millions in renovation money. I believe the NPA council was, until recently, boasting about the $178 million or so it put into social housing.

The city also recently gave $500,000 to the fledgling Streetohome Foundation, which is trying to find ways to channel private donations into housing projects.

Yes, $300,000 is a lot of money. But the city started down this path quite a while ago, as it, like many other cities, realized that it could sit on its hands and say homelessness was a provincial/federal problem or it could do something.

What the new council is asking for”

- a staff report on options for the Burrard Street bike-lane trial by mid-February

- a staff report on options for a city arts council that would be in charge of giving out culture grants, instead of being solely in the hands of culture planners, by end of February

- a motion to ask for changes to the Residential Tenancy Act to extend the eviction-notice period, to try to prevent “economic evictions” and to require landlords to report on a whole raft of things, including rent rolls and numbers of evictions.

- a staff report listing every order made to city landlords about complying with the city’s standards of maintenance bylaw, along with a report on who has complied and who hasn’t, and then another report asking what would be entailed in having the city complete repairs for those not done by the landlords. this by January.

- a motion to move the head of the sustainability office onto the corporate management team (a move that seems innocuous but is a direct contradiction of the prevailing city hall policy for years, which was that there was no need for that because “every department incorporates sustainability into its plans already”), to ask for a report on progress with farmers markets and urban agriculture, and a request for a staff report back on car-free days every Sunday in thre different commercial districts. The first two by Jan. 15, the last one by end of February.

- and, of course, the motion to kick start the homelessness emergency response team.