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Former councillor Jim Green hired to help on Olympic village

January 27th, 2009 · 10 Comments

I see my former Sun buddy Jeff Lee was the first to get this story in print about Jim Green being hired by Millennium Developments to help out with the Olympic village and possibly other projects of theirs.

Of course, the sub-text is that this must be about Jim, who helped started the Vision Vancouver party, using his influence with his political allies to get them to do something or another for Millennium. It’s not clear what more he could get them to do, considering they’re already bailing out Millennium by helping them find cheaper financing but we’ll wait to see how this unrolls.  I’m sure you, my always-ready-for-critical-analysis readers, will have some suggestions I haven’t thought of.

Those who follow development issues will recall that Jim’s been doing a lot of development work since he left council. He worked for a while with Bastion Developments on projects they had out at the University of B.C., which involved both heritage and affordable-housing issues.

He also worked with developer Rob Macdonald on plans for his B.C. Electric building at the corner of Hastings and Carrall and with Concord Pacific on their now controversial 58 West Hastings site. In both cases, he was helping develop a proposal to the city that they get extra height/density in return for including more social housing — something the city’s planning department said they weren’t going to consider while a height review for the area was going on.

By the way, Jim Green is not the only person that Millennium, aka Peter and Shahram Malek, have gone to for help in the last few months. (And he was initially surprised to get the call he told me last December. Although he’d worked as a councillor to get social housing included in Millennium’s L’Hermitage project downtown, he’d never really spoken to or got to know the Maleks during that process.)

The Maleks, who generally don’t seek publicity for their projects even in good times, have been more than a little bewildered and dismayed to find themselves at the centre of a media centre of bad coverage. So they’ve turned to a number of people for help. Among them, besides Jim: Larry Campbell and Allan DeGenova, former mayor and former mayoral candidate.

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