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New council starts to take control with appointments

December 5th, 2008 · 4 Comments

The agenda for Monday’s meeting is up and the new council has put out its recommendations for who will sit on which boards and committees, which you can go through here if you’re that kind of detail-obsessed person.

Interesting things of note: Gregor and the most senior members of the Vision team are going en masse to sit at the Metro board — not like Mayor Sam, who didn’t take much of a role there for himself and left it to his other councillors to represent Vancouver.

Councillor Geoff Meggs, former communications director for the B.C. Federation of Labour, is going to be Vancouver’s rep to the GVRD labour-relations board — the group that oversees the contract negotiations for all the municipal unions. That ought to be an interesting experience for all involved.

Andrea Reimer and Heather Deal are chair and vice-chair of the planning and environment committee, Raymond Louie and Meggs same for the budget committee, and COPE Councillor David Cadman gets to chair the transportation commitee with George Chow as his vice-chair — a diplomatic nod to the coalition team

Interesting tussle in the works, as the recommendations have Raymond Louie as council’s appointee to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities with “effective date to be determined.”

What that polite phrase means is that there’s a lot of unhappiness about the fact that NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton is the actual current appointee to the FCM but her term doesn’t run out until June. That means Vancouver is represented for six months by a very minority member of council.

I chatted with Anton last night at her campaign volunteer thank-you party (where they were gleefully celebrating their new reputation as a “legendary ground team,” which I apparently called them on one of my radio appearances). She said she’s planning to serve out her term. But the Vision team are anxious to have a full-court press of Visionistas here, there and across the land to push their agenda on housing, childcare, homelessness and the rest.

I await further news.

The new duties reflect the unofficial portfolios that councillors are going to be taking on, as Vision gets its troops in place to push a rather ambitious agenda.

Rumours around city hall yesterday were that the new council had already picked its new citizen reps for police board and others, but, if so, no one is willing to say that. In fact, George Chow, Kerry Jang and Ellen Woodsworth are on the nomination committee to choose those people.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if it does all happen fast. This crew wants to get out the door fast

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