I remember an editor of mine long ago saying there had to be some kind of kickbacks or fraud going on in a city with so many construction cranes on its skyline. My response was that I had never heard a whisper of that because developers were too preoccupied with the city’s form of institutionalized […]

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This little story just keeps going on. Latest info here.

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Cities all over the Lower Mainland are falling over themselves these days to attract businesses, but Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts is the champ at delivering her message the loudest and clearest that the door is open in her city — complete with property tax holidays and fee breaks. Yet again, she gets lots of attention […]

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The vehicle levy, now known as the transportation improvement levy, is back on the table, for those who didn’t know. Metro mayors, who have to decide by October whether to approve a substantially improved new transit system — on that Premier Gordon Campbell said they were going to build — are struggling to figure out […]

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You have to look at this survey out in Maclean’s this morning, looking at the best and worst run cities in Canada. Burnaby, Surrey and Vancouver are in the top four — with Vancouver down from the usual number-one spot it enjoys in other lists because of inefficiency in “recreation and culture.” ???? I haven’t […]

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Faced with mounting bills at TransLink and no way of paying them except to keep going back to transit fares and property taxes, the region’s mayors have decided to make transit funding a campaign issue. They’re holding their (required) in-camera meeting tomorrow to talk about their plan to ask for some of the millions in […]

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Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson got to deliver HIS speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade today, right after Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts’ speech to her board yesterday. Like Dianne, he promised lots of things to stimulate developers and construction: speeded up processes, some vague stuff on fee concessions that I couldn’t get a tight […]

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A month ago, I did a story about cities thinking about ways to entice developers into building again. At that point, there were a lot of rumblings coming out of Vancouver about bold new possibilities for luring developers into building, especially building affordable housing, while Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts was still pondering. Yesterday, Dianne came […]

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I didn’t realize how strongly people felt about the question of One Big Police Force until I did some calling among mayors this week. The question of regional policing is not academic for these people, as they argue for and against, as you can read in my Globe story here.

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I have a story in today’s Globe about what cities are trying to do to keep business, especially development, going in their neighbourhoods. Surrey’s efforts are just kicking off so not a lot of details yet, but there’s a LOT of talk in Vancouver these days about what the Vision council could do to thaw […]

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