Mayor Dianne Watts has been on a mission to remake Surrey in image and in reality since she was elected in 2005, from burb to big city in all ways.

The business mission to India in the latest of a series of public events designed to bolster Surrey as a business centre. But no one should make the mistake of thinking it’s anything but hard work to achieve that. Surrey was first an agricultural community and then a bedroom suburb for decades, where politicians were happy to coast on a simple tidal wave of residential development.

Residential development still dominates Surrey’s economy. Of the $1 billion in building permits issued last year, only a fifth of that was for commercial or industrial space.

As my story notes, people were impressed with the level of pre-planning that has gone into Surrey’s mission to India. But the mayor is being careful not to say this is going to turn Surrey into some kind of international hub of financial dynamism. It’s all about nurturing the businesses already there — a cautious and probably more realistic goal.

Lots of interesting info from the presentation on housing and homelessness yesterday, currently only in PP form, no report.

I’ve been getting news releases from some organizations that were just named to the top-employer list, so thought I’d add another twig to the smouldering employee-relations debate here by posting this.

Also paid for by your tax dollars on the list: Coast Mountain Bus.

You can go to the link here, click on the organization of your choice, and see which workplace policies contributed to their selection.

There’s almost zero chance council won’t endorse staff’s long-awaited report suggesting the Vancouver Art Gallery should get two years to develop a financial plan to build a new facility on the empty block next to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

But the back and forth between VAG board member David Aisenstat, union president Paul Faoro, and councillor Geoff Meggs in Jeff Lee’s story makes for fun reading. (Spoiler alert: Someone uses the F-word. Who is it?)

The city and province have spent hundreds of millions to create supportive housing for the chronically homeless.

But the homelessness conveyor belt isn’t stopping. So, in spite of a the big push of the past few years, the city is projecting that homeless numbers will dip over the next two years but then start to rise again.

There’s been a lot of reporting on staff departures at Vancouver city hall in the past two years, partly because the new Vision team has made a point of cleaning house, partly because some of the departures have been so high profile, and partly because the city’s former political staffers at Citycaucus have done an energetic job of flagging every departure.

But it’s not the first time there’s been an exodus from the hall.

The first high-profile swan dive I recall was deputy city manager Ted Droettboom, a highly respected guy who quit when then-councillor Jennifer Clarke insisted on bringing in new zoning to the False Creek Flats’ industrial area in preparation for the fabulous high-tech/dotcom boom. Remember that?

Then the tide flowed out copiously after Judy Rogers, with enthusiastic cheering from the development industry, canned the four-day wor week.

Others have quit under various administrations over the years. So is this term unusual?

Here’s the memo from city manager Penny Ballem to various people at city hall.

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Vision finally made its decision on how the nomination process is going to work for all its candidates. It’s a race for everyone except the mayor, who gets a performance review. (Hope it’s as much fun as mine always were.)

Get ready, get set, go. Actually, some candidates have already. Geoff Meggs launched his campaign for re-election this past week. Heather Deal has hers coming up at the end of February.

 I haven’t been able to check with everyone on whether they’re running again. I hear a couple are thinking about it. Kerry Jang says he’ll decide by mid-February whether he can “work on homelessness the best at the province, the city or in my lab at UBC.”

Here’s my story and below is a fact sheet from the party.

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Of all the departures from city hall since Vision Vancouver took charge, Carlene Robbins’ abrupt exit on Monday is the most puzzling.

A lot of reporters knew Carlene. She and her boss, Barb Windsor, rode herd on some of the city’s hardest and least glory-accruing problems. They pushed the landlords of slummy hotels and rooming houses to keep their property maintained, dealt with houses that were falling to pieces because of absentee or incompetent owners, and stickhandled every other problem that fell under “property use inspection.”

They were efficient, had reams of information in their files and were unfailingly straightforward about what they could and couldn’t release. And though neither was British, they always put me in mind of the pleasantly steely endurance of London residents during the German bombings: quiet but firm, and not likely to let the villains get them down.

Barb retired recently and now Carlene, who had been off work for a week for reasons that aren’t quite clear,  quit abruptly on Monday, as every media outlet in town reported today, including me.

Carlene was in charge of monitoring all the inspections in the city for problem premises, so the house on Pandora Street, where a fire broke out and killed three men just before Christmas, would have been in her bailiwick.

There are allegations that she quit or was asked to quit because of something to do with the fire and the inspection process. But that’s all pure speculation so far. We don’t really know.

All most of us who knew Carlene can say for sure is that she was an asset to the city and things will be worse without her.

And you have to wonder about a work environment where she feels she has no place.

More tales from the Land of Municipal Oversight of Human Behaviour.

To follow up on the events from last week, I called people in Chinatown about their thoughts on council’s strange little manouevre last week, which entailed delaying a decision on allowing taller buildings in the Downtown Eastside but moving ahead to a public hearing on the same topic in Chinatown — all of which pre-empted about 70 speakers who had come out for and against in both areas.

The results here.