It was cyclone season at city hall this afternoon, after the city called a briefing and unloaded a giant heap of steaming financial information on us about what’s going on with the private developer that built the Olympic village, plus more. I just finished writing my Globe story for tomorrow, which will have interesting details about what the city is doing that weren’t in the news conference.

But here are the highlights:

– Millennium only paid $192 million out of the $200 million it was supposed to pay on Aug. 31.(Another $5 million came in by Sept. 20)  Because of that, the city is demanding that it pay the other $561 million it owes right now or prove that it has a plan to make future payments on time.

– It is moving to register charges on Millennium assets

– It does not want Millennium to have a fire sale of the 480 condos.

– Millennium owes the city a total of $730 million, including what it owes for the land

– It’s currently costing Millennium $4.4 million a month for loan payments and $400,000 in strata fees

On the brighter side:

– 60 per cent of Millennium’s 119 rental condos are rented

BTW, if you want a feel for the mood at city hall this week, here’s one comment I heard in the hallway from a city staffer talking about going after Milllennium’s assets to get back the city’s loan money: “And if we have to, we’ll drive the moving trucks to the house, pack up the rugs and pictures ourselves and sell them on craigslist.”

The Vision Vancouver council is now working out whether it is prepared to reach an agreement on its own with one or more of the non-profits who bid on its three rental/social-housing buildings at the village.

As my story today says, that comes with one extra straw on the financial burden the city’s camel is already carrying — the loan guarantee that BC Housing would have provided and which now might fall to the city.

This may or may not be significant. Hard to sort out for many of us what the exact ramifications are to this surprising move, which took city councillors and staff completely off-guard.

City councillors and mayor’s office staff were in mild shock yesterday after it turned out that only three non-profits put in bids to run the three city-owned buildings at the Olympic village, and then Housing Minister Rich Coleman publicly stated that none seemed to be bidders the province deemed acceptable. Full story here.

 (To be accurate, the Co-op Housing Federation, a long-established and solid non-profit, was fine, but that group wants to run the mainly market-unit building as a co-op and that’s not something that BC Housing needs to get involved with.)

This leaves the city, after six months of long difficult negotiations with BC Housing on this bid process, with no operator and no clear sense now of when they will be able to start moving tenants into the 252 units now sitting empty in their three buildings.

More to come on this.

I noted one of Ian Reid’s previous articles in Vancouver Observer a month or so ago, but it now looks as though Mr. Reid is going to be providing regular blog fodder from the left, copying the Citycaucus@ TM style — FOIs left and right and accusations of impropriety.

The latest is a front-“page” story about contracts for website work under the Sam Sullivan administration.

For those not in the know:

Ian Reid, former chief of staff to NDP leader Carole James

Vancouver Observer, online newspaper run by Linda Solomon, former reporter at the Tennessean and sister of Joel Solomon, who has been a fan and financial supporter of Gregor Robertson and, latterly, Vision Vancouver for some years.

Also, to round this story out, is the response from Mike Klassen, the subject of Ian’s FOI’s and aspersions of wrong-doing. (Though Mike also gets a crack at defending himself in the original post — a new tactic on the blog scene.)

This just out.

DVBIA – Hornby bike lanes

A story a day on the troubles at the Olympics village, that’s our motto here in media/bloggerland. There is no shortage. The envelopes will be opened today to reveal how many bids were received to run the three rental buildings the city has at the village.

Here’s my story on what people had to say yesterday when I asked if they had put in bids.

As some of you will recall, I wrote a story earlier this summer about the fact that the head of the union that represents Vancouver Art Gallery workers was planning to go to the gallery’s annual general meeting with some resolutions asking for explanations of how the gallery is spending its money. The sore point: While some staff were being laid off, the gallery was running publicity campaigns to generate support for its plan to move to a new site and build a new gallery.

In advance of the meeting, VAG director Kathleen Bartels has sent out this memo to staff.

From:   Kathleen Bartels
Sent:   September 27, 2010 12:41 PM
To:     Staff List
Subject:        All Staff Meeting Follow-up
Dear Staff,

It has been brought to my attention that you have received
communications from CUPE 15 regarding the Gallery and the upcoming
Annual General Meeting.  I feel it necessary to address some of the
issues that have been raised by the Union regarding the Gallery’s
Management and Board and trust that you will understand my reasons for
addressing these.

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The usual topics will be debated at the annual Union of B.C. Municipalities convention this week, ranging from the Canada-goose problem to a looming RCMP contract that could boost policing costs for almost every city and town in the province.

But, as several municipal politicians told me this weekend, the biggest topic is one that isn’t up for debate: the HST. Whether they support it or don’t, it’s having a ripple effect on the places they represent. Everyone will be waiting to see whether the premier uses his speech as the vehicle to try to alter the course of this train wreck.

Fighting fire with fire, the city has done its own poll on public opinion about a Hornby bike lane.

Alert readers will recall that the Canadian Federation of Independent Business released poll results a couple of weeks ago indicating almost 100 per cent of businesses were opposed to the planned bike lane on Hornby.

Now this from the city. Deconstruct away.

Here is the actual text of the memorandum of agreement between the province and mayors, which many are hoping will end the food fight that was going on between the two sides last year.

But it’s a little hard to figure out, just from looking at these words, what it all actually means. I’ll have a story in the Globe later on that, but you can peruse the agreement in the meantime.

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