I thought people were riled up about the city’s impending budget. Boy, am I so last century. Apparently the real city issue these days is whether to allow mixed martial arts. See Jonathan Ross’s breathless live blogging here.

People were chattering about this at the lefty party a couple of weeks ago, but here’s the official announcement that Jan O’Brien will become the provincial secretary for the NDP. For those not in the know, O’Brien is the wife of Councillor Geoff Meggs.

I’m sure those who love to believe that Meggs is the “real” mayor of Vancouver — a constant observation from the critics, even though Meggs is clearly not part of the EcoCapitalist circle around Gregor Robertson  — this will add new dimensions to their conspiracy theories.

BC NDP HIRES JAN O’BRIEN AS NEW PROVINCIAL SECRETARY

Burnaby–The BC New Democratic Party today announced that Jan O’Brien has been appointed Provincial Secretary.

O’Brien is succeeding Laura Nichols, who has served as Provincial Secretary since 2006.

A labour relations specialist, O’Brien currently works in the advocacy department of the BC Government and Service Employees’ Union. She previously wrote for a Vancouver daily newspaper and was a vice-chair of the BC Labour Relations Board. She  is a director of the Vancity Credit Union and the West Coast Legal Action Fund. She has been involved in other community organizations including DOXA (Vancouver’s Documentary Film Festival) and Everywoman’s Health Centre. A committed environmentalist, she is a member of Nature Vancouver and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

O’Brien will begin her new role early in the new year.

There is literally an avalanche of news coming out of city hall these days, as staffers frantically push through reports in advance of the one-month shutdown at city hall during the Olympics so it’s hard to keep up with everything going on or pick out only one or two items.

There’s the first apartment building to be approve under the new rental-incentive program, one that brought out 50 speakers, most of them opposed — not to rental but to the height of the building at Bidwell and Davie. There’s the incentives the city’s putting in place to encourage homeowners to switch to solar-powered water heating. There are the various homelessness initiatives, at $500,000 a pop.

And one small item that has gone mostly uncovered was the staff recommendation and council approval of an extra 16 feet for the Ritz-Carlton, a move that brought out some spitting mad Shangri-La residents, especially those on the higher floors. The additional height will put the R-C at 616 feet, while Shangri-La is at 646.

Shangri-La residents came up with a number of arguments against allowing the new height and, along the way, made any number of accusations about what the city was really up to, along with dark suspicions about the windfall profits the developer (the ubiquitous Holborn Developments) would be making.

Planner Rob Jenkins got up last night to defend the decision, saying that the developer will end up giving the city $26 million in total through DCLs and other community amenities, including buying up $14 million of heritage density (that magic formula that allows owners of heritage buildings to get money to restore them and compensates them, in a way, for not just ripping them down and putting up something new).

Jenkins also noted that the additional height will result in only a 12 per cent reduction in views and that the impact on residents “is minimal.”

The head of real-estate services, Michael Flanigan, also made the case that the additional height will help the developer turn this into an economically feasible project. Hard for many of us to believe, but apparently the developer’s projection of the profit on this 60-something-storey building is only 1.8 per cent. Flanigan said the staff estimate of the profit was only slightly higher — 2.8 per cent — though he did note that if the market changed it could go as high as 17 per cent.

But his conclusion for now was the developer is “taking a significant risk” and so the extra height was not contributing to any windfall profits.

Of course, I can’t help thinking that we went through exactly the same revision and height addition with the Shangri-La a few years ago. And, although many people have resentfully concluded that it was the planning department colluding with or giving in to the developer, it seems to me like what’s happening is that the city — which demands about 90 per cent back of any landlift that developers get in these rezonings — is accepting arguments after that percentage has been agreed to that the developer’s pro forma is then too tight. Rather than back down on the amenities they’ve asked for, city planners agree to new height.

So when you admire a beautifully restored building in Chinatown or Gastown, or the public art in front of the Shangri-La, or any one of the millions of dollars in amenities the city has extracted from developers, look at those top floors and ask if the price was worth it.

Okay, a frivolous story, I know, but I couldn’t resist.

Word has been filtering out the last couple of week or so about the one day of training that Olympics volunteers at Vancouver city hall have been going through, which included some amusing items like memorizing the names of the mascots and learning to identify the councillors (sure hope they don’t get those two mixed up — thought I vote for David Cadman as Quatchi). I hasten to add that staff thought much of the training was, by and large, probably useful. It was just certain bits that got them giggling.

I made long-suffering Peter Judd, who is busy trying to oversee not just this but also the transportation plan — essentially the equivalent of having 17 Super Bowls in a row — and much more, confirm it all and have a story in the Globe today.

Just checking into the city hall website at close to 11, and the speakers are still lined up to protest proposed budget cuts. Doesn’t sound happy. Raymond Louie is grilling yet another hapless speaker on whether it isn’t better to save community centres rather than some of the other the services. The speaker says he’s discouraged by the news that council has decided in advance on limiting any tax increase to two per cent.

Now John Cooper from Friends of the Bloedel Conservatory is up. Another unhappy camper. (By the way, the conservatory people must be experiencing a bittersweet victory. Since the news that the conservatory is going to be closed came out, the place has been packed — partly by people who know it and love it, partly by people who didn’t even know it was there and now want to see it.)

Oh, now a debate over whether to continue on to 11:30. And it’s Mike Bradley up, from the Thunderbird community centre, talking about what a hit the community-centre cuts are going to have on all kinds of programs for at-risk kids — not a frill in low-income neighbourhoods like his.

And now here comes Bob Laurie, from the Vancouver Board of Trade. It must be the late hour, but he’s using the word “crap” a lot as he refers to previous speaker Neil Monckton’s assertions that businesses are getting a break, with council’s plan to shift taxes from business to residential this year. He’s making the point, as he has for a decade, that businesses pay tax at five times the rate residents do, that residents still only pay 54 cents for every dollar in services they use, and more.

It’s a busy life for councillors and staff these days, between these hearings (I think another night on budget hearings is being scheduled, because council probably won’t get through the remaining 50 speakers tonight), the dozens of major reports that everyone is scrambling to get through council before the Olympics hit in February, and the many Christmas parties of various persuasions going on.

While that means gruelling times for some councillors and staff, at least one person seems to be thriving on the busy schedule. That’s the city’s new deputy city manager, Sadhu Johnston.

I’ve seen him at several social occasions lately, where he has invariably outlasted me and many others. He shut down the Bill Tieleman and company “lefty” party sometime well after midnight on Saturday, along with Councillor Heather Deal. At the Concord Pacific party on Monday, he was swapping tales of his dad (a construction worker who was one of the first people hired by Concord back in the 1980s) with a project manager. Very savvy networking.

His energy doesn’t extend just to after-hours partying. I hear from staff inside the building they’re impressed with his admin skills, as he makes sure to prep his teams before they do council briefings and then debrief everyone will a concise summary of where they’re going next after the briefings.

And he’s organizing his life to make sure he has lots of time to spend at city hall. He and his family will be moving into a townhouse in the complex behind City Square. That’s right across the street from the hall. That’s really one-upping everyone else. It’s a bit of a joke that the mayor, his chief of staff Mike Magee and his communications guy Kevin Quinlan all live within about 15 blocks of the hall.

I’m thinking the next staffer is going to have to set up a cot in the empty former engineering offices to improve on Johnston’s move.

Johnston says it’s all part of trying to maintain a good work-life balance — he gets to preserve family peace by running across the street for dinner in between meetings. If you say so.

As council awaits a staff report on what to do about the 250 units of social housing at the Olympic village, whose construction costs ending up soaring far beyond what a normal social-housing unit would cost, ThinkCity is weighing in with an opinion on this issue that echoes what others, many of them of a somewhat more right-wing persuasion, have said.

This is going to be a difficult one to sort out. If there was anything the previous COPE council wanted here, it was a social mix. The mix was already diluted when the NPA council came in and eliminated the idea of trying to make one-third of the units affordable.

This would pretty much eliminate all but the narrowest range of social mix at the site. It raises a painful debate for proponents of social housing. Obviously, just putting social housing always in the cheapest parts of town, yes, generates more units but then creates exactly the kind of concentration or ghetto that everyone — left and right — agrees is problematic. So what is the balance between trying to get a mix of social housing into a wider range of neighbourhoods without blowing the budget?

Obviously the best solution is when governments can get in before land values start to skyrocket and when construction costs are at a reasonable rate. It’s because of that that we have social housing in Kitsilano, including near the waterfront at Jericho, and in some other unusual parts of the city.

And then you build something nice, but not extravagant. However, it also needs to fit into the neighbourhood. It doesn’t do anyone any good for social housing to be instantly recognizable because it’s the worst-looking housing on the block. I don’t have a complete handle yet on why the construction costs went so high on this project — how much was construction-cost escalation, how much was nice touches to help it fit into the neighbourhood, how much was meeting the green goals.

But now councillors are going to have to make the painful decision on what ultimately is the best solution — social mix at a high cost or not?

I zipped down to the new Nester’s store at Woodward’s yesterday, where there was a major PR-assisted nostalgia initiative going on to link to the old Woodward’s Food Floor. In spite of that, it was fun, seeing all these people flooding in to what has been a dead block for a decade and a half.

And, as I left out the cheese shop side door onto Abbott, where the sun was shining and the street was busy, and the ghostly old advertisements on the original old Woodward’s store were visible above every window, it reminded me of how lively it used to be down there.

I got to write about a few snippets of my years of experiences with Woodward’s (and I still have my old blue and white credit card in the house somewhere — yay for hoarders) in the Globe yesterday. Funny how this capitalist operation generated so much love once it was dead.

After a few months spent on a view-corridor study, Vancouver’s planning director, Brent Toderian, is expecting to go to council with a report in January recommending that four new sites be allowed to go higher than usual limits and intrude into existing view cones.

(For conspiracy theorists thinking this is a giveaway to developers, the city typically looks at how much of a profit a developer is going to make from the extra space and takes back up to 90 per cent of it.)

My story on this in today’s Globe.  I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who was at the meetings and is violently opposed to this, for future stories (i.e. I need your name, if you’d like to contact me offline). It sounds to me as though, from the public surveys, that most people are not in favour of any intrusions, though they are more reluctantly willing to accept a few tall buildings that other options (narrower panoramas or a wholesale rise in building heights throughout the downtown).

That’s the question I was left with in my head after spending a few weeks pondering and researching the new health minister.

What do you think? Here’s my story on him in BCBusiness this month.

The UBC researchers who have been doing the most thorough analysis of Olympics impacts released their report today. Here’s the new release.

Pre-Games impact study for 2010 Olympic Winter Games finds modest
benefits

Early results from a comprehensive study that measures the impact of the
Olympic Games during the first four years of the organizing phase finds
Canada’s decision to host the 2010 Games has helped boost its medal
count and led to an increase in the number of businesses in Vancouver
and Whistler.

Meanwhile, the results on issues such as housing and the environment
remain inconclusive in this initial period.

The Olympic Games Impact (OGI) Pre-Games Report, led by University of
British Columbia Prof. Rob VanWynsberghe, is the second of four studies
required by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to measure the
overall impact of the 2010 Winter Games.
[Read more →]