This re-design has been anticipated by those in the know for a while, with an earlier rendering of the building floating around the internet.

And today, here it is.

The Twitter conversation about this is already suggesting there’s a sudden nostalgia for the old building, which surprises me. I had only ever heard bad things about the building.

But love or hate the new design, it will change the main intersection of Vancouver’s downtown, as noted in my Globe story today.

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As the province contemplates what to do with the carbon tax beyond this year, various groups are piling on with their opinions.

Mayors have been trying to get carbon-tax money for a while. They say they don’t want all of it, just some. And they claim that it can be done without too much pain.

I have to acknowledge that I think there is a touch of wonky math behind some of these assumptions, some of which may be mine. At any rate, here’s the story for you to hash over.

You can also look at the calculation below that Metro Vancouver did of how much local residents and businesses paid in carbon tax and how much they got back. You’ll be surprised at the numbers.

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It will be officially announced tomorrow, but after more than a year of testing out organics recycling in a couple of neighbourhoods in Vancouver, the city is now going to move forward to phase 2 — letting everyone start dumping all food products in their yard trimmings bin.

Here’s an explanation of what is allowed in the yard trimmings/organic waste carts in the pilot neighbourhoods (Sunset, Riley Park), which will now be what we can all do.

Here’s my blog post from April when I did an early story about the success rates in the pilot program, showing that the city was getting a 50-per-cent recycling rate — considered good by the standards of many cities.

The one thing still to come in the organics recycling is a change in garbage pick-up. For now, the pick-up will remain as is: yard bins every second week, regular garbage every week. At some point (once the new trucks and carts arrive), it will reverse.

That will be the true test. People who continue to throw food scraps in regular garbage will find it gets kinda smelly kinda fast. Other municipalities doing this already have found they end up with some cranky residents who don’t want to get with the program and don’t like running mini-rendering plants out in their garbage cans in the lane.

Will Vancouver be different? We are sooo green, aren’t we? We’ll see.

Mary Polak is the fifth transportation minister since the Liberal government came into power in 2001. Kevin Falcon made his name here, of course, in the five years from 2004-2009 and became beloved of road builders everywhere for his aggressive championing of the something-billion Gateway project, which includes the Port Mann Bridge twinning and the perimeter roads.

He also changed the way TransLink is governed, with an appointed board that makes most of the decisions, instead of a mayors’ body. The mayors now get to have a council where they can decide on extras (mostly because they usually have to pay for them), but not on what or how the approximately billion-dollar base budget is spent.

But there was also Judith Reid (01-04), Shirley Bond (09-11) and recently Blair Lekstrom (11-12).

And now Mary Polak. Not surprisingly, in Day Four of her new portfolio, she was not veering off the road in any way. As you can see here, she stuck to what has been pretty much the government playbook: We are fully in support of certain services. But the TransLink mayors have to stop asking us for money all the time, because the deal was that they would use property taxes to help pay for transit and we would take away hospital taxes.

Also: There will be a Highway rapid bus on the Port Mann when it opens. We will talk to them and maintain lines of communication (tho Polak said she can’t make the upcoming Sept. 19 mayors’ council meeting). There needs to be a good land-use plan along with transit and a change in people’s expectations. Her quote (not in the story): “It’s going to take local communities different from what there have been. Now, everybody wants a two-acre property but they still want the bus to pull up to the driveway.”

Polak, by the way, drives a Dodge Caliber, which replaced her previous Honda Civic hatchback. But she knows commuting. She’s done the trip to downtown by bus and SkyTrain and, as a girl growing up in Cloverdale, she commuted to Catholic high school in Burnaby. (Fortunately for her, by school bus, not public transit or she might still be on the road somewhere.)

It never made sense to me that meters should always charge the same price at all hours. The CBD (central business district, for non-nerds) streets are between $4 and $6 an hour on weekdays … and on weekends, when no one is there and there is no compelling reason for anyone to drive downtown to pay those prices. So they sit empty, when the city could likely make more money by lowering the price, which would attract people who would be willing to pay the lower price and hike over to Robson or Granville.

Conversely, other areas charge incredibly low rates (many around Gastown, for example) when the streets there are often packed as people flood down for the restaurants and bars on weekend nights.

The city, as was previously reported, said it was moving to programmable meters. And now, it appears, they’re arriving.

Now posted under City Plumber. (Over there to the left on the blog page, folks.)

Comments about the “true history” of the Blue Bus or any nefarious conspiracies undetected until now should be posted over on CP.

When I went to Home Depot and bought a new toilet on the weekend, I noticed that among the various messages stamped on the outside of the box for my lovely Kohler item (made in Mexico, if I’m remembering correctly) was one boasting that this new model had been shipped with with far less packaging than was previously the case.

That’s the kind of message we’re going to be seeing in print, and in practice, at many more stores in the future here.

As I discovered only recently, B.C. is moving to a system of having producers and stores be 100 per cent financially responsible for recycling their products and packaging.

Their plan for accomplishing this by May 2014 is due this November. As I also discovered, it’s a complicated discussion with considerable debate over who should run recycling systems, if it’s companies that are going to be paying the bill.

The building industry and municipalities track building permits hawkishly. The cities need to know if they need more or fewer planners on the job, as well as belt-tightening all around if construction slows down. Builders want to know what everyone else is up to and whether there’s a glut of condos coming on.

Vancouver got the ball rolling for me on this topic recently by issuing a news release noting that the value of buildings for permits in the first half of 2012 were in the $1-billion plus range. (Original news release here.) That got me wondering what was going on with other municipalities. Were they seeing returns to pre-recession levels, still struggling or had they recovered even faster?

My story here has the results of my little research foray. For numbers junkies, here are the sites I went to: Richmond, which had fabulously complete stats, right down to individual addresses; Surrey, and Metro Vancouver. Vancouver’s new release is here and its historic stats (which you can’t find by going to the menu on the main website, oh, no, that would make it too easy) are here.

Part of the fall ritual is announcements about improved bus service here and there in the region, as TransLink determines where the transit-rider bulges are. This year, service is going up for a number of heavy commuter routes south of the Fraser, but other, less-used routes are being reduced, some to once an hour. Yikes, won’t be building up any customers there! (You can read all the changes here, which make great nerd material. Alert people will have noticed there what the City of Vancouver announced today, which is that Robson Square is going to remain closed to traffic even after Labour Day.)

And, as the summer doldrums end, we are back to thrashing around about how to pay for transit. As my story in yesterday’s Globe detailed, we’re going to have the privilege as of Sept. 17 of commenting on a new 10-year plan, one that is supposed to include a solution for the Highway 1 bus, among other projects.

The Village, as it’s now called, is full of life these days, with more people and shops around all the time. London Drugs is due to open any day, from what I understand.

But, although things look better than they did 18 months ago, the numbers still don’t add up to anything near like a profit or break-even for the city at this point.

I took a look at the latest report filed by the receiver, just recently, to find some of the information for this story in the Globe, which shows that after $157 million in sales and another $8 million in rental revenues the last six months, the city netted $114 million. Which means a ways to go on both its construction loan and the unpaid sale price of the land.