Not quite as visceral as the letters asking you for money to prevent wild animals from getting caught in leghold traps, but almost.

This is the pitch to the faithful from NPA fundraising chair Rob Macdonald for the party’s planned $2.4-million campaign.

RE:          Gregor’s Teflon Coating and Strange Leadership Style is Wearing Very Thin

I have never witnessed a civic government quite like the one we have now in the City of Vancouver.  When one looks at the record of Gregor Robertson and the Vision/Cope alliance, the litany of poor governance is quite shocking:

·         Complete mismanagement of the Olympic Village file where we now have the most expensive social housing in North America at $600,000 per door, coupled with a staggering loss of taxpayer’s money, in the $100 million range, due in good part to things said directly by Gregor Robertson that damaged the value of the property;

·         The backyard chicken coop economic strategy;

·         Horribly designed, multi-million dollar “temporary” bike lanes that have created substantial harm to the downtown business community that were literally rammed into place without honest consultation.  This was followed by an impact study that city staff proceeded to tamper with and delay;

·         A new “housing strategy” that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, all so you can pay someone else’s rent;

·         Out-of-control property taxes on small business, that are crushing people out of business and throwing people out of work;

·         Lack of accountability over the Stanley Cup riot where Gregor, as chief cheerleader of large downtown view sites, invited over 150,000 people downtown and then forgot to increase the police budget;

·         A half-baked, radical green-agenda that lacks environmental good sense;

·         Parks and City boulevards that are going unkempt and uncut while we fund various goofy social engineering projects like taxpayer funded wheat fields;

·         Ignoring the basic and important work of local government while civic employee morale drops to an all-time low;

·         And the list goes on, and on, and on.

In our quest for a progressive and vibrant Vancouver, we cannot afford or sustain this kind if ineptitude.

Enough is enough.

Like a growing number of Vancouverites, I believe it’s time for a change that puts common sense back into our local government.  It’s the reason I have decided to help raise money for this year’s civic election campaign in support of the NPA Party.

The NPA Team is being led by my long-time friend Suzanne Anton who, as both a former Crown Prosecutor and an expert in plain old mathematics, will bring both integrity and financial responsibility back to City Hall.  You can review the whole NPA Team of candidates on the website www.npavancouver.ca.  As a group, the NPA Team of business-like individuals offers a highly credible alternative to the existing City Council who have really let the citizens of Vancouver down.

As someone involved in the development business, you will be asked and expected to give a donation to the Vision party. What I would like you to carefully consider before you do that, is to take into account Vision’s support for activities taking place in the planning department that are horribly misguided. Attacking private property rights and effectively charging income taxes on the development community, when statutorily prohibited from doing so, is wrong. Strong arming money from people and then having them sign a “voluntary contribution agreement” is wrong.  Playing favourites and threatening your livelihood if you don’t “play ball” is wrong.  If we support this kind of behaviour with a political donation to the Vision party, basically out of fear of reprisal, then what does that say about us? Supporting the political process is one thing, but supporting plainly bad government, that does not understand the difference between right and wrong is another. Our democracy and our City deserve better.

The NPA has assembled an incredible team of professionals to run the election campaign and we have a $2.4 million budget for the campaign operations. As the NPA Campaign Fundraising Chairman, I really hope I can count on you for financial support.  Cheques should be made payable to “Vancouver NPA 2011 CAMPAIGN” and may be sent in care of myself at [business address].

I would be happy to get together with you personally to discuss the campaign as your support is integral to restoring common sense government to the City of Vancouver, and you can call me anytime at [personal cell number].  In addition, I would appreciate it if you would forward this correspondence on to any of your friends and particularly your professional advisors and contractors who you think might support a much needed change at City Hall.

At the end of the day, if we do not have good government, we have nothing.

Yours sincerely,

Robert J. Macdonald
Fundraising Chair
NPA 2011 Campaign

It’s that time again, when political parties tell us about great new projects that are on the way that will make the city great but won’t cost taxpayers anything.

Wednesday, the NPA’s Suzanne Anton announced that it would push ahead to get a downtown streetcar, which would not require a city investment. Or maybe. I couldn’t tell.

I asked at the news conference how much the city would be prepared to put up to get the project moving, in case the private sector didn’t have the $80 million. She said a future task force would decide that. (The NPA’s details on this attached below.)

You lovely blog-people have already posted numerous thoughtful comments on this under my last entry. (Sorry, guys, bad day yesterday and no time to post or even barely tweet.) Perhaps you can continue the conversation here.

That story got a lot of coverage.

One that got no coverage was the city’s news release about an invitation for developers to propose affordable-housing projects for a piece of city land on the east side. This new effort to create affordable housing would entail the city providing land at a discounted rate for a developer that promises to build at agreed-on affordable rates. (NOT $1,600 for a one-bedroom, like the Olympic village or STIR projects in the West End, presumably.)

Those with long memories will recall that Gordon Campbell tried precisely this idea on a grand scale, giving heavily discounted land to a company that promised to build affordable housing. Jack Poole created the Vancouver Land Corporation, using union pension funds, to take advantage of that offer.

I’ve seen ideas like this work. But the public needs to be sure that what the city is giving as a benefit to the developer really does produce affordable units or things can get ugly.

More info below from the sources involved:

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There was so much buzz the last couple of weeks about the amount of money that Non-Partisan Association chair Peter Armstrong and fundraising chair Rob Macdonald were raising that I had to pursue this story.

Interesting that they are talking like this so early in the campaign. Party fundraisers usually don’t like to say they are going after big money — alerts the opposition, for one.

But it could be that the two are trying to encourage other donors to come on board by creating some hype. The momentum in the party had been a bit lacklustre until recently, when I started hearing from various sources about the money that the two men have been raising.

I’m inclined to think that the talk is more than just hype, though. I’ve heard more than one tale of well-off businessmen in the city who are so spitting mad (often about bike lanes) that they’re prepared to give generously. Plus, the political opposition seems to think that it’s not just hype.

So, if it is true, and if this prods Vision into also driving hard on fundraising, we can look forward to many, many robo-calls, robo-tweets, billboards, television ads, regular phone polling and more in the next eight weeks, as both parties try to find their supporters and caricature their opposition.

(Speaking of which, lots of griping the last couple of days about robo-calls from the NPA, asking people to press #1 if they wanted a lawn sign, #2 if they supporting the party, etc. Apparently, this new technology is considered a very fast, efficient way to generate a quick list of your known diehard ‘mark,’ as they’re known in polling — your for-sure supporters. Vision claims they won’t be using that technique. Hmmm. They were quick to point out robo-tweets from the NPA, but I noticed recently a little eruption of robo-tweets on the Vision side.)

Political junkies, fill your boots figuring this one out.

Here’s my story. This changes the look of the chessboard.

Good scoopola by Jeff Lee at the Vancouver Sun, thanks to someone clearly unhappy about this going on behind the scenes. What do you think? Should the city have bailed them out or not? Done it in camera or not?

(Jeff’s blog post indicates the vote was unanimous.)

Lots of tweets and emails flying around about this column, posted below, in BIV from former NPA councillor and NPA mayoral candidate Peter Ladner. While never naming the NPA directly, he warns that it’s a “mug’s game” to mock and attack efforts at urban agriculture.

Ladner did not write this column in response to the attack ad that the NPA posted this week, ridiculing Vision’s backyard chickens and frontyard wheat fields. It was written before that ad was first aired. But clearly the attacks in previous months had something to do with this column.

He hasn’t split with his party, by any means, though. He was at the party’s annual general meeting last night and maintains the party is open to a diversity of views.

Here’s the column

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Civic election campaigns don’t usually get going until after the Thanksgiving weekend, so as not to bore us to tears and cause candidates to drop from exhaustion like overworked horses.

This year is different. The Non-Partisan Association is fighting like mad to get more than one seat on council, which they were reduced to in 2008. It looks as though they’ve got a budget to do some damage.

Word among the party is that campaign chair Peter Armstrong is doing a phenomenal job of raising money from people who think the Vision council is out of control, with help from developer Rob Macdonald (who has donated the office space the NPA is working in, an office in the SkyTrain concourse underneath his Shore Club as part of his contribution to the effort).

That’s allowed them to start buying ads early and hire Campaign Research Inc., the company that helped Rob Ford win in Toronto through its extremely effective and aggressive strategies for identifying likely voters.

My story on the campaign start is here.

The NPA’s chicken-attack ad: NPA Ad-1

Details of Suzanne Anton’s promises on accountability below.

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Consider this blog post my once-monthly quota on all things bike-related. People who don’t like noise or violence should stay away from the comment section.

That said, I continue to find stories that make me think about the incredible worldwide push on to make bicycles a significant part of urban transportation systems. Is this part of a revolution as significant as 1950s freeway building? Or is it just a fashionable trend that will plateau in a few years, as attention turns elsewhere.

Two stories recently were striking:

This one today, about Los Angeles putting a bike lane through its downtown. Okay, the downtown is kind of a dead zone and the real traffic craziness is on the freeways, but still. I could actually see this expanding rapidly. One thing we noticed the last time we were in LA is that quite often the non-freeway arterials that run across the city are quite pleasant and not that crowded. Plus the city is relatively flat. Plus those streets are quite wide, so could easily accommodate bikes.

And then Frank Bruni’s column in the New York Times on the weekend, as he cycles around the city with much reviled Janette Sadik-Kahn (who visited here a couple of years ago), who has driven New York’s aggressive push for bike lanes and pedestrian zones in the middle of streets.

One thing I’d like to know in all this bike stuff is how many cars are really removed from the road when someone converts to cycling. It’s always been my suspicion that most people cycling are converting from transit, not cars.

However, those of you who follow my tweets know that I, in an excess of virtue, cycled to work twice out of four days last week, PLUS cycled to the farmers’ market for my load of organic vegetables that will quietly liquefy in my refrigerator this week. That was definitely one gas-hogging minivan removed from the road for those trips. Maybe there are more of those kinds of converts out there than I think.

By the way, one thing that I was pleasantly struck by last week on my commutes — the silence. Many people I know in Vancouver mourn the passing of the city of the 1970s mostly because of how tranquil it was compared to what it’s like now, with 24/7 streams of noise-spewing traffic.

But when you’re on a bike on the city’s great bike routes on the residential streets, you get to go back to that old, tranquil city. It’s incredibly quiet. You spend your time admiring instead, as you whoosh along, the lovely gardens, parents walking their kids to school, older couples strolling around hand in hand, owners out with their dogs.

If only our late summer could last forever, says this fair-weather cyclist.

A scary headline on my Globe story today says the Sustainable Transportation Coalition is campaigning for property-tax increases to kickstart the $700-million transit expansion that TransLink has proposed.

Are they really? No, people like former NPA councillor and Business in Vancouver founder Peter Ladner are not in favour of permanent property-tax increases to pay for transit expansions. What the group really wants is a vehicle levy, road pricing, or a carbon tax whose revenues are turned over to transit.

But are they advocating that mayors pass a plan with a theoretical tax increase for 2013 in order to provide the security needed to get financing right away while the province figures out which other funding mechanism to put in place by then? Yes.

And that argument is the confusing kind of debate you’re going to hear more of in the next three weeks as mayors prepare to vote. (North Vancouver District Mayor Richard Walton is trying to organize a vote for the last week of September or first two weeks of October on what’s called the TransLink supplemental plan, which is the last kick at the can to try to get transit expansion funded and going in 2012.)

It’s hard to follow these transit-funding stories because of what seems like hair-splitting arguments. But it comes down to this, as you read your allotted quota of TransLink stories in the next month.

No mayors or advocacy groups are really supporting a property-tax increase. Every one of them says it’s the wrong way to fund transit and it’s a hardship for already overloaded municipal taxpayers.

But some mayors are willing to vote for a 2013 tax increase in order to show the province some good faith.

TransLink can’t go out and borrow money unless it can prove to lenders that it has a way of making the monthly payments. Just like us when we borrow money for a house. We need to show we have an income that is sufficient to make mortgage payments.

So the approval of the property tax is like collateral.

The promise from the province is that it will look for other mechanisms than the property tax, to be put in place by 2013.

The problem for a whole ‘nother set of mayors is that they are worried the province will jam out when crunch time comes. It’s happened twice in the past. (And then there are those, like Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan, who thinks there wouldn’t be such a demand for extra funding for transit expansion if the mayors had control over TransLink’s base budget. But it doesn’t. The TransLink board, appointed by the province, can pass that on its own.)

And Premier Christy Clark scared all of them when her own minister pitched using a two-cent gas tax for part of the funding and then she came out sounding like she was not in favour of the idea and that it’s hard for people to pay new taxes. She was quickly brought back into line and issued a letter saying she supported it.

But it gave many of the mayors the willies imagining what would happen to their own political necks if they pass this new plan, with gas-tax hikes and commitments to property-tax increases, and then she goes around saying people can’t afford it.

So this is a nervous bunch, these 22 mayors. Vancouver, Surrey, the District of North Van, and Greg Moore over in Port Coquitlam appear to be solidly prepared to support this plan. But it’s not completely clear how the vote will go among the others.

Some think there’s enough to carry the plan. Others think it’s closer to a 50-50 split.

Portland is not the nirvana that urban planners and Portlandia fans would have you believe.

It’s got persistent high unemployment that its own economic development commission has noted is worse than other cities.

The famous streetcar and light-rail transit? I’ve concluded that that is the only option the city has, since it has about 60,000 fewer people than Vancouver does but spread out over three times the land. They can’t afford anything else.

It’s stunning in its Caucasianness. All of its immigrants are living out on the edges of the city, while young, white hipsters and middle-class professionals rule among the never-ending neighbourhoods of historic houses.

But it does have, as I note in my Globe story here, a sense of creativity and innovation that I only see sporadically in Vancouver. And it radically different from this city in the way its interesting restaurants, shops and bars are spread out all over the city instead of being concentrated so heavily downtown.

Think about it — when have you ever travelled south of 16th or east of Victoria in this city to go to a cool new pub with live music, experimental new shop showcasing local talent, or inventive new restaurant. There are a few tiny little enclaves — Main Street from 16th to 25th, a few spots on East Hastings. But otherwise, everything is focused on downtown, Gastown, and little bits of Fourth and Commercial.

The map below showing the location of bars in Vancouver, generated by Andy Yan at Bing Thom Architects, tells the tale.

As I note in my story, Portland gives me the feeling of a city that is an interesting place to live for everyone there, no matter which neighbourhood they’re in. Vancouver feels like a place that has invested all of its energy in the downtown, because that’s where visitors go.

Liquor Establishments II