Posts from — April 2010

Good news appears to be on the way for the thousands of Lower Mainland post-secondary students who’ve been denied access to the U-Pass program.

NDP MLA Michelle Mungall (Nelson Creston) took advantage of Legislature debate on the Ministry of Transportation’s budget estimates Thursday to find out the status of the long-awaited  program, promised by Premier Gordon Campbell in the 2008 election campaign.

Here’s what Transportation Minister Shirley Bond had to say: [Read more →]

Unlike VANOC and even the Province of BC, the City of Vancouver never had an overall budget for its Olympic expenditures. That dispiriting conclusion, obvious from a close review of the city’s report on overall expenditures, was confirmed at council yesterday by City Manager Penny Ballem.

Nor, despite claims to the contrary from Councillor Suzanne Anton, is there evidence of a coherent budgetting process for individual Olympic projects, whether we’re discussing the Olympic Village or infrastructure like the Hillcrest curling centre, which was the subject of massive overruns the Park Board will be paying off for years.

As Ballem told council, projects were undertaken, designed and paid for, all in a single process. If costs rose, the bills were paid, often behind closed doors. Details were only released with the election of the Vision council in November 2008.

The latest and one of the largest bills to come due is the $32 million council is asked to approve Thursday to meet the very minimal commitments for affordable housing the NPA had incorporated in the Southeast False Creek Olympic Village.

The COPE Vision council had hoped to make at least one-third of the units subsidized, a middle range accessible at lower market rents and one-third at full market prices. Rolling back that commitment was literally the first order of business for the Sam Sullivan NPA council in November 2005. The new, reduced goal was 20 per cent affordable housing with half of that amount market rental.

Although Millennium paid the highest price ever paid for land in Vancouver up to that date, the NPA quickly allowed the entire project to go into the ditch. Overruns on the Salt Building and the Civic Centre amounted to tens of millions of dollars, but the worst mismanagement occurred on the affordable housing.

The preliminary budget there was $65 million but that soared to $95 million by the end of 2007 (approved in camera) and finally to $110 million. To achieve even the NPA’s vision of affordability will cost $32 million more.

The fateful December 2007 in camera meeting that quietly shovelled tens of millions of dollars into the Olympic Village program also directed the SEFC program manager to negotiate with BC Housing “with the expectation of recovery” of some of these funds.

However, this week’s report says, “it is noted that no agreement was ever negotiated with BC Housing.” Why bother? It seemed the NPA council never met an overrun it couldn’t approve.

Translink has quietly posted the six scenarios for  UBC Broadway Corridor rapid transit development — including everything from rapid bus to full-on Skytrain to UBC — that it will take out this summer for a second phase of consultation and detailed evaluation.

The main surprise: two options that will consider the possibility of building at least part of the city’s proposed streetcar line, although the city has never suggested the streetcar could be a substitute for rapid transit on Broadway.

The options were unveiled at a stakeholders’ meeting in Vancouver Thursday but do not include cost or ridership estimates. Those will come later. City council, meanwhile, will consider revised principles for its approach to the project on April 22. [Read more →]

Architect Jay Hiscox leads off a review of a dozen answers to the question: Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, should they stay or should they go?

The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts: should they stay or should they go?

City hall staff are preparing a request for proposals from professional teams interested in probing the issue later this spring. (The RFP flows from a motion I presented to council earlier this year for reasons I outlined in this article for The Tyee.)

But a dozen students in the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada Syllabus program were given just three weeks to answer the question and had to present their conclusions today in Vancouver. The results ran the gamut, from demolition through repurposing and even to re-engineering viaducts as a 21st century freeway/art installation.

Thanks to program director Jay Hiscox, I was invited to attend the four-hour session at BCIT where the students presented their concepts to a supportive but critical audience of experienced architects and urban designers.

The remarkably rich and varied presentations (sorry, I simply couldn’t keep track of students’ names) included compelling advocates for keeping the roadways and many proponents for demolition. A sampling: [Read more →]