Posts from — December 2010

Outgoing Translink chair Dale Parker has issued a challenge to the region’s mayors as they gather this morning to elect a new chair.

Take Translink’s offer to fund the first year of Evergreen construction and use the next three months to develop a new funding model, Parker says, to put the organization back on track.

Parker sees two difficult tasks ahead for elected officials:

• identify new sources of taxation; and
• support the Translink board and staff to maximize transit efficiency.

Here’s the full text of that letter.

The marathon council hearing into the proposed new Master Plan for Hastings Park, which will continue for at least another night, was sent back in time Tuesday night by the first-person testimony of Mary Kitigawa, who was interned in the Hastings Park livestock barns as a seven-year-old in the spring of 1942.

Kitigawa, her mother and four siblings were living with their father on their “immaculately clean” Saltspring Island farm when Canada began the infamous internment of Japanese Canadians in the wake of Pearl Harbour.

Her father was arrested by RCMP officers and taken away in the back of a pick-up truck “like a common criminal,” she told council, while the rest of the family, with children ranging in age from one and a half to 13 years, were taken with their mother to Hastings Park. Her mother was allowed two suitcases, each child only one.

At Hastings Park they were kept in horse stalls for a month, suffocating in the stench of urine and feces from the countless animals that had proceeded them. Mattresses were simply bags stuffed with straw. Their latrines were rough boards rigged over a ditch without screening. There was no privacy.

“We were fed in the poultry section at rough tables with tin plates,” Kitigawa recalled, “and our hair, skin and clothes were soon permeated with the stench of urine and feces. We were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by RCMP.” [Read more →]

The battle of the Seafield Apartments, which has seen a committed and united group of tenants hold off a landlord bent on evictions for more than two years, seems to be heading into its final phase.

Mayor Gregor Robertson and I were on hand today for a news conference held by the beleaguered residents of the Seafield, at 1436 West Pendrell, where the landlords are evicting current tenants, including a pregnant woman and a senior fighting cancer, en masse.

Seafield tenants Roland McFall (left), who is fighting cancer, and expectant mother Dana Crudo speak to reporters today at the Seafield, 1439 West Pendrell, as MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert looks on.

Just 10 days ago, the Seafield tenants won an important victory at the Residential Tenancy Branch, which denied Gordon Nelson Inc.’s bid for rent increase up to 73 percent. Now Gordon Nelson is back with a demand that everyone clear out by Feb. 1.

The renoviction battles on 2008, particularly the Seafield’s, were the backdrop to Robertson’s campaign pledge to bring in some kind of city support program for the construction of new rental property. The STIR program, Short Term Incentives for Rental, was the result.

The Seafield tenants, who have always offered to co-operate with renovations, but have refused to be exploited by exhorbitant rents, have found themselves in a civil war with Gordon Nelson. The apartments have been surrounded by a steel fence since the summer, and this week the owners began boarding up entrance windows, apparently simply as a harassment technique.

Robertson promised the city would do what it could to protect the tenants, but warned that there are few tools at council’s disposal.

With taxpayers facing a two percent tax increase in this year’s budget – actually four percent after a proposed shift from business to residential taxpayers — it’s sobering to see the continuing impact of the recession on city revenues.

City licence and permit revenue, although rebounding, is still far below 2008 levels. City finance director Patrice Impey is forecasting this revenue will total about $23 million in 2011, still $5 million below what was generated in 2008.

That’s equivalent to about one percent of tax revenue. (These numbers are not evident in the report but came out during today’s budget presentation.)

A large element cash of this is generated by building permit activity, which is summarized to the end of October here. This year the city has issued about 5,200 permits of all types for total construction activity of $1.4 billion. Last year, only 4,425 permits were issued for a value of $796 million.

Contrast those numbers to 2007, when permits had totalled only 4,140 to the end of October, but the value was $2.1 billion.

A second chunk of next year’s revenue — about another $5 million — is being tucked into a reserve fund now sitting at about $31 million. This money is intended to cover the liability the city faces for the accumulated sick time and vacation time of city employees, which totals $83.9 million. If previous councils had maintained this reserve, council would have an additional $5 million to spend on services this year — equivalent to another one percent of taxes.