That means funding formerly available to help seniors and people with disabilities, by giving them a 50 percent discount on taxi fares, has been reallocated to HandyDART.

Translink says this will actually improve service and save$1.1 million at the same time. But the bottom line is clear: the money is going to HandyDart and TaxiSaver users are losing flexibility, even though they pay half of their fares.

The BC Coalition of People with Disabilities and the Council of Senior Citizens’ organizations are greeting the news with dismay.

The STIR program generated 1,648 new units or about 550 units a year, up from the 150 units a year the city had seen until then. Although the rents are not subsidized, the new rental units are much cheaper than home ownership — owning a similar bachelor unit would be between 23 percent and 118 percent more expensive.

Action to encourage rental housing construction was a key element of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s campaigns in 2008 and 2011.

Despite the good news, councillors’ mailboxes have received a flurry of e-mails claiming the new program is being launched without consultation. Here’s Raymond Louie’s reply:

The staff report comes as a result of a council directive that requested them to report back on the experience of the STIR program and with recommendations on any adjustments that are necessary.

In developing these recommendations, a number of public engagement activities were undertaken and these are listed below.

On April 27th 2011, as part of a public and stakeholder engagement program, Talk Housing With Us, the City of Vancouver hosted a Stakeholder Workshop. The purpose of Talk Housing With Us was to gather input from the public and key stakeholders on the City’s future Housing and Homeless Strategy and to consider approaches to take over the next ten years. Around 80 individuals participated, who came from a wide range of organizations including those that have experience and expertise in housing the homeless.

On May 26, 2011,  the City hosted the Renters Roundtable. The objective of this event was to gain a clearer understanding and build awareness of the challenges and benefits renters face related to rental housing in Vancouver. The format of the event was an informal, café‐style discussion with a focus on listening to participants’ comments and sharing ideas. Approximately 75 people participated in this event.

On June 4, 2011, nearly 80 citizens gathered at the Talk Housing with Us Unconference to share ideas on the actions required to ensure everyone in Vancouver has a home. The Unconference provided an opportunity for housing stakeholders, experts and interested community members to present ideas, seek advice, and engage one another to find solutions to the challenges of housing affordability and homelessness.

The results of the evaluation were reported to council in March 2012. Much more on the city’s work can be found here.

The report, to be considered at council next week, shows Vancouver virtually tied with Boston both for the amount of walking done around town and the low number of fatalities. Portland, surprisingly, is near the other end of the scale. As for Los Angeles . . . don’t ask.

The number of annual fatalities is declining steadily in Vancouver. But while pedestrians are involved in only 2 percent of all traffic incidents, they account for 45 percent of fatalities. Nor are pedestrians normally at fault. In about 18 percent of the accidents, vehicles had the right of way. The rest of the time, the pedestrian was in the right.

We have about one fatality for every one million “walk to work trips.” (Portland’s toll is 2.5 and LA sees 5.2 deaths every million miles.)

The report recommends increased spending on education, along with VPD and ICBC, as well as stepped-up enforcement and continued improvements in pedestrian infrastructure.

And like last year’s re:Connect contest to reimagine the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, contestants will be judged both by a panel of professionals and the general public through an online poll.

Mayor Gregor Robertson launched the contest late last week as part of his Affordable Housing Task Force. The task force will build on the city’s work to fight homelessness with a new focus on housing to serve the needs of people earning between $21,500 and $86,500.

Do you have big picture proposals to bring on more affordable housing for families earning in that range? Or suggestions to make our neighbourhoods more affordable? There are lots of opportunities to help the city become more affordable — and win great prizes.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your laptops! Deadline June 29.

Also circulated to the City Clerk, Mayor and council: an apology and a $500 penalty payment for late filing. Wong’s failure to file in time was disclosed at last week’s council meeting. He also missed the deadline for filing with a penalty payment, resulting in his prohibition from running in 2014.

Fallujah, a new production of City Opera Vancouver,  is the story of an American marine and an Iraqi boy whose lives intersect at the dreadful Battle of Fallujah in 2004. According to City Opera’s Nora Kelly, “it is a story of conscience and regret, of loss and longing, of surival and hope.”

Admission is free Friday at 4 p.m. at the Carnegie Centre at Hastings and Main for a piano vocal workshop of the entire opera. (This is thanks to a city grant.) A final onstage workshop is scheduled for Sunday, May 12 at Frederic Wood Theatre at UBC at 7 p.m. The music is by Canadian composer Tobin Stokes and the libretto by American-Iraqi playwright Heather Raffo.

Don’t like our national energy strategy? We don’t have a national energy strategy!

The Playhouse’s handicaps included “a bureaucratic straitjacket” composed of the civic theatre agreement, union rules and delays in the delivery of replacement rehearsal space, caused  by the Olympics.

Birnie makes passing mention of revisions to the theatre agreement negotiated last year by Playhouse direct Max Reimer, but leaves out the city’s $1 million bailout and the decision to present God of Carnage, in an effort to mitigate losses, a decision that now appears ill-advised. The obstacles raised by the city for 40 years proved insurmountable.

Nonetheless, Birnie’s piece includes some useful comments from actress Jennifer Clement, part of a Playhouse 2.0 initiative that hopes to fill the gap left by the collapse. Filling that gap — and determining what is a gap and what is the disappearance of outdated approaches — is the main question explored by the Globe‘s Kelly Nestruck in a much more incisive piece.

“The Playhouse might be the canary in the coal mine for Canada’s regional theatre network,” says Nestruck, “which was set up in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s time to look at what that institutional model offers us and ask whether it’s good value for public money compared with the smaller, more dynamic companies that are in comparatively robust health.”

Is it possible the city’s “straitjacket,”, an expensive one by any standard, had a counterpart in an outdated, restrictive business and creative model? It will be hard to find out if the debate remains confined, as Nestruck warns, to “grief and denial.”

A closely-related issue that must be confronted to achieve real progress is well-captured in this Salon article tweeted as a “must read” by PuSh festival’s estimable director Norman Armour. The “creative class” is in deep trouble, the article concludes, but do “creative class” workers get stirring ballads written about them by Bruce Springsteen, like the regular working class? No! No respect!

I found myself thinking about the Salon article during a visit this week to the picket line being maintained by Rocky Mountaineer workers nearly a year after they were locked out. It’s worth a visit if you think life is better in the regular working class, where the plight of the “creative class” is the least of their worries.

In fact, creating theatre that reaches people like the Rocky Mountaineer crew, who hold down jobs in a host of other hospitality, creative and commercial sectors during the off season, may be part of the solution to problems illuminated by the Playhouse debate.

The penalty? Under the city’s feeble rules, Wong is prohibited from running in the next election. That’s it. City clerk and chief electoral officer Janice Mackenzie confirmed to council today that she has no power to order disclosure from Wong or the NPA.

The result: voters cannot get a complete picture of who donated to the 2011 NPA campaign, which raised a grand total of $2.4 million (not including Wong’ s unknown sum) and spent $3.1 million. (That leaves a mammoth $640,000 gap to close before the next election in 2014.  NPA revenue included a single donation of $980,000 from a single donor, perhaps the largest such individual donation in Canadian political history.)

Mackenzie revealed Wong’s delinquent status in a statutorily-required report to council today.

How much is unaccounted for? Only Wong knows, and he’s not telling. (He could have filed for up to 120 days after the normal deadline upon payment of a $500 fine, but did not do so.)

But consider this: the other NPA council candidates raised between $5,600 (the ill-fated Jason Lamarche) and $64,142 (Ken Charko).  NPA councillor George Affleck raised $40,000 and Elizabeth Ball raised $17,509. Wong undoubtedly raised and spent similar sums.

During debate in council today, I called on  Affleck to urge his NPA colleagues to disclose everything they can about Wong’s election finances so voters have a more complete picture of the NPA’s overall campaign.

But Affleck laughed off the appeal, claiming that the NPA was not a political party and “dissolved” between elections. “It’s a non-partisan association of free thinkers,” Affleck said, implying NPA candidates are free to ignore the rules as well. Ball assured council “it will all be resolved in due course.”

Too late for that. Wong missed the deadlines. This year, seven candidates failed to file, many more than the three to four in recent elections, but Wong is the only one who campaigned on the slate of a major elector’s organization. His campaign was an integral part of the NPA campaign, but he’s not disclosing one cent.

Vision Vancouver has disclosed all contributions since its formation and has called on the province to tighten the disclosure rules in the Vancouver Charter.

Now Affleck says he’ll bring in his own motion to tighten the rules.  Why not start by ensuring the NPA’s 2011 candidates comply with the existing ones?

I know: it’s crazy talk.