New Voices, One Vision slate: Sammie Jo Rumbaua, Coree Tull, Trish Kelly, Naveen Girn
The fix is in: awhile back VanRamblings received the following information from one of our regular correspondents, offering insider insight into the — tried and true, par for the course — selection process for Vision Vancouver Park Board candidates to fill out the slate for this November’s civic election …
Heard through the grapevine that the Vision backroom has decided that the four candidates for Park Board will be Trish Kelly, Sammie Jo Rumbaua, Coree Tull, and Naveen Girn. How exactly this squares with their election by the membership I’m not sure.
Some of COPE’s supporters were approached by both successful and unsuccessful candidates to sign up as members to vote and told various COPE people about it.
If this “gang of four” is true, then that means no Brent Granby and no Catherine Evans. No Katherine Day, Mark Mitchell, or Graham Anderson either. The latter two are bikes & gardens respectively. Granby also espouses bikes.
So … Vision is foregoing their environmental keeners and going for representation from visible minorities (I understand “racialized” is the current term) with Naveen and Sammie Jo, and the “L” in LGBTQ with Trish? And youth with Coree? Hmmm … will be interesting to find out if the rumour is true, but the person who told me seemed pretty sure.
VanRamblings has tweeted out the information above — denied by Vision Vancouver Executive Director, Stepan Vdovine — hoping to open the nomination process, somewhat, and provide a level playing field for those candidates not among the “chosen few” New Voices, One Vision slate.
Thursday morning, a kink was thrown into the nominating process when Hollyhock Board Chair, and Vision Vancouver supremo, Joel Solomon, endorsed five Park Board candidates for the four vacant positions on Vision’s Park Board slate, Brent Granby and Graham Anderson receiving his favour, and Filipina Sammie Jo Rumbaua left to hang out to dry.
According to a story published in The Straight last evening, more than 800 Vision members showed up at the advance polls, yesterday, for park and school board nominations. Results from the nomination process will be announced after 8pm, this Sunday, June 22nd, at the Waterfall Building, at 1540 West 2nd Avenue, near the entrance to Granville Island.
Housekeeping: Ken Charko Dumped from NPA Board of Directors
For the second time in 19 months, maverick NPA member Ken Charko has found himself “removed” from the Non-Partisan Association Board of Directors.
There’s been bad blood between Charko and the NPA for some time now — last summer, at the NPA’s AGM, the NPA’s Board of Directors brought a motion forward that would have stripped Charko of his membership in the party. The motion was narrowly defeated, with the support of a ragtag group of Jesse Johl and Charko acolytes and hangers on who’d turned out at the NPA AGM specifically to defeat the motion.
In respect of Charko’s recent expulsion, which was moved and voted on Wednesday, June 17th, a statement on the civic party’s website reads:
The decision to remove Charko was deemed necessary given his decision to knowingly, purposefully, and repeatedly violate the confidentiality that he and the entire NPA Board agreed to respect and uphold as part of their duty as directors.
Of course, there’s a great deal more to the story than may be gleaned from the otherwise reasoned, if enigmatic, statement above.
For some time now, the movers and shakers in the NPA have believed Ken Charko to be a quisling, an individual who has set about to not only provide aid and comfort to the “enemy” (civic opposition parties), but someone who has set a course to actively undermine the party’s chances for power this November, by consistently acting as a “confidential informant” to members of the fourth (bloggers) and fifth (mainstream media) estates.
In addition to all of the above, various reports have emerged in the community over the past year that indicate Ken Charko was the major funder of the nascent right-wing municipal party, Vancouver First, and that working with Jesse Johl — and anticipating that he’d likely be removed from the NPA once again — Charko and Johl would mount a bid for civic office this autumn, with Vancouver First as their newly chosen vehicle.
With all the controversy surrounding Jesse Johl, in his role as President of the Riley Park-Hillcrest Community Centre Association, Johl has emerged as a disgraced and spent force. Charko — who managed 45,372 votes in the 2011 Vancouver civic election, coming in 14th, just 3276 votes behind the last Councillor to be elected — would like nothing better than to emerge as Vancouver’s oleaginous answer to Rob Ford (minus the drugs, of course).
Ain’t gonna happen, though, despite The Straight’s ringing endorsement.
