Category Archives: Park Board

#VanPoli Civic Politics | Faith Groups + Affordable Housing | Part 4

May 16, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Canada, Essay, News, Park Board, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Joming Lau, a City of Vancouver Planning Analyst and member of Vancouver city’s Community Serving Spaces Team, and his colleague James O’Neill, a Cultural Planner with the city, working in the Cultural Spaces and Infrastructure Division of the Planning Department — and also a member the city’s Community Serving Spaces Team — have been kind in posting to VanRamblings the core document informing the conduct of the Tuesday, May 7th, 2019 affordable housing forum held at CityLab, at Cambie and West Broadway, the document in question, the Community Serving Spaces Place of Worship [pdf] presentation paper on the development of affordable housing and community service spaces on the sites of places of worship.

In an April 1, 2019 article in the Vancouver Sun / Province / PostMedia, migration, diversity and religion writer Douglas Todd asked the question, “Can Metro Vancouver churches plug the dire housing gap?”, going on to ask a second, related question, “How big a dent will re-developing scores of places of worship into housing make in a metropolis that ranks as one of the most unaffordable in the world?”, quoting Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s city programme as saying …

“Hopefully, the redevelopment (of places of worship) is one of the steps of creating a stairway to housing nirvana in Metro Vancouver. But the scale of trying to house those on local incomes affordably is almost biblical.”

Mr. Todd goes on to report that Christian and Jewish religious groups are together adding hundreds of units each year to the region’s rental and housing market, their annual contribution sometimes exceeding 1,000 new homes, a relatively small portion of the roughly 20,000 to 28,000 homes being constructed each year across Metro Vancouver, but still an invaluable contribution of low cost, affordable housing across our region.

Approved by Vancouver City Council in 2014, completed in 2018, a partnership between Central Presbyterian Church and Bosa Properties.

In collaboration with the city, Bosa Properties and Central Presbyterian Church, at 1155 Thurlow in downtown Vancouver, set about to provide 45 social housing homes that would be owned by the church, allowing Bosa Properties to build 168 secured rental homes that would be owned by Bosa, the project including the construction of a new church (and child care centre) built for the church by Bosa — at no expense to the church — and still owned by the church, the very much needed social housing homes and the child care centre creating an ongoing revenue stream for the Central Presbyterian Church. A win-win for all concerned: city, developer & church.

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The role of the city? To collaborate with the places of worship to secure funding — from private sources, from the federal or provincial governments through their affordable housing programmes, or in some cases through access to the city’s Community Amenity Contribution programme, which secures in-kind or cash contributions from property developers in exchange for re-zoning of the property — which pays for the entire cost of construction, the city liaising with the place of worship to establish a relationship with a non-profit or for-profit property developer / builder.

Further, the city expedites the development permit process.

From first contact with a place of worship to final completion & occupancy, an average of three years transpire, with the end result: the creation of affordable rental housing, low cost social housing, and much needed community serving spaces, such as the aforementioned child care centre.

The most common phrase enunciated at the Community Serving Spaces for Places of Worship forum last week was, “Robert Brown can’t do it all.”

Mr. Brown, the founder of the Catalyst Housing Development Society is the President of our province’s largest non-profit real estate developer, he and his team responsible for the development of more affordable rental homes on the Lower Mainland and across our province than any other British Columbia developer, allowing faith groups to unlock the value of their real estate assets, while reinvesting that value back into communities for the benefit of families, and a revenue creation stream for places of worship.

A key piece of altruistic advice Mr. Brown provided to faith groups at last week’s affordable housing forum: retain ownership of your property.

Here’s the bottom line: there are 364 land rich, cash poor places of worship across the Vancouver landscape. The City of Vancouver, as part of the city’s Healthy City Strategy, has set about to work with faith groups to create the conditions necessary that would result in the construction of much needed low cost, affordable housing on the under developed properties owned by faith group congregations, providing a no cost renovation or reconstruction of the aging church, synagogue or other place of worship infrastructure, while also creating a revenue stream for the faith group membership, to ensure that our city’s places of worship will continue to thrive, while serving the social and community interests of neighbourhoods across our city.

Music Sundays | Ani DiFranco | Vancouver Folk Music Festival

April 28, 2019A & E, Music, Park BoardRaymond Tomlin

Ani DiFranco first played the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 1992, a 22-year-old up-and-coming singer-songwriter who drove herself from concert to concert across the North American continent, billing herself as the “Little Folksinger” (Ms. DiFranco is 5’2″ tall), in the process creating her own record label, Righteous Babe, allowing her significant creative freedom.
Through the Righteous Babe Foundation Ms. DiFranco, long a political and cultural activist, has backed grassroots cultural and political organizations supporting causes including reproductive rights, gay, lesbian and women’s issues, in 2004 touring Thai and Burmese refugee camps to learn about the Burmese resistance movement and the country’s fight for democracy, in recent years lending her voice and presence to the Women’s Lives Marches in Washington, DC, tangibly demonstrating her belief that the personal is, now and forever, political.

When she first appeared on the various Vancouver Folk Music Festival stages, she immediately connected with the rapturous festival audiences, and that grassroots connection has endured here and far beyond.
Over the years, Vancouver’s Folk Music Festival stages have also been gay-friendly: in addition to Ani DiFranco, Canada’s own k.d. lang, the Indigo Girls, Nanci Griffith, Holly Near, Janis Ian, Tret Fure, Melissa Ferrick, Toshi Reagon, Jill Sobule, Cheryl Wheeler, Patty Larkin (and dozens more) have graced festival stages, and delighted and moved audiences.

When she first emerged in 1990, Ani DiFranco had an immediate appeal to misfits. After débuting her eponymous solo album that year, she followed it up with six more in rapid succession, taking only a brief one-year breather in between 1996’s Dilate and 1998’s best-selling Little Plastic Castle.
Ms. DiFranco’s folk-punk aesthetic (complete with staccato finger pickings and spoken word spun into song) was especially exciting to queer women, who rarely had the opportunity to sing along with inclusive lyrics like Ms. DiFranco’s. Not only was she a poetic lyricist, she had a handful of songs that were explicitly about other women, using female pronouns.
Success has been somewhat bittersweet, though, for the folk-punk feminist and rabble-rousing storyteller.
Early on, Ms. DiFranco was open about her bisexuality (she’s married to producer Mike Napolitano, with whom she has two children), but in 2015, she told the LGBT blog GoPride.com she’s “not so queer anymore, but definitely a woman-centered woman and just a human rights-centered artist.” This didn’t sit too well with the lesbian and otherwise queer fanbase she’d drawn from the beginning.

Ani DiFranco - No Walls and the Recurring Dream

Ani DiFranco is set to release a memoir entitled No Walls and the Recurring Dream, recounting her early life from a place of hard-won wisdom, combining personal expression, the power of music, feminism, political activism, storytelling and philanthropy, while chronicling her rise to fame with an engaging candor, a frank, honest, passionate, touching and humorous tale of one woman’s eventful coming of age story and radical journey, defined by her ever-present ethos of fierce independence.
Viking Press will release Ms. DiFranco’s book next month, on Tuesday, May 7th, a week from this coming Tuesday.

Holiday Season | VanRamblings Will Reduce Posting This Month

December 1, 2018#VanPoli Civic Politics, Cinema, Music, Park Board, Politics, Stories of a Life, VanRamblings, Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

The holiday season is upon us. For VanRamblings that means spending time with friends and family (as I suspect is the case with most of us), and a level of busyness that is unusual for us — given that much of our life is given over to the creative endeavour of writing on VanRamblings, which entails a dozen hours or more each day sitting in front of our computer composing the posts that you read from time to time, on this blog of ours.
From April 20th on of this year — six months out from the 2018 Vancouver municipal election —&#32there was a raison d’être for VanRamblings: to introduce you to the candidates we felt were worthy and deserving of your vote. To that end, we wrote as many as 2500 words each day about the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, the issues we felt were important for candidates to address, and who we felt best were most capable of creating the city we need, a fairer and more just city for all.
While it remains our intention to continue our coverage of Vancouver City Council, School Board and Park Board, we are not quite so obsessed with civic governance and all that occurs each day with the process of decision-making that will lead to creating a city for all of us. In Vancouver, we’ve elected our Mayor, Kennedy Stewart, and a pretty darn fine group of City Councillors, School Board trustees and Park Board Commissioners — we’re prepared to let them get on with the job sans the obsessive coverage that has come to define VanRamblings these past almost eight months.

Damara, our new 3-year-old kitty, soon to be our companion as we write each day.

Here’s our plan for VanRamblings, then, going forward, which, of course, is subject to change — we’re planning on writing about politics once or twice a week this month. We have a column on Janet Fraser, Chairperson of the Vancouver School Board, that we’re intending to write, with likely publication this upcoming week (for the record, we consider Dr. Fraser to be a transformative political figure, and believe we should all be grateful for the gift of her presence on Vancouver’s political scene). We’ve also got a column on Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Tom Charity’s Best of 2018, which it is our current intention to publish next Friday.
In fact, VanRamblings will publish a great many columns on film this month — because we love film, considering it to be the art of our age, and during the April through October period we forfeited our love of film in favour of covering the election — where the majority of candidates we endorsed were elected to office, as well as a few we failed to endorse, but should have.
As far as is possible, in addition to our once or twice a week political coverage, we’ll keep up our Arts Friday coverage — which will be given over to film for the foreseeable future, but within which we plan to expand our coverage into other facets of Vancouver’s arts scene. We’ll continue our Stories of a Life feature — no such posting this week, or last, but next week we promise — and our Music Sunday feature, which tomorrow oughta emerge as a sort of Story of a Life when, and if, it actually comes to fruition. Tuesdays and Thursdays may be fallow days, or given over to tech coverage — we have a column for Apple iPhone SE, 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus, and X users we’ll publish this upcoming Tuesday.
In the new year, VanRamblings will finally write about our cancer journey — which “story” will begin 10 months prior to our official cancer diagnosis. We’ll introduce you to those who made a difference in our life, and who are — we believe — the reason we are here today, enabling you to read those words on the screen in front of you (there’ll be a great many political folks who will find their way into our reporting out, as our “life savers”).
Thank you for hanging in with us.
Going forward, it is our intention to remain relentlessly positive about pretty much darn near everyone and everything, while focusing on change for the better, and a better life for everyone in all aspects of our lives.

#VanPoli | Politics Comes to Park Board | Woe is Us

November 20, 2018#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Park Board, Politics, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

Park Board Commissioners, l-r: John Irwin, John Coupar, Dave Demers, Gwen Giesbrecht and Tricia Barker (both obscured), Stuart Mackinnon, and Camil Dumont. On the far right (with a beard), the one, the magnificent Malcolm Bromley, Park Board GM.

VanRamblings has spent much of the month stating to anyone who would listen that there’ll be some politics at City Hall, and a whole bunch of politics at School Board, but the saving grace in municipal politics in Vancouver is our Park Board — where there’d be no politics, just good caring folks who have the best interests of Vancouver’s parks & recreation system at heart. Oh how wrong and naïve we were. Alas and alack.

The same sort of procedural wrangling that infected Council last week visited Park Board last evening.

Once again it was an amendment to amendment hellscape, this time around it was at the Park Board table, though, with a no-nonsense, takes no truck from anyone, by the book Gwen Giesbrecht in the Chair. Before we continue, note should be made we believe Ms. Giesbrecht can do no wrong — we’re so in her corner, we’ve moved in and set up permanent residence.

The first item on the agenda: setting up a VanSplash Advisory Committee, to advise Park Board on how to move forward on the VanSplash report.

VanRamblings happens to know that the eminence gris at Park Board (and one of the finest men we know), John Coupar (along with his colleague Tricia Barker) believes that the controversial VanSplash Aquatic Strategy has been talked and consulted to death, and that any reasonable person would know that Park Board should just get on with things, build much-needed community neighbourhood pools, preserve, renovate & update Templeton and Lord Byng pools, and jettison the neighbourhood-intrusive Olympic destination pool the authors of the VanSplash Aquatic Strategy threw their support behind — a plan vehemently opposed by community pool advocates, and the neighbourhood surrounding Connaught Park.

In an effort to play nice (realizing he and his colleague didn’t have the votes to quash the VanSplash Advisory Committee), Commissioner Coupar moved an amendment that would turn the attention of the Advisory Committee to preserving both the Lord Byng and Templeton pools (both recommended for closure in the original iteration of the VanSplash Report).

But Park Board Committee Chair Gwen Giesbrecht, no fool she, and one of the most well-experienced Board chairs in Park Board history, was having none of that palaver, no siree, Bob.

Not only would the amendment hamstring the new Advisory Committee, the mandate of the Committee had not yet been made clear — the amendment was ultra vires. On the advice of the clerk — with whom Commissioner and Park Board Committee Chair Giesbrecht consulted, and who advised the amendment was not an amendment, but a whole separate motion that would have to be put on notice for a future meeting — causing Ms. Giesbrecht to rule the amendment out of order. Bear with us — the amendment will live on to fight another day, in another form (and pass).

Lulled to sleep, yet? Okay, okay — we’ll leave VanSplash for now.

Topic 2: Where the (Ugly) Politics Comes in.

Chair Giesbrecht called for a 5-minute break after the contentious “debate” on the questionable VanSplash Advisory Committee. Fine & dandy with us!

Given that we’re a snoop, we listened in on a conversation Park Board Chairperson Stuart Mackinnon was having with former Park Board Chair, Anita Romaniuk, where he was exclaiming to her how he’d consulted with all of the Commissioners before assigning them to their Park Board liaison and other responsibilities.

Migawd, it’s been a long time since we’ve heard such codswallop.

Earlier in the day, we had been advised that Chairperson Mackinnon had not assigned John Coupar as the liaison to the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens — perhaps the meanest, most off-putting, partisan act by an elected official in this or any other term. Colour us mightily disgusted.

The Bloedel Conservatory, now inexorably linked to the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens, is entering its 50th year, which it will celebrate next December 9th. John Coupar’s claim to fame in Vancouver politics, as a former member of the Board of Director of the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens, was in convincing the Gardens Board to take over the Bloedel Conservatory at Queen Elizabeth Park, when the previous Vision Vancouver Park Board wanted to shut it down. John fought against the closure, found the funding to keep the Conservatory alive, such that the Conservatory thrives to this day. John Coupar loves the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens and the Conservatory atop Queen Elizabeth Park.

At their worst and their meanest, the Vision Vancouver Park Board Commissioners would never have dreamed of denying John Coupar the job of liaison to the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens and the Queen Elizabeth Park Conservatory / Aboretum. But Stuart Mackinnon has done just that.

And in its 50th anniversary year.

Whose father was the founding curator of the Bloedel Conservatory? Gosh, could it be John Coupar’s father? Hmmm, yep, it was.

And who was present at the opening of the Bloedel Conservatory / Arboretum on December 9th, 1969, standing next to the father he loved, and who passed on to him his love of parks? Gosh, could that boy standing next to his dad at the opening of the Conservatory on that chilly Tuesday morning, December 9, 1969 be John Coupar? Yer darn tootin’ it was …

John Coupar had asked Mr. Mackinnon to be re-appointed as the liaison to the Conservatory in its 50th year, so he might help prepare for the anniversary. But Stuart Mackinnon?

He all but told John Coupar to go to hell.

VanRamblings being VanRamblings, we queried Stuart Mackinnon on his decision to strip John Coupar of his liaison responsibilities to the Conservatory, particularly in its anniversary year, and the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens. His voice dripping with a haughty and indifferent mix of derision and condescension, he simply looked down on us and said, “Thank you for the input, Ray,” and walked away, nose held high in the air.

In Vancouver folks, this is what we call petty politics of the worst kind.

Update: Park Board Chair Sober Second Thought. John Coupar Appointed as Liaison to Van Dusen + Conservatory for 2019

Consistent with everything VanRamblings knows about Park Board Chairperson Stuart Mackinnon — whom we have long known to be a heart-filled person of conscience, and one of the finest men it has been our privilege to come to know — Chairperson Mackinnon, engaging in sober second thought, re-thought his original assignment of responsibility to the Bloedel Conservatory and the Van Dusen Botanical Garden, and less than 18 hours after the publication of today’s VanRamblings column, appointed Commissioner John Coupar as Park Board liaison to the Bloedel Conservatory + Van Dusen Botanical Garden for the 2019 calendar year.

VanRamblings would like to thank community members Dave Pasin and Elvira Lount for helping bring the above matter to resolution.

And don’t think that it was Mr. Coupar alone who was made subject to Stuart Mackinnon’s non-consultative decision-making. John Coupar’s good-hearted NPA colleague Tricia Barker had asked Stuart Mackinnon if she might be the liaison to the Seniors Advisory Committee at City Hall — given that Ms. Barker is a certified personal trainer who works with seniors in building a healthier, more productive life, while facing the challenging aspects of aging. Chairperson Mackinnon assigned Ms. Barker as the liaison to City Hall’s Youth Committee instead.
Commissioner Barker asked Stuart Mackinnon if she might be assigned as liaison to the Dunbar and Kerrisdale Community Centres, where she knew and had worked with staff. Instead, Stuart Mackinnon assigned Ms. Barker as the liaison to the Champlain Heights and Killarney Community Centres.

Note. Revised Park Board Liaison appointments by Park Board Chair Stuart Mackinnon have been made, that correspondence to Commissioners dated November 20th, the appointments effective January 1, 2019, or sooner.

Lest you be left with the impression the Park Board Committee meeting room is Dysfunction Junction, let us assure you that is not wholly the case.

Whatever Mr. Mackinnon’s faults — after all, whom among us does not have faults? — he cares desperately about Vancouver’s parks and recreation system, and long has been a staunch advocate for our parks system. The same is true for each of the other electeds at Park Board: truth-teller Camil Dumont, take no guff Gwen Giesbrecht, heart-filled Dave Demers, passionate John Coupar, parks advocate extraordinaire Tricia Barker, the mighty, velvet-gloved and oh-so-bright John Irwin, and just about our favourite person on Earth, Park Board General Manager Malcolm Bromley.

Parks and recreation is in great shape with the above-named persons.

On to the second to last item in today’s VanRamblings column, as our beloved and persons of conscience Park Board Commissioners unanimously approved a $35,000 grant to the Queer Arts Festival, the motion moved by Commissioner John Coupar, seconded by Tricia Barker, and amended by Gwen Giesbrecht to raise the sum to $35,000 — which motion and amendment passed with, as we say above, unanimous consent.

In 2019, the Vancouver Park Board will meet 21 times, with a month break in August, and only one meeting in each of March (spring break), October and December. Chances are the Board will meet more often than that, tho.

For instance, although the Park Board Commissioners meet in open session, next, on Monday, December 3rd, Chairperson Mackinnon announced to his fellow Commissioners on Monday night that there’ll be a Budget Committee meeting on the evening of Wednesday, December 5th — chances are, there’ll be more than one budget committee meeting, as there will also likely be community consultative meetings throughout the year.

Compensation for all their hard work? The Park Board Chair receives $21,346 per year in compensation, whereas our Park Board Commissioners are paid $17,077 for each year of their tenure — for what generally works out to be a 35 – 40 hour week, although most Commissioners put in more hours than that, in their liaison work, and in work in the community.

Little known fact: the Park Board meeting schedule mirrors that of Vancouver City Council, with Park Board meeting on Monday evenings, and Council meeting all day Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.