Category: Ask Pat

Ask Pat: Safety Dictator

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Nicole asks—

Since your wonderful idea of a 30 km/h urban speed limit has drawn some ire, what other controversial things might you do to make our roads safer if you were made Dictator of BC for, say, a year? (I am guessing that photo radar is very high on the list, if not number one.)

Ire!? If an idea doesn’t draw ire from some sector, it is probably not worth even discussing. You may have heard some ire, I heard a lot of people saying its about time. Just this week, there were articles in Price Tags (Vancouver’s best Urbanism portal), there have been great results out of Toronto on their speed reduction program, and Seattle has joined the fray. I even took this photo at the Janette Sadik-Khan talk in Vancouver on Tuesday night:JSK20

Ire be damned, I want our streets to be safer. As JSK herself says: “When you challenge the status quo, it pushes back. Hard.”

I like the tone of your question, however. What would I do if I was Dictator for a year and was able to do whatever I wanted to make roads safer? Not sure I could get it all done in a year, but Dictators have armies to do their bidding, right?

Photo radar has it’s use. The Pattullo Bridge is a perfect example of a 50km/h road where everyone goes 80km/h and the resultant accidents are incredibly dangerous for other bridge users. It also reduces the inferred safety of the bridge, and is used as a primary reason for replacement. With careful application and an emphasis on safety (as opposed to punitive punishment in places where poor road design encourages speeding), photo radar has a role.

Look at this stupid road. Nothing here tells you to go 60km/h, except the sign. Of course everyone goes 80
Look at this stupid road. Nothing here, not the >3.5m lanes, not the generous shoulder and fixed divider, not the wide-open sight lines, nothing tells you to go 60km/h, except the sign. Of course everyone goes 80 or faster. A silly and punitive place to put Photo Radar, but dollars to donuts, the first place it would be installed.

I also think intersection cameras have a role. There are some in New West, and ICBC and the Integrated Road Safety Unit have a program to support them. However, they seem to concentrate on the red-light runners, likely because it is the easiest thing to enforce with a camera. I’m just as concerned about illegal turns, failing to yield to pedestrians, and entering intersections you have no possible way of exiting in order to “beat a light cycle”. With all the talk of distracted pedestrians and dark clothing, it is a pretty important point that the majority of pedestrian fatalities are caused by the driver failing to yield right of way in an intersection.

To make roads safer for cyclists, I would start by implementing (almost all) the recommendations that the Ontario Coroner released a couple of years ago after investigating cycling deaths in the province. I wrote a long piece on this once, but in summary: build safe infrastructure for cyclists, improve education for school students and all drivers, pass a 3-foot rule, and so on. We already have a pretty good idea what works, this isn’t radical or anything surprising. All that is lacking is the politcial will to make it happen.

The next big step would be nothing less than a complete re-writing of the design standards for urban streets. This is major part of Janette Sadik-Khan’s thesis for road safety. The existing standards for road design, paint markings, signs, and other treatments are from a different era, and were developed with the desire to make driving through our cities as efficient as possible, with only a nod to driver safety. That the “efficient movement” of cars makes the environment for all other road users less safe does not seem to be addressed.

JSK points out the American road design bible (“Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices”) has more than 800 pages of diagrams and plans describing the standards, 800 pages in which not a single pedestrian is shown. This book (along with it’s Canadian version) needs to be thrown away.

The good news is that there is already a lot of work being done on a better book to replace it. The National Association of City Transportation Officials has a go-to book called “The Urban Street Design Guide” That needs to become the standard, not the alternative. We can no longer use a 1950s guide book to adapt our 1920s streets for 2015 users. Time to challenge the status quo.

This probably exceeds the authority of the Dictator, but I would also change the laws to make cars safer. This engineering work is being done primarily in Europe, and some of it is becoming mainstream, but we can and should make more changes sooner. This includes a suite of things: better crush zones in front bumpers; softer hood materials with larger energy-absorbing gaps between sheetmetal and hardpoints; use of active cushioning (airbags); injury-reducing body shape geometry; larger windows with smaller pillars to improve driver visibility; active and passive collision avoidance systems.

While we are at it, we can add regular vehicle inspection to assure these systems work, and have not been messed with. There is no place in the urban environment for the suite of modifications that make automobiles unsafe for the people sharing the environment: trucks lifted to ridiculous heights, bull and grill guards, black tinted windows and lights, etc. I know that this is a radical idea in a society where many people consider their car an extension of their personality, and anything that impacts the design of their car would be seen as squelching freedom of expression.

Talking about Freedom of Expression, I am a keen follower of the move to change the language of traffic crashes. Read your local newspaper about a pedestrian being killed by a driver, and the headline is usually some form of “Pedestrian killed by car”. The events are always referred to immediately as “accidents”, which makes them sound inevitable, something that just happens, and presumes there is no fault (and, by inference, nothing we can do about it).

We can change how we value public space and our expectation of pedestrian safety by simply changing our language. “Pedestrian hit by driver of car” makes it clear there are two people in the transaction, not a person and an inanimate object. “Collision” and “incident” are both better terms than “accident” until the police and ICBC have an opportunity to determine the cause of the collision (inattentive driving? texting while walking? bad street design? non-functional brakes?). I think words mean something, and the words we use frame the discussion we will have, and we need to have a better discussion, because people are getting killed and we should have no tolerance for it.

Boy, I really sounded like a Dictator there, eh?

Ask Pat: Tipperary U-turns

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 5 Comments.

Chad asks—

I’m a Brow of the Hill resident who walks home from the Skytrain at Columbia St up 4th St every day. I’m wondering about the deal with Royal Ave and 4th St. Every day I see dozens of cars getting around the no right turn restriction on to Royal Ave by driving into the Tipperary Park parking lot and doing a u-turn. (Where I frequently feel I’m at risk of being run over). I’m especially concerned about this as the days get warmer and longer and more people will be making use of that great park, while those using New West as their highway between home and work zip around in the parking lot to try to bypass part of the Royal Ave traffic parade. I can see that there is a no u-turn sign in the parking lot but no one’s paying attention to it – makes me wonder why they even bother obeying the no right turn sign…anyway, would love to see this area made safer for pedestrians and park goers alike, and would greatly appreciate your thoughts on this!

It has taken me more than a month to answer this question, mostly because I don’t have an answer.

It isn’t only the “no right turn from 4th to Royal” folks who do this. It is also the “no left turn from 3rd to Royal” who turn right instead, go the block and pull a u-turn. Mix these with the people who drive through the City Hall parking lot and access 4th from there instead of waiting a light cycle on 6th…

It is a mess. We have (according to some counts, although the source of this oft-cited number is somewhat obscured by urban legend) 400,000 vehicles a day passing through New Westminster, and for an hour or two a day, the legal accesses to the Pattullo Bridge are constricted, and those through-commuters do whatever they can to take a few minutes off their commutes. Except pay a toll on the Port Mann, of course.

It has been measured, this increase in 20,000 vehicles a day crossing the Pattullo (about 30%) since the tolls were applied at the Port Mann. There is a coincident 20,000-vehicle drop in daily crossings of the Port Mann. This is a huge part of the reason why this City has been working so hard to assure that any replacement for the Pattullo Bridge will result in a tolled crossing – to level that playing field. We are also lobbying to assure the bridge is not higher-capacity, as induced demand will assuredly result in congestion on the feeder routes increasing as capacity does. Finally, we worked to encourage people to vote YES for the funding of the Mayor’s Plan to bring better transit service South of the Fraser so those 10,000 extra people had viable alternatives to sitting in traffic in New Westminster and getting frustrated enough to pull a u-turn in a parking lot to shave a few minutes off their trip.

We can target enforcement in places like you mention, and the NWPD does have a traffic division who do this. Their priorities are not necessarily to catch “rat runners”, but to target the most dangerous road users at the most dangerous intersections. With a few thousand intersections in the City and a million road signs, they can’t be everywhere enforcing everything (and enforcement costs money!), but they are doing what they can against the tide.

So no easy answers, and yes I share your concern, but I don’t know the solution. I’d love to hear if you have any ideas to make the situation safer.

Ask Pat: tax increases

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

RA asks—

This past year the assessed value of my property has increased by $150,000. Approximately a 30% increase. Using the property tax estimator, entering a rate increase of 0% results in an increase of my tax payment of 18% due to assessed value increase alone. Therefore this more than covers the 2.67% the city proposes. I understand that many homes faced similar increases this past year. For these reasons, I am not in favor of the tax increase proposed.

Can you tell me how the city has factored in the large assessed value increases into its budget and resulting proposed tax increase?

Wow. 30% in one year is crazy. It would be nice to think you made $150K this year just sleeping in your bed, but that doesn’t do you much good if you can’t sell – you have to put that bed somewhere. However, the short answer to your question is: it hasn’t. The longer answer is below.

Your assessed increase was significantly above the average increase in property values for the City over the last year, which was 11.7%. This means you are going to get dinged by the property tax system more than most. However, that doesn’t mean the City is getting extra money, it means someone out there in New West must have got an assessment increase less than the average, and they will see a relative tax savings this year.

The better way to answer your question is by going through a quick example of how the Assessment/Mil rate tax math works.

First off, the City has not yet settled on a tax increase this year. The current draft of the 5-Year Financial Plan that needs to be done by May (the “budget”) is built around a 2.73% increase. That is (more likely than not) the number that is going to come to council in the form of a Bylaw sometime in April. This means the City plans to collect about $1.8M more this year than we did last year in order to balance the budget. About $1.3M (1.97%) of that is “base budget” increases – inflationary increases that, if not approved, would result in a reduction in existing programs and services. The other approximately $0.5M (0.76%) is new departmental requests: things like additional staff to enforce and administer the Tree Bylaw.

Using the City’s handy tax estimate calculator, you can enter 2.73% and your assessed values from 2015 and 2016, and get an idea how much your taxes are likely to rise this year. For the fun demonstrative value of it, I entered several values for property assessment increases and City tax increases, and plotted out the results:

grahp

On the Y-axis (vertical) is the property value increase from BC Assessment. I don’t think many properties went down in value, and your 30% is the highest increase I have heard of, so this should cover most of the range of residents in the City. The average increase City-wide was 11.7%, which I show with the thick grey line. On the x-axis (horizontal) is the amount your tax bill will increase based on the three scenarios represented by the green line (City tax increase of 0%), the blue line (the City’s proposed 2.73% increase) and just for comparison, a 5% tax increase shown with a red line.

You can see that for the average assessment increase (11.7%) the tax increase is equal to the City’s set increase. As your assessment increase is an astounding 30%, your tax increase is going to go up much more than this, and the relationship is linear: if we raise taxes 0%, you will pay 18.3% more, raise taxes 2.73% and you will pay 21% more, raise them by 5% you would pay 23.3% more. My assessment went up about 17%, so my numbers would be 5.3%, 8.0% and 10.3% respectively.

However, 11.7% is the average increase for the City, so for every property that increased more than 11.7% there is one that increased less than 11.7%. For the owner of a property that went up 10% in value, the proposed tax increase is about 1% (less than inflation), and any property that increased by less than 8.7% in 2016 will see their taxes go down. I know you are sitting on a 30% increase and the regional real estate numbers are crazy, but by the virtue that your property went up almost 3x the average, there must be a large number of properties in the City whose increase was less than the average, and even below that 8.7% threshold.

To sum up, the big point here is that the City does not look at the assessed property value increases when calculating the tax increase required for the year. We look at our budget and determine what our need is to deliver the services required. This year it looks like about $1.8Million, so for every $100 we took in from property taxes last year, we need to take in (about) $102.73 to deliver those services and balance the budget. If the average property assessment was 1% above last year or 100% above last year, it does not change that 2.73%, and the only thing that increases or decreases your tax burden is the amount your property increased or decreased in value relative to the city-wide average.

If you think a 30% increase is not realistic, then you are able to appeal it. Too late now for 2016, but 2017 is just around the corner. The BC Assessment office doesn’t work for the City, so we have no say in how they do their work, but there is an appeal mechanism, and if you think your out-of-scale assessment is wrong, you can appeal. If you were to get your 30% increase appealed down to 20%, you will cut in half the amount of tax increase you experience. As a City, we have no skin in that game (because every one of your neighbours’ taxes will go up slightly to offset your reduction), but as homeowner whose assessed value went up 17% last year, I’ll be sharing your pain.

Ask Pat: Crappy Park

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Someone asked—

Hi Pat, I am just inquiring about Sullivan Park on Oliver Street here in the Queen’s Park neighbourhood. It is a lovely park and really close to our home. However, I am noticing that there is a lot of dog dropping being left all around the park. I am not sure if this particular park is monitored but something needs to be done. It is horrible. I refuse to take my 14 month old there anymore as I am worried he is going to fall into it.. or worse. Anything you can do for us?

Shh! I didn’t think we were allowed to talk about Sullivan Park. It’s one of those neighbourhood secrets that we aren’t supposed to let anyone know about.

One general rule about a persistent dog-crap problem in a location is that it is probably just one person. Most dog owners are responsible and don’t want crap lying around any more than the rest of us, but one or two bad apples definitely can result in a lot of… uh… road apples. Unfortunately, catching that one person is probably near impossible.

My first suggestion is to use SeeClickFix when you run into a problem like this, to make sure it gets onto the City operations radar. If you aren’t a smart-phone lover, you can use this on-line form to make sure your issue gets tracked and followed up on. Or call Parks, Culture and Recreation at 604-527-4567.

What can Parks do? That is definitely a small park, and we have limited staff, so 24-hour patrols are not likely in the offing. I am not as familiar with Sullivan Park as my Queens Park neighbours, but having a doggie station with a ready source of collection bags, trash receptacle and signage will usually help most people do the right thing – if the park doesn’t have these at the one or two most common entry point, that may help. Of course, it may also encourage more people to see Sullivan as an unofficial “dog run”, which comes with its own issues.

As it is a unique spot, with a relatively small group of users (until you went and let the secret out!), it might be interesting to see if the neighbourhood has any ideas how to approach the issue. Better signage? Neighbourhood dog-watch? As a non-dog owner, I’m happy to hear suggestions!

Ask Pat: New Westminster College

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Randy asks—

Have you read the article at the Globe and Mail about a fake college set up called New Westminster College? As per the article, there are no students, no courses, no employees. It seems like a total sham. Is there anything the city can do to prevent this kind of thing from occurring?

No, I hadn’t read this, but I encourage people to. It is a pretty good piece of investigative reporting that gives me hope for the continued existence of journalism.

It is pretty strange to see how far some people will go to run a scam potential non-existent business, and it is unclear exactly what the scam business model is here (although my skeptic senses are tingling). The “General” doesn’t appear to be asking anyone for money from their website, and as far as I can tell, putting up a webpage of you shaking hands with famous people isn’t against the law, even if you call yourself “Professor” to do it. Neither is handing our fake fellowships, even when dressing up in uniform and pretending to be a soldier. The world (even New Westminster) is full of “Kentucky Colonels” and “Nebraska Admirals” and the such, and having never been a soldier myself, it isn’t up to me to call them out. If he calls himself a geologist, I’ll get involved.

According to the Globe story, the “College” has a business licence in New Westminster (I have not looked into this), but without an address here other than a post office box, it would be hard to argue they are violating any business license requirements or zoning. Perhaps not surprisingly, our Business Licence Bylaw says you need a license to run a business, but not that you need to run a business in order to be able to buy a licence.

As far as trading in the good name of New Westminster, there is probably not much we can do about that either. From New Westminster Centre to the Shops at New Westminster Station, businesses can attach a place name to their business without the City being able to command intellectual property. I’m not sure we have the legal authority to determine who is “too scammy” to use our good name.

But hey, who am I to say? This may be some sort of immigration scam, or he may just be an innocent general contractor with access to the former Prime Minister trying to open a Hospital on Morocco. Could be he is just a guy with a dream. To quote the illustrious General himself: “It’s not my fault if people do not do their research.”

Ask Pat: bike lockers?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 5 Comments.

Pamela asks—

Are there bylaws requiring bike lockers in new developments?

Yes. Kind of. But they may not be as useful as you might like.

The City has the weighty tome called the Zoning Bylaw that regulates pretty much every aspect of new development. If you want to build an apartment building, row of townhouses, office tower, curling rink or shopping mall, there are all sorts of regulations in there to dash your architect’s dreams. Included in those requirements are requirements for bicycle parking (Section 155, to be precise).

Before we get too deep into it, we need to define our terms, because I often park my bicycle leaned up against a parking meter, so all “bicycle parking” is not created equal. The Bylaw differentiates between Long-Term Bicycle Parking (“means a space designed for the parking of one bicycle by permanent users of a building, such as employees and residents”) and Short-Term Bicycle Parking (“a freely accessible space designated for the parking of one bicycle, available for public use during the business hours of premises in the building”). It also differentiates between a Bicycle Locker (“for the storage of one bicycle and accessible only to the operator of the bicycle“) and Bicycle Storage (“an area providing two or more long term bicycle parking spaces“).

Let’s put the short-term parking aside, because installing a couple of racks on the sidewalk is pretty straight-forward. The number of designated long-term bicycle parking spots depends on the type of development. New multi-family buildings require 1.25 bicycle spots per unit (regardless of whether that unit is a studio or a three-bedroom), and office buildings require 1 long-term bicycle space per 8,000 sqft of office space. For comparison, the City requires between 1 and 1.5 vehicle parking spaces per residential unit (depending on the number of bedrooms) and 1 parking spot per 31-50 sqft of office space.

Long-term bicycle storage must be at least 20% in the form of bicycle lockers, which must be solid-walled (not metal cages) and secure. The rest can be in a bike storage room, which must by law be painted white(!), include space for no more than 40 bicycles per room, and have secured access by key for fob.

The Bylaw is silent, however, on how those bicycle parking facilities are distributed among the residents of the building, so those decisions are made by the Developer, the Marketer, and (eventually) the Strata Board. I can find no rule that makes it mandatory to provide access to one or more secured bicycle parking spots to any specific suite, nor is there anything limiting a developer from charging for access to those secured spots. It is possible that, once built, the “bicycle storage” area could be converted to general storage, and I suspect that is what happens in many buildings.

Do you have storage lockers in the basement of your high-rise? Nothing in the Zoning Bylaw that I could find mandates their existence, and it is possible those are converted bicycle storage, if your building is a recent build. People who bought suites may have paid for access, or may have been guaranteed access, but it is, unfortunately, a buyer-beware market. Of course, the same is true for automobile parking spaces. The City designates there must be, say 1.4 per suite, but we do not dictate which suites get one spot and which suite gets two, or how much residents are required to pay for buying/leasing/using them.

As for Office buildings, we simply do not require enough in our zoning bylaw. One spot for 8,000 sqft of office is ridiculous. However, we also do not have any rules around end-of-trip facilities in commercial buildings, and this will limit uptake of cycling more than the threat of having to lock your bike up outside. If you work for a large organization like TransLink with a 150,000 sqft office (18 bike spots required!), it is easy to justify end-of-trip change rooms and showers for your several-hundred staff – actually, they are likely to demand it if your staff includes professionals under the age of 40. But if you are a smaller office tenant, leasing 2,000 square feet for your 5 employees in the same strata building, it is not viable for you to build those same amenities, and you can only hope the Owner and/or Strata see the benefit of these as a “common area” amenity.

So to answer your question, Yes, we require bicycle storage. However, we don’t do enough to make sure that storage is useful for people who want to use it.

Ask Pat: Jamieson & the C3

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Someone asked—

I live at Jamieson Crt and currently catch the C3 at the bottom of my complex. It also drops me off there on my return. I am worried this stop will be eliminated. Is this there any indication that this might happen? This is a very convenient spot for folks to board the bus. I hope this spot will remain as is.

I talked about this in a previous post, and it seems the C3 as we know it is going away. If you used the C3 as a direct route up to Canada Games Pool, then you will potentially need to take the C9 to Columbia Station, then switch to a “J” to get you Uptown. If you used it to get to Columbia Street downtown, your route just became more direct.

TransLink floated the idea of completely removing the Jamieson Court stop, and I asked them at Council on November 2nd to please reconsider this, for reasons I outlined in the post I link to above. The stop on Jamieson is useful for a few destinations popular with seniors, and the crossing at Jamieson and Richmond is not great for pedestrians, especially those with mobility issues. We do not yet know if that request (made by others as well, I hope, through the public engagement that ended in November) had any effect. I have not heard any further, but the TransLink system maps on this page “Effective from January 4, 2016 to April 10, 2016” show Jamieson still an active stop for the C3 and C9, and the C3 on existing route, so the changes are probably not going to occur until later in the spring.

If you and your neighbours have concerns about the Jamieson stop being lost, especially as they relate to safety of seniors trying to get to Richmond street, please make sure everyone lets TransLink know. You can contact them at this link. I would categorize this as a “suggestion”, and make sure to ask for a response.

Ask Pat: Trees!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Two Ask Pats in one! Both of these questions came in about the same time a while ago, and one I have already personally answered at a public event, but they are a common theme, so here goes:

Someone asks—

does Queensborough landing area require tree cutting permit to remove tree on edge of city and private properties?

Depends. If it is on their land, they can cut it down. The City does not have a tree protection bylaw for private property, something I have complained about in the past. We do have a Bylaw that makes it illegal to cut or damage trees on City property without the City’s permission. We can fine you for that, and make you replace the tree.

Wes asks—

Hi Pat, why in light of the City’s recognition of the importance of an Urban Forest Strategy did Management and Council strip out budget for the city arborist to plant any new Boulevard trees this year? Seems totally counterintuitive.

Because we probably weren’t aware, and because it made sense at the time.

The annual budgeting process is large and complicated, and Council needs to rely on senior staff to make decisions about their annual needs, based on a set of priorities set out by the Council.

It would be unusual, and not very useful, for any individual Councillor to go through every single budget line and decide “a little more” or “a little less”. If every Councillor did this, it would be chaos. The budget documents we need to review come in three-ring binders, the massive 3-inch ring types, and are printed double-sided. Every change to one line results in sometimes obscure changes to other items, with compounding effects over multi-year budgeting cycles. Relying on senior staff from multiple departments to distill this info is required.

That said, as a Council we asked Parks, Culture, and Recreation staff to reduce some of their spending last year from what they requested, in part of the effort to get the annual property tax increase reduced from a draft 2.42% in February to the to 1.96% we approved in April (and yeah, there may be some politics to that idea of “keeping it under 2%”).

I do remember having discussions about the reductions in some spending on Parks Maintenance staff (which I voted against) as I remember joking that if we paved all of the green space, it would then be Engineering’s problem to pay for it, and Parks would be off the hook. I also remember at the time staff being asked to dig deeper for some operational savings related to this. We did, at the time, discuss Council’s expressed desire to improve the amount and quality of our green spaces in the City, and how this wasn’t being reflected in the budget. However, I doubt it was ever expressed to us that no trees would be planted in 2015.

The good news is that this does not mean that no trees would be planted in 2015. Parks staff recognized that they had a bit of a backlog of unplanted trees. These are generally trees the City receives as part of the contributions of various developers (if a developer is required to put trees in front of their property on City land, they just pay the City to do that instead of doing it themselves) and other sources. We also (I am told by staff) had a bit of catching up to do in regards to tree maintenance across the City, so this freed up some staff time to do more pruning and other tree maintenance activities.

The City plants something north of 200 trees per year on average, but the early work being done to help develop an Urban Forest Management Strategy tells us this is not enough to maintain a healthy urban forest. Expect to hear more in the New Year, but the City is going to need to ramp up its plantings, and do more to encourage the protection of trees on private property, if we want to change the trend of an urban forest continuing to erode.

Ask Pat: Dontenwill Hall

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Someone asked—

Hey Pat, I was driving down Agnes Street the other day and was checking out the progress on the restoration of the old Dontenwill Hall (336 Agnes) and remember reading in your April 3 post that you support the proposed HRA for this redevelopment, which provided some concessions to the developer as a means to ensure that survival of this ” the historically important building”. The thing that struck me as odd while I drove by was the recent installation of Vinyl windows and addition of a huge A/C unit on the front roof. Being under an HRA, shouldn’t the exterior materials used be in keeping with those available at the time of construction and should not there be reasonable attempts to place mechanical systems so that they do not affect the street appearance of the building?

This is one of those topics of which I don’t know much, so I need to do more research, and rely on the opinions and suggestions of our staff and the external experts who do know more.

The conditions of the HRA are outlined in the agreement,  which you can read as part of the agenda of the March 3o Public Hearing. The only thing in that agreement that directly references the approach to restoration is this clause:

Upon execution of this Agreement, the Owner shall promptly commence the preservation, rehabilitation, and restoration of the Heritage Building (the “Work”) in accordance with the “Dontenwill Hall – Heritage Conservation Plan” prepared by Pattison Architecture and dated August, 2014, a copy of which is attached as Appendix 2 (the “Conservation Plan”).

Which makes the appended Conservation Plan the document with the details to how the City and proponent have agreed to do the restoration. In there, it appears there were some 1990s vinyl windows that were allowed to stay as they were in good condition and structurally sound, however the agreement states that if those windows ever need replacing, they will need to be with period-appropriate wood framed units. I suspect cleaning them up and fixing up around them might make them look like new units, but I have been assured they are the existing ones.

The air handling system isn’t really covered in the HRA, as there is no reference to it in the Restoration Plan. Apparently, it came later in the planning. This is part I had to check into, and apparently there is a plan to do some screening of the units, but there is a bit of devil in details here. As the HVAC upgrades are not strictly related to the exterior renovation (which is what the HRA secures), and there are building permits and code requirements in regards to air handling that definitely did not exist in 1940, there needs to be a bit of  wiggle room in the final design if we want the building to be functional. Long and short, the HVAC unit does not violate the terms of the HRA, but the “spirit” of the HRA would support screening them to make them blend in better.

Note, the hall is still a “work in progress”, so we should wait to see how it all turns out.

Ask Pat: Whistle cessation?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

Sleepless asks—

What is the deal with the downtown train whistle cessation program?

In early 2014, it was announced that an agreement had been reached with the railroad companies and that trains would stop whistling downtown as soon as the crossings are upgraded.

In mid-2014, councilor Puchmayr mentioned at a Downtown Residents Association meeting that the only thing holding back whistle cessation downtown was backordered equipment for the Fourth and Begbie St crossings, and that the upgrade work was expected to be completed “within a few weeks”.

A year later, in your May 25, 2015 Council Meeting report on this site, you mentioned that the target for whistle cessation downtown was now September 2015.

I just saw an update on newwestcity.ca, dated August 2015, which gives a new date of “end of 2015” for downtown whistle cessation.

So, what is the hold-up? Why is a simple crossing upgrade taking so long? Why does the target date keep getting pushed back? Is there any hope of the whistles ever stopping?

Of all those sources, I would trust the most recent one. The problems across the many crossings in the City are complex, and there are some crossings (Spruce Street and Braid, especially) where the issues may be unsolvable in the short term, but that is not true for Begbie and Fourth.

The best update I can give you is this one from the summer that you mentioned, but I am not on the Rail Committee, so there may have been developments since then.

The City really hoped to have the Begbie crossing done this fall, but there were some delays on ordering the required hardware, and now it looks more like spring. I know this isn’t what we planned, but the important pieces are in place – the Railway companies have agreed to a hardware plan that will permit cessation, the City has budgeted the money to do the work (and, in one case, Southern Rail has contributed some money to making a solution work), so it is going to happen, it is only a matter of time now.

I cannot emphasize enough how getting those first pieces in place was a significant effort by the City (again, this is one of those things I can take no credit for, as it mostly happened before I joined council), after a decade of unfortunate confrontation between the railways and a few well-meaning community groups, we now have a collaborative relationship that will see dividends as far as whistle cessation, and is already showing dividends in how emergency planning takes place on the Quayside.

So much like the 4th Street Elevator and the upgrades to council chambers, I am disappointed by the delays, but believe the work needs to be done, and am happy Council has supported and funded the projects. I apologize that we have not hit our intended timelines, and am starting to question how we, as a City, set our timelines.