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Strategic Priorities Plan

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

A Strategic Priorities Plan was recently endorsed by Council. I wrote previously about the process we went through to get here, this is the meat in the middle. The Plan sets out the five priority areas for our work in the next few years. One of the principles we took into Strategic Planning was a recognition that these kinds of plans need to be aspirational and values-based, not necessarily prescriptive. The last 4 years taught us that even the best laid plans can be shifted by events, and we need to be ready to pivot when events conspire. A clear understanding of our common goals and the values that guide us toward them helps us with that pivot.

The core of the plan is five priority areas, four fairly straight-forward, one more abstract. In each of these, we have objectives and some example outcomes.

Homes and Housing Options. Our Community has been a leader in full-spectrum housing policy, from shelter and supportive housing through purpose-built rental and family-friendly transit oriented development. Still, secure and affordable housing is the #1 regional priority, and we have work to do. Our focus this term will be on implementing the Homelessness Action Strategy, and better targeting our affordable housing efforts to align with senior government funding opportunities. We will continue to prioritize market housing development on and near Transit, and will update our infill density program to bring more diversity of housing in every neighbourhood. Finally, facing the labour crunch, we are going to implement a simplified and streamlined approvals process to get more built sooner.

Safe Movement of People The ways people move around our region are changing, as people want more choice and equity in how we allocate transportation space and we are starting to make the shift necessary for us to meet our Climate Action goals. To reflect this, we are emphasizing increased safety for all modes, and measuring transportation success by our ability to move people more than traditional transportation models related to moving specific types of devices. Along with generational investments in our Active Transportation Network (again, to align with senior government funding opportunities), we are going to bring a new focus on the safety and comfort of our transportation realm – we don’t want choice constrained by lack of safety. This will be inter-departmental and culture-shifting, whether we brand it “VisionZero” or not.

People-centred Economy Continuing the trend of centering the people we serve in our work, we are framing our Economic Development focus around people. This means supporting vibrant retail areas that are focused on local needs. This means assuring our jobs-creating spaces (Commercial/ Industrial) are able to support local jobs. This also means assuring the economic benefits of our strong Arts and Culture sector are shared here in the community. This is an area where relationships and partnerships will be key to our success.

Assets and Infrastructure This doesn’t get everyone excited, but the City has a 5-year capital plan I can only describe as aggressive, which means we are investing in core infrastructure like never before. Asset Management is a the practice of assuring you understand your long-term asset needs and the lifecycle of existing and new assets, so that you can properly plan the finances needed to keep your assets in good repair, and renew them when needed. We are advancing a structured Asset Management strategy in the City, department by department, and though this will be better positioned both to score senior government grants to support infrastructure growth, and to set priorities when the inevitable call for more stuff but less spending arrives.

Community Belonging and Connecting This is the slightly less tangible priority area, but through our Strat Plan discussions, it was a theme we kept coming back to organically. What makes New West unique is the way residents and businesses feel connected to the community, to each other, in a way many other municipalities in the Lower Mainland don’t. We have a culture of connections, and Council wants to foster that. This means supporting the many community organizations that are bringing people together around, arts, around culture, around sport, or around an activated street.

These are the focus areas, but the way we do this work is as important as the work itself, so this Strategic Plan includes context statements that describe the organizations foundations we work upon, and the lenses through which we view our work. That can all sound a bit like Management Consultant Speak, but let me unpack it a bit using Climate Action as an example.

We are in an era where people expect their government to take action on Climate Change mitigation and adaptation. The existential aspect of this work is such that it impacts every department in the City. We cannot achieve our 2030 and 2050 GHG goals unless we engineer our public spaces differently. We cannot be resilient in the face of climate disruption unless our Emergency Services understand and adapt to the new threats. The buildings we approve today will be the affordable building stock in the zero-carbon future, we better assure they are built for that future. It goes on. Everything we do from this point forward must be viewed through a climate lens – are we doing this in a way that reduces GHG emissions? Is what we are building going to be appropriate in 20 years? Does this move us towards mitigation, or away from it?

Lenses like this will be applied to assure we are being true to our goals for Reconciliation, for Public Engagement, and for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism (DEIAR). It is what our community expects, and it is the right way to approach this work.

Finally, all of this work will be done on the foundation of Organizational Effectiveness. This means supporting our professional staff to do their work, assuring they have the resources and tools they need to do it, from IT to HR to the building in which people work.

And that is the plan in a nutshell. It is meant to be aspirational and realistic, and it is flexible enough for us to shift emphasis as needs (and senior government supports) shift over the next 40ish months. We will be monitoring and measuring the success transparently so Council and staff can be kept accountable to deliver on it.

Now go enjoy your long weekend, and Tuesday we get back to work.

Strategic Planning

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

As I reported last week, New West Council completed our Strategic Priority Plan. You can read the plan here, and I will write a second post about the content of it, but first a bit about the process that got us here, and the next steps. In the Strat Plan Blogging sandwich, this will be about the bread, and we can talk about the meat in the middle in the next post.

This Strategic Plan is the work of all of Council, with significant support from staff in preparing it. This is a new Council, with 4 new members and a new Mayor. We have also seen some significant changes in the last few years, between the persistent impacts of COVID-19 on our program delivery and the generational scale of our capital plan. Though it is common for a new Council to adopt a new strategic plan to guide staff work for the term, I felt it was important that this time we take a bit of time for the new Council to get their feet under them, and that we do intensive onboarding and training to assure all of Council are adequately informed to take a meaningful part in the Strat Planning.

As both Strategic Planning and budget planning take a lot of work, I did not want to rush through the former before we started working on the latter, and the budget has legislated timelines we needed to meet. The timing we followed allowed Council a chance to go through their first budget cycle before we buttoned up the Strat Plan – an important lesson in compromise and priority setting. The Strat Plan (and future budgets) will be stronger because we did this learning, but we also needed to recognize that our Strat Plan will not be fully demonstrated in our budget until next year.

The Strat Plan process included a weekend workshop, it was embedded into the many onboarding workshops we held, and there were early written drafts that all of Council opined on, as staff were able to frame and make sensible from all of that input. This was a good exercise overall, as members of Council were free to discuss technical and legislative policy limits with staff in a way that they feel free and unencumbered to ask the “bad question”. There was also space to debate values, ideas, policies, and challenges in a way that is mostly free of the political fray. I think we grew as a Council through this.

All that said, there is a responsibility that Council make decisions transparently, which means that the Strat Plan comes to an open meeting, and all of Council have an opportunity to speak to it. You can see this process (closed development discussion followed by open release and endorsement) is the standard practice for Municipalities that do strategic plans, and you can see other Munis reports here, here, and here.

Now that the Strat Plan is adopted, we will use it to guide future budget discussions, and will integrate it with our other major planning documents, from the Official Community Plan to our Climate Action Plan and Parks and open Spaces Strategy. When Staff or Council bring ideas forward, they will be discussed in the context of this plan – either the new work should match our priorities, or we need a compelling reason to adjust those priorities.

To bring the Strat Plan to function, we will likely be making some changes in the operation of the City. We had a report last week about Advisory Committees, and are beginning the work to assure they are structured to serve the priorities of the Strat Plan. It is also possible that we will make some organizations changes at the staff level to assure that workplans are better aligned with Council’s priorities and that the reporting structure is designed to provide oversight and accountability to the goals of Council as expressed by the Strat Plan. This is the work of the months ahead.

We are in a time when Local Governments are being asked to do more things for more people all the time. We are also being asked to do more with less, in the sense that our budgets are strained and the regional labour shortage means fewer people are available to do the expanded work. To achieve our major strategic goals, we are going to have to set priorities. This is a hard thing for New Westminster (the City, and the community) to do – we are the small city that does a lot, and we are proud of our level of achievement. Yes, there are a lot of great things we could do but we simply cannot do it all. This is called a Strategic Priorities Plan for a reason, and I’ll write in the next post about what those priorities are.

Finally, it was disappointing that the work of the last few months was not endorsed by all of Council. I assumed everyone was in those meetings and discussions for the same reasons, to work out a shared sense of principles and priorities. I thought we had got there, and it was communicated to me that we got there. To have a last-minute amendment on a parochial item seemed performative to me, and to use the lack of support for this performative gesture as an excuse to oppose the result of months of staff and Council work seemed to disregard the collaborative approach Council had taken into this work. I am disappointed by that, but will learn from it.

LOWER MAINLAND LGA 2023 (PT 2)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I wrote last week about the political part of the Lower Mainland LGA annual conference, here is the rest of what happened, including the Sessions and Resolutions.

Sessions:
A major part of the annual meeting are workshops and panel sessions where Local Government leaders can share and learn. Considering about half of the attendees this year were new to the job of being a Mayor of City Councilor, these formal sessions (and the ample informal networking time) is really valuable. This is the briefest summary of the sessions this year.

Local Government Partnerships & Innovation
This was a panel discussion with representatives from three Municipalities taking innovative approaches to their unique challenges: Abbotsford taking an Airport the Federal government didn’t want anymore and making it a local economic driver; Whistler working to bring community-based health care work in their unique community; and Chilliwack taking an aggressive approach to Downtown Revitalization.

The last item sparked a lot of interest in the room, and was also the subject of a pre-conference tour. The centre of the discussion is a block branded as District 1881 that over more than 15 years went from this:

To this:

To this:

The Streetview images don’t fully represent the texture of the change, as the first photo has a lot of end-of-life buildings, many boarded up stores and low value leases inthe few remaining. The new Centre is certainly attractvie and higher value (arguably gentrified?). There were some good lessons from their experience here, some not particularly useful now (“buy up land before the prices are driven up!”), and some very useful, though sometimes hard to achieve (“be clear on your vision and stick with it, even through changes in council and government; build partnerships early”). I had some good discussion with colleagues from Chilliwack after the panel to get more details, and will be following up.

Everyone’s Responsibility: Codes of Conduct & Ethics in City Hall Description
This was an interesting and timely panel ad most local governments (by direction of the Province) are reviewing their Codes of Conduct now, we have new Councils across the region, and we were meeting in Harrison, one of the municipalities that is currently facing scrutiny for its council conduct challenges. The Panel included a member of the Provincial government who works in local government oversight, a Councillor for Squamish, which is a municipality with a “model” Code of Conduct, introduced last term, and a Lawyer who guides Cities (including New West) on Code of Conduct issues.

This was an interesting conversation that spoke about the importance of a strong CoC, and also admitted that a CoC was not a panacea for all forms of organizational dysfunction. So many of our systems in local government organization rely on good faith participation, and the development of a CoC is one of these. The importance of developing a CofC when things are going well was emphasized, because trying to bring them in during time of maximum disruption (when they are needed the most) does not work – they have to be in place ahead of time. Lesson learned.

Running a Positive Election Campaign: Reflections and Lessons Learned from the 2022 BC General Municipal Election
This panel brought elected types from Vancouver, Burnaby, Squamish, and Langley together with the observer of all things Municipal, Justin McElroy, to discuss the campaign of 2022, and the potential for positive messaging as a positive force in elections. There was a*lot* here about the battle of ideas, and the absolute quagmire that is election period Social Media. Perhaps one of the insights that stood out was Justin’s advice/observance that elected people who are still talking about the election 6 months later are probably the ones who will not survive, which evokes a bit Nenshi’s comments: stop campaigning and do some work. There will be lots of time to campaign three years from now. Perhaps the most interesting moment was when the question was asked about the role of “Kennedy Stewart’s Road Tax” in a positive campaign, but you had to be there to appreciate it.

We also had a great closing keynote from Bowinn Ma, the Minister of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, speaking about the lessons learned from the atmospheric river floods, Lytton fire, and other major events of the last few years ,and new ways the Provincial Government is working to help local governments be prepared for the next shitty climate-change-driven catastrophe (my words, not hers), including the Climate Ready BC website

Resolutions
Except for years where there is a spectacular speech implosion, the resolutions session is the most noteworthy part of most Lower Mainland LGA meetings. This is the part where municipalities put forward resolutions they hope the membership will endorse, mostly calls for Senior Governments to do things, like change policy, legislation or revenue streams for local government. In 2023 we had 35 resolutions debated, and you can read all about the here. Most were successful, but some failed. I am only going to speak to the ones that New Westminster took to the session. For the rest, you will have to find some other mayor’s blog. This is a really fun debate process for those who dig local government policy wonking, and want to make change.

R9 Equitable Communities
…be it resolved that UBCM call upon the Province of British Columbia and the Government of Canada to provide resources and policy direction to enable local government to implement analytical processes for the assessment of systemic inequalities (i.e. Gender-Based Analysis Plus) across local government capital investments, operations and strategic initiatives to ensure all citizens can participate fully in civic life and to make measureable progress towards dismantling system inequality in our communities.
This passed non-controversially.

R10 Exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act
…be it resolved that the LMLGA and UBCM request that the BC Government request Health Canada add “public park spaces designed for and used by children and youth” to the list of exceptions to the Controlled Drug and Substances Act exemptions.
This resolution was divisive, and was eventually amended to remove the work “park”, which left it asking for a ban for all public spaces. As this effectively results in full recriminalization of decriminalized drugs, this derailed the motion completely. The amended motion was endorsed by a slim majority of delegates, but in this form will no doubt be ignored by the Federal and Provincial governments, a classic example of cutting off ones nose to spite one’s face.

R16 Vacant Property Tax on Commercial Properties
…be it resolved that UBCM urge the Province of British Columbia to provide local governments with an option to introduce a vacant property tax applicable to commercial properties
This was another hotly-debated resolution, but with a solid majority of delegates voting in support. This will no doubt be ever more hotly debated at UBCM, and the rural-urban divide on this issue may be more pronounced than one might expect.

R28 Bringing Equity to Traffic Enforcement
…be it resolved that UBCM calls upon the provincial government to implement a means-tested traffic fine system, similar to Finland, Switzerland, Sweden or the UK where fines may be calculated on the basis of the offender’s income.
Perhaps surprisingly, there was little debate on this issue, and reflecting the public opinion polls on the matter, this resolution was supported by a solid majority of delegates. Again, I expect this to have a rockier ride at UBCM, but the level of support was positive.

So all in all, New West was 3 for 4 for our resolutions, and our memberswere the re to support solid resolutions for other progressive councils from around the region – this is an area where Port Moddy asnd Squamish really step up and take some regional leadership.

In what became a running joke for some during the resolution debates, was the frequency with which the term “slippery slope” was used as an excuse to not endorse a regulatory change. This is a bit silly, as all regulation is, buy it very nature, a potential slippery slope, which is why the framing of it is as important as the request for it. But I also note that the “slippery slope fallacy” is the only logical fallacy we common name as we are committing it. In debate, we rarely say “this is a total non sequitur, but…” or “I would like to offer the strawman argument that…”, but we have no shame in saying “If we approve this, it is the thin end of the wedge!”.

Maybe I’ll save the rhetoric lecture for UBCM… 

Budget Amendment

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 5 Comments.

Last meeting we approved a provisional budget. After several months of work by Council and much, much more by staff, a 5-year financial plan was presented that included Capital and Operational budgets for both the General Fund and the Utility Funds. The next step is for staff to forge these into Bylaws that can be read and adopted by Council – a process that needs to be completed by the end of April by regulation. But first Council has to approve the 5-year plan in principle.

In a move that is no longer surprising, an Amendment motion was proposed late in the discussion that sought to derail much of this work. Not in a way that allowed staff or Council to meaningfully deliberate the changes proposed, but in a way that appeared to be (and I’m not saying this was intent, I’m saying this is how it appeared to me, recognizing one cannot really know what is in another’s mind) more of an attempt to score talking points. And I’ll detail why I got that impression, but first, I want to talk about the Amendment.

The Amendment that arrived in front of Council at almost literally the 11th hour is a list of 12 different shifts in line items, projects, and plans in the City, with little rhyme or reason. All were framed as initiatives to reduce the burden on property taxpayers by reducing the proposed 6.4% tax increase. I cannot bury this key point, so I’ll underline it:

*Not a single item in this list, if approved, would have any effect on the proposed 6.4% tax increase. Not one.*

It is also worth emphasizing that many of the items sought to undermine years of work by different departments based on long-standing strategic plans and sometimes years of community engagement, advisory committee work, and partnerships in the community. This is not good governance.

So beyond the headlines, here’s some detail:

The biggest line item was “Eliminate $46,337,399 in funding allocated for the District Energy Project in Sapperton”, and this is emblematic of the entire Amendment.

The District Energy Utility (“DEU”) is a project the City has been working on for some time, similar to successful projects in Vancouver and Richmond. It is still conceptual, because it needs several things to come together for it to be successful, some of them outside of the control of the City (like pace of residential development and global energy prices). The City has been carefully evaluating market conditions, and has been building partnerships and raising external funding to support the financial modelling and design work. When the business case is right, when the known risks are managed, we need to be ready to move.

As we have received external funding support in anticipation of these factors coming together, we have a line item in our Capital budget to support the capital cost of building the DEU. That is the number that appears above. Cutting this from the budget means the DEU doesn’t go forward, now or ever. It seems to me good governance would include a deeper conversation about that (including with our funding partners) before we throw away years of work by striking a red line through it during budget deliberations.

Perhaps the more important aspect of this is that the DEU will not be funded by property taxes.  The “U” stands for “Utility”, and it will be operated as such. The people who will pay for the DEU are the customers of the DEU – the people and businesses of the new buildings that hook up to the DEU and receive the benefit of resilient, carbon-free, and affordable space- and water-heating provided from sewer heat recovery. The entire point of the DEU is that the capital cost (somewhere around $50 Million now, it may be more or less depending on how it is built and when) will be covered by rates paid by customers, supported by some external grants and value gained in the carbon credit market.

Cutting this out of the budget now and spiking the project on a whim will do nothing to change property tax rates, now or in the future.

There is also a line item here that suggests we “Eliminate $15,321,089 in funds earmarked for the installation of advanced ‘smart’ meters”, effectively ending the Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) project.

Again, this is a capital project paid through Electrical Utility rates, so it will not impact Property Tax rates, but that is not the most baffling part. The City has already invested in the IT work to support integration of digital meters, and we have already signed the contract to purchase 40,000 next-generation electrical meters. Taking away the Capital budget for their installation and integration now is a strange request, as we already own the meters. They would become very expensive doorstops.

But let’s talk about the Advanced Meter initiative, and why we are doing it, because not all of you have the benefit of lengthy onboarding that the Councillor moving this Amendment had access to, or serve on the Electrical Commission like the Councillor who seconded the Motion does.

The City’s electrical meters are old and overdue for replacement. The mechanical meter technology we rely on is harder and harder to get inspected and certified by the regulators, because of their age. They are becoming less reliable, and repairs are challenging. At the same time, Utility customers have been asking the Electrical Utility for more information about energy use, more consistent billing, and even more innovative rate structures to support EV integration, building electrification, and conservation. We can do none of these things relying on 1950’s technology meters. Even if you don’t think digital meters are a good thing, and don’t value those benefits, I don’t think throwing away the investment already made in new meters and keeping the failing older technology in place provides any benefit at all to utility ratepayers.

There are other items in this list that are out of left field like cutting $2M from the BridgeNet capital plan (another thing not paid for by property tax payers, but by service users and ISP partners, who maybe we should talk to before we toss away our development plan?) to a random cut of almost $5 Million in the Capital budget to make long-needed improvements to the sidewalks and commercial streets through the Great Streets program. Some other line items point to familiar grievances like the Queens Park Farm upgrades (not sure why a motion to not update the farm area after two years of consultation and design work that failed earlier in the day during workshop ended up back here only hours later to fail again?) or adding a few hundred thousand dollars to the whistle cessation line item (when staff have repeatedly made clear it’s not lack of money that is preventing faster implementation of whistle cessation).

It is important to note that none of the numbers in this laundry list have been verified, nor has there been any analysis of the impacts of these cuts on existing programs, on long-term strategic plans, or on the people and businesses of New Westminster. No public consultation, no business analysis. Just randm numbers on a sheet of paper.

This is why several Councillors, surprised and confused by the suggestions, fell to using language like slapdash, knee-jerk, and crazy when referring to the content of the Amendment, and why Council, in its wisdom, voted this down.

There is another conversation to have here about intent, and that is harder. Especially when one sees the first proposed change: “Establish a $1 budget for the City’s rebranding for the rebranding process aimed at eliminating the Royal City moniker”. We didn’t debate this in Council, but it is not difficult to infer intent here. But I am going to hold off on talking about that for now, because I don’t want that necessarily-political discussion to distract from the cold facts above about why the Amendment was misdirected, misinformed, and unsupportable.

on reserves

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The discussions about municipal budgets are ongoing across the region, As it is budget time, and as the Province has decided to flip $1 Billion to local governments right in the middle of that budget period, which will lead to some interesting conversions in every muncipal hall. Some Councils will see it as a windfall to be spent on new things, some will use it for political cover for questionable decisions, some will prudently invest, others will go full populist. A real Marshmallow Test for local government.

Among the stories, this one popped out to me. PoCo is getting a reputation for artfully blending populism with prudent investment, but the bigger question about balancing reserves is something that every city neeeds to grapple with. The McElroy story caused me to dig deeper into reserve levels across the region, so I can test my preconceived notions about New Westminster’s relative financial health. As always, I want to preface this by saying it is not a competition, as every municipality has its own pressures, its own priorities and its own way to serve their populace. In comparing ourselves to our regional cohort, I want to get a sense of where we are doing better or worse to inform our priority setting while approving a budget.

I am once again leaning on the BC Government Local Government Financial Statistics, which are reported in a more-or-less consistent way every year. This is not my data, but the data provided by law to the Province by local governments every year. When it comes to Financial Assets, Reserves, and Tangible Capital Assets, all data is pulled form Schedules 301, 302, 404, and 503. Got a problem with the numbers? Take it up there.

Every City reports Financial Assets (the money in their savings and chequing accounts) and their financial liabilities (their mortgages and loans). The difference between them is reported as “net financial reserves”, which is the number McElroy was pointing to in that story above. These are the reported numbers for the 17 major Municipalities in Greater Vancouver (sorry, Belcarra) in the most recent reporting year, which is the end of 2021:

But perhaps a better way to look at it is to subtract the liabilities form the assets, so you can compare the Net Reserves:

Some things are not surprising: Vancouver has the most money, and the most debt. Burnaby has the highest net neserves, and Richmond and Coquitlam are both doing really well if money-in-the-bank is your preferred measure. Indeed, PoCo has the lowest net, with New West a little below the middle, but there is a trend following population, as you might expect, with smaller Munis over on the right, larger towards the left. So let’s calculate the net reserves per capita using 2021 Census data:

Burnaby still way up there (with $7,700 in net reserves per resident), and New Westminster shifting further over to the right (with $972 per resident). PoCo in this measure is not the lowest, but is pretty closely clustered with Surrey and the Township of Langley at under $500 per resident.

This is interesting, but does not really reflect the purpose of reserves. Part of it is to demonstrate financial health to make it easier to borrow money, but part of it is also to have sufficient cash on hand to address unexpected future costs. Mostly those costs are related to capital replacement, so it is more useful to compare your reserves to the value of your capital assets. This is the value of the roads, buildings, pipes, computers, vehicles and all of the “stuff” your City owns and operates. Schedule 503 provides these numbers as reported by the City every year. This chart shows the reserves as a percentage of the net book value of our tangible capital assets:

There needs to be a big caveat here. Though a fundamental measure of your reserves vs the value of your capital assets is a measure of financial resiliency (our finance staff have suggested 10% of the asset value is a good minimum benchmark), the denominator of the equation needs to be viewed with a certain skepticism. This is because local governments have not historically been very good at evaluating the true value of their capital assets, and that might take me down the rabbit hole of talking about asset management, which is probably another blog post on its own.

Just to create a sense of comparison, here are the net reserves per capita and relative to tangible capital assets, plotted as a scatter. Somewhere in here is a trend. I added the green dot to show the “average” for the region:

Finally, part of the conversation about reserves is the direction they are moving. Are we building them, or are we depleting them? Luckily the province provides data going back a few years in their Schedules 404. To compare across cities of varying size, I indexed the reserves value based on their 2012 value so we can see the decade-long trend. Problem is, a couple of Municipalities (Vancouver and West Van) had negative reserves in 2012, which makes it hard to compare this way, so I removed them from the data set. Suffice to say, their increase over the last decade has been proportionally much higher than all others (they would be well off the top of this chart). But for the rest of us, you can see most Munis are in building phases, and only one has fewer reseves than a decade ago:

The comparison over a decade is valuable, because reserves serve another function – they are where a City stores some money for big capital investments, like a recreation centre or a new City Hall. And when a City borrows to build a new capital asset, that downward pressure on net reserves is felt for several years. New West has been growing reserves in the last couple of years in recognition that təməsew̓txʷ and it’s $114 Million investment will have this impact on our net.

So, comparatively? New West has lower-than-average reserves by most measures, has been building them, but has a big capital investment that will put downward pressure on these reserves in the years ahead. That should inform some of our thinking about future investments in the City and our ability to make expensive promises.

On fiscal responsibility

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Council has for several meetings been going through the budget. In practical terms, this means staff have been writing reports, providing long spreadsheets, and Council members have spent hours reading through those reports and spreadsheets in preparation for meetings. We have then held these meetings (mostly in Workshop format during the day, Jan 23, Jan 25, Jan 30, Feb 6, Feb 13 and Feb 27; you can watch those meetings and read those reports here) and discussed different aspects of the budget in some detail. We were able to ask questions of staff about departmental priorities, about work plan capabilities, about the policies that drive the priorities behind the budget, about where we could fit our own priorities (because we all have them), and at times went line-by-line through different operational and capital line items. These have been productive and positive conversations, and the budget has been iterated along during them.

Through it all, we now have a pretty good understanding of where the budget will land and how we are going to pay for our aggressive capital program ($166 Million in 2023!). Last meeting, we gave instruction to staff for them to prepare budget documents for Bylaws to come to our next meetings.

So, with that background for context, I need to retort to this story. Alas.

The motion that was defeated at Council arrived at the eleventh hour of that months-long budget discussion, and comprised a long list of disconnected funding items. Together they represented something like $8 Million in new spending that was not discussed in previous budget deliberations, though that number is uncertain, because the funding was requested without any actual costing, testing for viability, or understanding of the impact on work plans or the ability to deliver. It was an expensive wish list tacked onto the end of a budget, ballooning it by something like 5%, with no consideration for how this fits into any existing priorities. This is not good governance.

It was further suggested this wish list could be funded by the City’s expected grant from the Growing Communities Fund. This was based on speculation about how much money the City will get, and presumes there will not be any limitations on how this money can be used. In the meeting, staff made it clear that this was not a prudent way to plan for a senior government grant. As we were currently looking at a very aggressive ~$170 Million capital budget for 2023, one that staff have repeatedly pointed out over the last months of open discussions will challenge our debt tolerance and reserve funds, I think treating new capital funding sources as “free money” to be spent willy nilly is the least fiscally responsible idea I have heard in my time in Local Government.

This raises the question of whether, as implied in the headline, Council opposes investments in “New Sidewalks, Paved Roads And Community Festivals In New Westminster”? Of course not. The draft capital budget includes $5 Million in 2023 (more than $20 Million over 5 years) for paving roads alone. This is aside from the $11+ Million to be invested in 2023 in road and street safety improvements and $4+ Million to be invested in 2023 in pedestrian improvements (sidewalks, light signal and crosswalk upgrades, etc). We also have one of the most generous community grant programs in the Lower Mainland to support local groups running festivals and activating our streets. Every bit of that funding has been discussed and prioritized, because saying yes to more is always easy; putting all new spending into the context of tax increases, debt and reserves before you spend it is harder.

I have heard people ask us to do more. I have heard people ask us to spend less. I have not heard people asking us to be fiscally irresponsible and spend money for the sake of spending it. That is why I didn’t support the motion presented on Monday. I am happy the majority of council was equally as prudent.

As perhaps an aside (now that I am into it), there are other quotes in that piece that criticize council colleagues for not being “collaborative”. This after a meeting where there were no less than four motions brought to the floor by the author, and three of those motions were passed by a majority of Council – two of them (in my recollection) unanimously. Collaboration in my mind means working together to evaluate each other’s ideas and finding compromise and places of agreement, it does not require the capitulation to all ideas regardless of how poorly they are presented. The job of those seven people around that table is to govern, and the hardest part of governing is in setting priorities, including deciding when to say no.

I find this extra disingenuous in that these debates are framed as being partisan, with the implication that council members are acting for partisan reasons only. This implication is disrespectful to the intentions and professionalism of the council members. It also is not reflected in the voting record over the last few months. There have been many unanimous votes, there have been votes with one, two or three votes separate from the majority, because members genuinely disagreed with each other on the merits of the proposal before them. I have seen members across partisan lines working to amend motions to make them agreeable to all. As the Mayor, there are votes I have been on the losing side during this Council, but I don’t think that is a partisan conspiracy, that is members acting in good conscience and evidence of a Council responsibly doing its job.

Alas, Council responsibly doing its job and acting in good conscience does not fit the narrative being crafted by whoever is developing the Progressive media strategy. I have to have faith that the public will see through that.

Housing Book

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Who else spent a rainy long-weekend day digging through regional housing stats?

Metro Vancouver tracks regional population and housing numbers in order to meet their mandate and track progress on the Regional Plan that the 21 member municipalities share. One of the public-facing parts of this tracking is the Housing Data Book they recently published, building on 2021 Census data and other data sources. There are graphs, maps and the tables of numbers to back them up. Its a great resource.  Following on Mayor Pachal’s lead, I thought I’d look at it from a New Westminster perspective.

Thing is, regional planning is not a competition. Though I have been oft quoted suggesting that New West is more than pulling it weight on the housing front, I look through these regional stats to help understand where we are doing well, and where we need to find better solutions. So here are some graphs and maps pulled right from the Metro report, with a few comments.

There is no secret New West is growing fast. At 11.2% growth between the last two censuses, we are one of the fastest growing communities in the Lower Mainland, and growing faster than the overall regional average of 7.3%:

One interesting point about our demographics is that New West is not young or an old city, but is a millennial city. The proportion of our population between 25 and 44 years old is second only to Vancouver proper:

And a you might expect for a City with lots of people in that parenting age, we are one of the fastest-growing communities for the 0-14 age range (and if you want to know how we differ from Port Moody – look at that number!):

New West continues to have a proportion of rental households (45%) well above the regional average:

And probably a combination of those last few data points results in New West having a median household income a little lower than the average for the region ($82,000 compared to $90,000, or 9% below):

but our median household income is growing faster than the regional average:

Now, that number is interesting. Between 2015 and 2020, median household income (inflation adjusted – using 2020 constant dollars) went up 17.1%. For the fun of it, I pulled up the data from the BC government on residential property tax burden (Schedule 707 available here) and found that per-capita property taxes over the same period rose about 13%. Using this calculator to adjust for inflation, per-capita property taxes only went up 8%. In short, incomes are rising much faster than property taxes.

Now on to this pretty cool bubble chart, that shows the correlation between population growth and growth in the number of dwellings, with the size of the bubble representing population in 2021. I added the red lines to show what parts of the region are growing in people faster than in homes (Surrey, Langley City, West Van, and yes, New Westminster ) vs the cities where homes are being built faster than population is growing (Richmond, Burnaby and Vancouver). Again, Port Moody’s quixotic lack of growth stands out.

I’ll jump ahead here to housing types, and one of the big headlines is that only 14% of New West households are in a single detached home, one of the lowest proportions in the region, Note that people living in secondary suites in those homes would be counted as “other” in this statistic. The 70% living in apartments is second only to Electoral Area A (which is predominantly UBC campus, so would include a lot of student housing):

And as you might expect, almost all new homes being built in the City are in the form of apartments and rowhomes (including attached and stacked townhouses) with no net increase in single family homes (but also no real decrease either, like we see in North Van District):

One place New West has been doing well is Purpose-Built Rental. We are getting more new rental built per capita than any other Municipality in the region, and more in raw numbers than any but Vancouver, while we are protecting the most affordable older PBR stock and are not letting it be replaced with condos (see the left part of the chart).

As a result, we now lead the region in Purpose Built Rental, with almost 26% of households in that housing type. This matters in a city where 45% of households are rental households, because PBR has one big difference over the “secondary” rental market (people renting out their condos or basement suites). That is in how they provide long-term housing security to renters. Any secondary market rental unit can leave the rental market at any time at the whim of the landlord, which is a precarious situation for the renting family. PBR brings increased housing security for the increasing number of working people in our community who cannot afford to buy.

This is especially important as the Vacancy Rate is still dire:

Which means upward pressure on rents is still a problem. Though, notably, New Westminster rents are not “in the top 10 in the country”, as they are not even the top ten in Metro Vancouver:

And here is why. New West cannot do it alone, our work to get us way over on the right side of those graphs above by building and protecting rental has not moved the regional needle, because we are only 3% of the population on half of 1% of the land area. When you look at rental inventory across the entire region this is the trend:

No meaningful change in raw numbers over 30 years. As the region’s population has gone from 1.5 Million people to 2.6 Million people, we have had no meaningful increase in the number of purpose-built rental homes. No wonder we are in a rental affordability crisis.

But cities don’t own all the blame here. This is largely a result of those destructive 1990’s Paul Martin budgets, when the Federal Liberal Government decided to get out of the business of housing, and of subsequent Provincial governments not stepping in to fill the gap. Without CMHC policy driving the building of new rental, with the province relying on the “the market” to fill rental need, with decades of being told home ownership is the path to financial success and tax structures that emphasize that, the market does what it does. The upward trend you see at the end is a result of the Province finally changing that two-decade practice, and (some) Local Governments shifting how we incentivize new building to make Rental viable again. But we have so much catching up to do.

CMHC & PBR

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Last week there were a few stories in the regional media (traditional and social) about CMHC’s recent release of housing data. One story that got my attention was this graph posted on Twitter by census data guru Jens von Bergmann (@vb_jens):

This appeared to show New West losing a large number of bachelor and one bedroom rental suites over the 2021-2022 survey period, while 2- and 3-bedroom numbers went up, resulting in a small net increase of units. A few people asked “what’s up with New West?”, and I honestly had no idea.

Not to bury the lede: there is no way New Westminster lost hundreds of rental units over this period of time. For this to happen, there would have to be either some massive conversion of rental units to condo (not something we permit in New Westminster) or major demo- or reno-victions (both of which are tightly regulated here, and we simply have not had any such applications).

So I had to look into this, and City staff looked into it as well, and conformed what I suspected. It seems like this was a data anomaly, thought it was not immediately clear what the source of the anomaly is. This did give an excuse to dig a bit into the data, which is available here.

I took the numbers for rental units for not just 2021 and 2022, but for the last 8 years, essentially since I was first elected to Council. Here are the raw numbers, and I highlighted the numbers that show a decrease in the last year that is reflected in the original post:

It appears that a couple of larger Purpose Built Rental buildings were misclassified in their unit counts when they were opened in 2019 and 2020, showing the significant jump in Bachelor and 1-bedrooms over those two years, and for some unknown reason, the more accurate data is being presented now. It’s a bit complicated how we can tell this, but the short version is that CMHC also provides unit counts by census tract and by construction period (e.g. “built in 2000 or later”). This allows us to look at how a couple of larger and recently completed PBR buildings were reported in the year they opened, and in there found an anomaly. It appears both 900 Carnarvon (Completed in 2020, 172 studio, 72 1-bed, 132 2-bed, and 22 3+bed) and 228 Nelson’s Crescent (Completed 2019, 0 studio, 85 1-bed, 77 2-bed and 24 3+bed) appear to not have been entered properly, as the number of new 2- and 3-bedroom suites added do not even add up to those provided by these two buildings (and they were not the only buildings to come on line during that period). This also explains some anomalous numbers reported last year about how New West was building way more bachelor and 1-bedroom rental units than our Family Friendly Housing Policy would allow – it is the same data error, now corrected.

As these numbers appear to have now been adjusted, it does show that looking at one year of unit completions from CMHC data may not be the best way to compare communities or track construction/approval trends, especially for smaller cities where one or two units opening (or being mis-reported) can skew annual numbers, and hide the deeper trend. To broaden the data a bit, I looked at the last 8 years (2014- 2022), non-coincidentally the time I have been on Council. I tried to re-create Jens’ chart with the unit count change over that 8 years, divided by 8 to give us an average annual unit change over that time:

And you can see why I have been saying no-one (except Vancouver) is building more PRB than New West. Of course not all of these communities are equal in size, or in population growth (see more on that here), and these net count numbers are not adjusted for those pressures.

If you want to look deeper at the numbers, they are here , and you can select by City. The numbers I have used are under the “Rental Universe” tab on the left. And just for fun, and if you want to check my math, here are the total numbers I found for over the 8 years (not the per year average presented above):

In summary, one part of the housing crises that New Westminster has been very effective at addressing is the paucity of Purpose Built Rental. There were a couple of decades there from the hollowing out of Federal Housing programs to the early 2000’s where almost no new PBR was being built, and indeed it was being lost. By policy and intention, New West has turned that tide and brought more rental to the market, while preserving the older more affordable rental, with visible results:

None of this changes that rents are going up at what looks like an unsustainable rate, and a rate disconnected from regional wages. Rental availability is fundamentally regional issue, not one New Westminster (with 3% of the regional population and 8% of the regional rental supply) can solve alone. Everyone needs to build more PBR, there is no new news there.

Behind the scenes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Trying hard to get back to my post-election semi-promise to try to post here once a week; Alas it was an aspirational goal I will strive towards, but not there yet. Though it is a good time for a bit of an update not just on what I’ve been up to, but what New West Council has been up to. You may have noticed our meeting agendas have been a little light (excepting random Motions from Council, which are another issue altogether), and there is a good reason for this.

We have 4 new City Councillors, and I am new in my role. There has also been a lot of change in the City over the last couple of years as we pivoted quickly to a COVID response, and more recently and slowly pivoting away from that initial response – recognizing that everything has changed due to COVID while there are still community expectations that the work that was delayed by COVID must go on. Into this, we had seven people elected with wish lists of things they want to do, even with promises of what they were going to do. We are going to need to figure out what to prioritize, or nothing will get done. That prioritization and strategic planning can only occur (in my mind), if all 7 members have a clear, and as equal as possible, understanding of the landscape between where we are and where we want to go. So all that so say: we have been doing a *lot* of  Onboard Training. This emphasis is meant to assure the new Council members are up to speed enough to make informed decisions before we make any major changes.

We have had a number of Onboarding Meetings, basically every Monday and Wednesday since early November, a few hours at a time. Different departments present to Council on what they do – their current work plans, the things they are looking at for longer-term planning, their pressures and challenges and the opportunities they see in the short term and in the years ahead. Council was able to have some frank discussions with them about our ideas and concerns. If you want to watch one of these meetings, they are streamed live, and you can watch them here. For example, click on January 23rd on the calendar, and you can watch our discussion of the Anvil Centre, Building and Planning Permits and Fees, and Pay Parking policies. Yep, there is minutiae.

We have also had a few tours of City facilities and sites of interest in the City. Talking about whistle cessation or works yard space issues or the new təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre in the abstract is not as useful as going to the sites to look over the site so Council and Staff can actually point at the things we are discussing. Down at the bottom, Ill add some photos from our tours, and note these are going to continue for another couple of weeks as we build towards Strategic Planning in early February.

I have also been taking the opportunity as Mayor to meet with Staff where they work. Not the senior staff we see often in City Hall so much as the 1,000-odd folks who keep the City running day to day. It has been great to chat with them about what they do every day, and what their pressures and concerns are, in an informal way. These meetings are ongoing as well, as I have a few more sites to get to.

I’ve really appreciated the time regional leaders (new and experienced) have taken to meet and talk about our shared challenges and opportunities.

Meanwhile, I have had a chance to meet with many of my regional colleagues, some in person, some through phone calls or zoom. And I’ve had meetings with our local MLAs, and phone meetings with the new Premier, and several members of his new Caucus.

Then there is the onboarding I have been doing at Metro Vancouver and TransLink. The Chair of Metro Vancouver appoints regional leaders to various Committees, and I am on several, including Parks (we had our Inaugural meeting January 11), Climate Action (I chaired our inaugural meeting on January 13th), Liquid Waste (Inaugural meeting January 18th), and the Board (next Meeting January 27th), along with the Indigenous Relations Committee (Which doesn’t meet until February). The TransLink Mayor’s Council has had several onboarding meetings, and has another meeting January 26th, and I have been named to the Finance Committee, so that will be another monthly meeting. It’s a lot of meetings, and a *lot* of onboarding. So as I empathize with my new Council colleagues drinking from the firehose of info, I am feeling it myself at the regional level.

Metro Vancouver Board meetings are a bit complex, with 40 Board Members, a challenging meeting space, and a plethora of screens. Here was a part of my view during the Inaugural meeting.

The good news is that staff in both organizations have been great in getting us elected types the material we need so we can read ahead and be prepared for training, and Council has been working hard and asking lots of questions. This is time and energy well spent, as it will make us a stronger group of leaders for the community.

Now for the photo tour of some of our tour stops (so far):

We toured the Anvil Centre to see the behind the scenes parts of the Archives and museum collection, the performance and conference space.
The topic of train whistle cessation is one where the new Councillors especially benefitted from seeing the on-site challenges and the work staff has done to make it work downtown…
…while also recognizing the special challenges at Sapperton that mean it is still a work in progress.
We’ve now visited all three Firehalls – the good, the almost-as-good, and the ugly. Each has its own character and use, but one really needs to be replaced.
The new substation in Queensborough represents the single biggest investment we have ever made in the sustainability of our electrical grid. It is almost ready to get turned on, and is looking to come in a little under budget – no mean feat in this time of inflation and supply chain disruption.
Visiting the Queensborough Community Centre was highlighted by seeing how the satellite library branch meets the needs of that community through careful collection management and programs.
We had a long discussion with engineering staff about Queensborough drainage infrastructure, the importance of the pump system and open watercourses, how the system is maintained, and some of the engineering challenges that come with ongoing upgrades to the system.
We toured the refreshed and renewing Massey Theatre to see how the MTS is making this into a new hub for teaching, experiencing, and engaging in the Arts.
And finally, today we got to tour the təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre, and I think most of Council was left agape at the scale of the project, as most of the framing is complete (except over the 50m lap pool). This is going to be a real game-changer for community space in New West come 2024.

2022 in review

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Having a bit of time over the Christmas break to think back about the year that was 2022, I am mostly thinking about a year of strategizing, planning, and bringing teams together like I have never experienced before. It is perhaps ironic then (though being the Alanis generation, I may not really understand irony) that my life path in 2022 was nothing I would have predicted one year ago today. This was not the path I expected, but it was a path I navigated as events occurred. So excuse me if my “Year in Review” post is maybe more self-reflective than community-reflective than is my usual.

December last year was the tail end of a challenging time. The City had weathered the worst of the Pandemic admirably, but was still seeing significant challenges around overlapping regional crises related to homelessness, spiraling housing costs and inflationary pressures, the poisoned drug supply and a regional emergency response system that was just not delivering for those suffering from health crises. There was a lot of bad news locally and planet-wide. People could not be blamed for being in a bit of a funk.

At the same time, there was a lot of talk among folks around the New West council table about who would run again. This became pressing in December, as the new campaign finance rules limit the amount of money candidates can contribute per year for their own campaigns. If you were going to run in 2022, it was a good idea to do a little fundraising in 2021, or at least put your personal maximum donation in the bank before the year end. I was very uncertain about running again for Council, and as I was leaning against it I did zero fundraising in 2021. But I hedged my bets by at least opening the bank account and putting in my personal donation.

It may seem strange for the current Mayor to suggest I was uncertain if I would run for Council again just 12 months ago, but Mayor and Council are two very different jobs and we had a solid Mayor. Council would mean another 4 years of continuing to hold my professional life slightly on the side burner: I was working half time, but my heart was not in it to build my geoscience career like it had been in the past, and the half-time work meant I wasn’t really doing the professional development that my work required if I really wanted to excel. I really enjoyed the work of City Council and the team I was working with, but I had two half time jobs, both needing fuller commitment. Something had to give.

There were also some great candidates who reached out about their interest in running for Council (some who are now elected, some who are not) and when I got into the Councillor job I made a personal commitment to not stay around too long, especially not so long that I block the path for great new candidates who can bring the kind of energy and ideas that motivated me 8 years ago. So, December 2022, I was considering not just whether I wanted another 4 years of Council, but whether I was needed.

Then on the first day of 2022, Mayor Cote surprised me (and many others, I suspect) by announcing he would not be running for re-election. That put the scramble to everything, and resulted in my 2022 being divided into four not perfectly equal quarters. All with the common theme of teambuilding.

The first was mostly discussions with friends, supporters, and political allies to determine if I was the right candidate for Mayor. If I was electable, and if there was a broad enough support base out there to get elected. This also included talking to some other potential Mayoral candidates to determine if I should throw support behind them, if they even wanted the job. There were SWOT analyses, hard personal questions asked, and even values challenged. There was also some soul-seeking and conversations about the type of campaign and vision I wanted to present – positive, optimistic and pragmatic. Is that what people would vote for in 2022?

The second quarter began when I was convinced there was a viable path, but I needed a team and a broader support group to run a winning campaign. Running as an independent (as some friends recommended) was an idea I dismissed through these early stages. I think a Mayor needs a team, a supportive Council who can help get things done. With the wide variety of topics we address on Council, a leader needs a strong team of people with diverse experiences to guide them and support them. I already mentioned there were several great new candidates interested in running for Council; I wanted to work with this team. The work of putting a party together was bigger than me, there were many hands that did much more work than I, but helping in that process informed me further on whether I was ready to do the Mayor job.

It was also about putting together and gaining the support of the volunteer team for the project that is a “campaign”. Many community leaders don’t want to run for election themselves, but want to help like-minded folks get elected. Some provide financial support, some volunteer support, some real party structure organizational support, and many a combination of all three. Just as a Council is a team, a campaign is a team. With a good team, you can worry about being a candidate, and know the logistics are taken care of. Without knowing I had this team behind me, I would not have run, because I would not have been successful.

The third quarter was the campaign itself. Parts of it began as far back as January with that self-reflection, but the really intense campaign period began in the last half of the summer. Doorknocking every night, working with the team to develop platform and communications, fundraising and events. It is non-stop, and it never feels like you are doing enough. And though I had been involved in many campaigns before, supporting others and in running for Council two times: the Mayor campaign was something different.

There were ups and downs during the campaign, a few all-candidate events went great, some not so great. Sometimes I read the media and felt good, sometimes I was frustrated by it (Facebook was a complete shit-show, but that’s another blog altogether). In contrast, the doorknocking and the booth-style direct engagement were almost universally a positive. We had a great team of candidates it was a pleasure to share doorknocking time with, and people of New Westminster were their usual: engaged, interested, friendly, thoughtful, and inspiring. As the campaign went on, it was the doors and the booth (or more, the talking to people at both) that gave me energy every day to do the work, because the campaign overall was exhausting. We also had phenomenal doorknocking weather, and an incredible group of volunteers that brought a little joy every day to what is often an arduous journey. And that attack ad – that is some great scrapbook material!

This makes the fourth quarter the post-election period and the new job. The rest of 2022 was mostly filled with various ways of integrating into the job. This means lots of meetings with senior staff and stakeholders in the community, getting the new Council up to speed on the “State of the City” and some deeper thinking about what the “want-to-do”s and the “need-to-do”s are for the next year, and the next four years. And ow there are evets again, where I am now expected to have a few inspirational (!) words.

The good news is that the State of the City is good. We are in a decent (but not decadent) financial situation considering the chaos of COVID and our very aggressive capital plan, but costs are going up everywhere, and the City is no exception. Thanks to Mayor Cote’s leadership, we are in a good shape on a lot of policy fronts – in recent conversations with regional leaders and new Ministers in the Provincial Government, our leadership in housing policy across the spectrum has been noted repeatedly. Our role in getting PACT rolled out not just here but in other communities is also seen as demonstration of leadership, ad the multi-jurisdictional approach to addressing Downtown challenges is a great work in progress, with more to come. At the same time, the conversations we are having here on active transportation infrastructure sounds like debates from 15 years go in Vancouver, and 5 years ago in Victoria. A medium-sized City can’t be a leader on everything.

2022 also saw a return to one of the things that makes New West such a great place to live: we were back to events. Pride and Car Free Day both rocked Columbia, Fridays on Front were appreciated by significant crowds, Uptown Live and Recovery Day brought thousands to Uptown, and all kinds of different events like PechaKucha and the S&O Anniversary Party and the Mushtari Begum Festival the On Your Block Festival and the Hyack Parade and Play the Parks, etc. etc. There were so many ways for folks to connect again, to build that community spirit that was challenged for two years. It was a fun year.

And this winter, we had a few reminders that the day-to-day work of the city never stops. It has already been a challenging snow removal season, we have had crews working long hours and burning through a lot of salt and diesel to keep up with the changing conditions. The social media feedback has been demonstrative of something…

…admittedly, a bit of a mixed message.

I’m also spending some time this break thinking about how to engage differently in Social Media. Partly because the new job changes how my engagement is read, partly because I simply do not have time to track and respond to social media the way it sometimes desires, and partly because during the election I found judicious use of the “mute” button improved my outlook on the community, what with the anonymous trolls and racists filtered out. But this will be the topic of future posts and further reflection as the social media landscape is rapidly changing. Apparently Mastodon is a thing now?

So, to sum up, thank you to everyone who took part in making New West an exciting, engaged, and proactive community in 2022. There is much good coming in 2023, though I am sure the upcoming budget discussions will be contentious here as in most communities, as cost are going up and the austerity hawks will be making their damaging claims about the need to strip back community services. One of my reads over the break has been Andy Merrifield’s “The New Urban Question”, an exciting review of the impact of neoliberalism on not just the function of “The City”, but on the very nature of citizenship in the new Urban Realm, worldwide. It is an empowering and challenging read, and a reminder that the work we are doing has a purpose, even if the battle has no end.

Happy New Year! See you in Council Chambers – and around town – in 2023!