Tag: Acting Locally

Loitering

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

I hate that word. Second only to my hatred for the term “jaywalking”. Both terms imply that there is a better use for a public space that you being on it, even if you are not actually stopping those better uses from being exercised. They are (semi-) legal ways of saying “go away kid, ya bother me”.

But I don’t want to defend loitering (a very, very good essay on that topic, with that very title, was already written by Emily Badger), I want to talk about a specific place in New Westminster, where we have completely lost the plot on loitering.

The New Westminster SkyTrain station is the defacto heart of our City. Speak all you want about Queens Park, the Quayside Boardwalk or the Coffee Crossing in Uptown, I will argue that our central downtown transit hub is the centre of our new City. This is where compact, mixed-use, transit-oriented new urban development is centred. When Hyack Square was built to better connect it to the River Market, when hundreds of residential suites and thousands of square feet of retail were developed right on top of it, when the Anvil was conceived as a new community gathering space, it was all about the SkyTrain and New Westminster Station. It is the centre point in the “big vision” for New Westminster, and it is the new “front door” to our Downtown and waterfront, a mix of our Grand Central Station and our Times Square.

As such, New Westminster station needs to be a space where people are comfortable hanging out, walking through, meeting friends, having chats. A place people want to be in, without a particular purpose, which is pretty much the definition of loitering.

It has always been a little tough to love New Westminster Station. It is far better now than the empty parking lot ringed with marginal businesses it was in the late 80s when I first moved to New Westminster, but for the best part of the last decade, it has been a station under construction. Plaza88 / The Shops at New Westminster Station has taken a bit of time to find its character, but is now mostly leased up with an interesting mix of businesses, and is attracting customers. The Kyoto Block (the empty lot between the shops and the Anvil Centre) is still an empty lot and a signficiant missing connection, but despite some dreams I may have had, I’m afraid they will never be realized now that it has been sold. With the Anvil construction just wrapped up and now a year-long construction project on the SkyTrain station, followed by potential expansion of the McInnes Overpass to occur with the River Sky development, and building of the 4th Plaza88 tower, there is more construction to come.

Meanwhile, the plaza opening up to Carnarvon between the front of a Tim Horton’s and the back of a Spaghetti Factory presents you the best-used “grant entrance” to New Westminster. With all due respect to the fine people in the Pawn Brokering industry – is this really the best we can do?

entrance

However, it isn’t the walls around the space that we interact with as much as the space itself, and I have had two very different e-mail exchanges of late with New Westminster residents I respect about the “problem” with that plaza space. The interesting part is that they were two very different conversations. One complained about the loiterers and “gauntlet of smoke and dirty looks” they have to endure when walking through the station, the other spoke of all the unfriendly spikes and security presence that is making a presumptively public place less friendly for people to linger.

sidewalk

(it just occurred to me that I should get these two people together for a coffee at the Tim Hortons there and let them come to a solution instead of writing this blog…)

I am very much on the side of the second person: public spaces with people in them are safer, more friendly, better for business, and more fun. It is clear the space in that plaza was initially intended to be lingered in – the architect built bench-height structures around the periphery and decks in front of the restaurants, there was even initially some funky plastic chaise-lounges and benches on the site when the shops opened.

Now, the benches are gone. Metal fences have been installed to prevent sitting on one set of benches, glass wall installed ot prevent sitting on another. And in case you didn’t get the message, the ineffective No Smoking signs have been supplemented with No Loitering signs.

spikes
This concrete bench is no longer a place to sit.
glassstep
Similar to this space, which was once somewhere you could sit.
noloiter
And the sign is there in case you don’t get the message from the spikey metal.

Get away from me, kid, ya bother me.

I remember a talk I heard last year by Susan Briggs, a prof at Douglas College, who discussed the loss of the public realm. We have replaced the town square with the shopping mall, the playground for the McDonalds Playspace, the urban space for the corporate place. Cash-strapped governments are only too happy to have private industry provide the plazas, the parks, the gathering spaces that governments cannot afford to buy, develop, or maintain. This space off Carnarvon is a prime example. It is the only access from the public street to public transit, yet the space is private, and beholden to the rules of the owner. In this case, the owner doesn’t want smoking teenagers and other ne’er-do-wells hanging about.

transit

Actually, I as I went down to the area yesterday to take a few photos for this blog, I was approached by one of thee young toughs. He was not very polite in asking who I thought I was taking pictures and suggesting I might prefer a punch in the face. He was clearly posturing more than threatening, but the demonstration was pretty clear that this space is not a friendly one for many people.

20150724_184234

I’m the first to admit I don’t know what to do about this. I want the entrance to New Westminster to be a welcoming space. But I have two suggestions, one in the control of the City, one not, and both successful in other cities.

The first is soft community policing. I don’t want to be in a place where we send cops down there to bust skulls or push “the wrong people” (whoever decides what that means) out of public space in New Westminster. However, the presence of community policing officers downtown could make it a better place for everyone. Police on foot, talking to people, saying hello and just being present and visible without being threatening, can make a big difference to how people experience the space. But the balance is hard to find, and this approach needs to be very cautious around that balance.

The second (and more promising) approach is to activate the space. The best way to make loitering (the pejorative term) into lingering is to give people a reason to linger, making the space “sticky”. This can include introducing some interactive public art, blending the restaurant seating space with the pedestrian space like you would recognize in the Spanish or French streetscape, or adding buskers or events into the space. The go-to reference for this type of urban space activation is Jan Gehl, and his writings about the “human spaces” between buildings.

Nuggets of these ideas can be seen in the slightly half-hearted attempt of placing the chaise-lounges in the square when it originally opened. A surviving example is the kids’ play area under the SkyTrain in the middle of the plaza level of the Shops, which (despite the shadowy look and roaring trains) has managed to remain an inviting space.

playplace

Unfortunately, the exact opposite of these ideas can be seen in front of the Safeway, where a “stickiness” opportunity is lost, and what could have been an active part of the public plaza became the best-defended coffee patio in history. What is the point of this glass wall? To keep people out, or in?

the cage

I’m not sure I know what type of “placemaking” can make this place more welcoming as an entrance to the City, but whatever it is, we will need to work with the owners of The Shops at New Westminster Station to make it work, because if it helps the City, it will help them as well. They need loitering for their businesses to be successful, and we want to be a City where people want to loiter.

Divestment

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I have been putting up boring council reports for so long, that I figure it is time to get back to a good old-fashioned NWimby-style rant here. It is about global warming, which I believe am convinced by the overwhelming scientific evidence is currently happening at a rate unprecedented in the last 2 million years, due directly to the accelerated introduction of fossil carbon into the atmosphere by human activities. If you are still in denial about this, you are either deluded or not paying attention, so before commenting here, please check your irrefutable factoid against this before trying to make your case.

That caveat on the old debate aside, we are not past the real debate about what to do about it. There is an argument that we should do nothing, but that is the deeply sociopathic side of the spectrum when we start to look at the seriously bad implications for the next generation of humans if we take that path (where do you plan to put 150 million Bangladeshis, not to mention 10 million Floridians?)

I also think there is a personal responsibility part – we (especially those of us in the rich industrialized world) need to take individual actions to address this real problem. We need to burn less fuel; we need support more sustainable farming practices; we need to stop buying so much disposable junk. But these individual actions will be meaningless without a coordinated government action, and societal shift to support those individual actions.

The Montreal Protocol was a good example of how this problem should have been addressed. Less than 15 years after the concept of ozone depletion by long-lived chlorofluorocarbons was proposed (and only a few years after that theoretical effect was demonstrated with a high level of certainty to be actually happening) the world’s governments took action, much to the protestations of DuPont and manufacturers of aerosol cans, and it worked. We have turned the corner on ozone depletion, DuPont still exists, as do aerosol cans. Industry adapted, society shifted, but it took government action.

However, those mid-80’s were simpler times. We had those socialist hippies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan running the free world like a commune, and Russia were our best friends yet. So world governments getting together to legislate an industry-constraining action to prevent life-altering damage to the earth’s atmosphere was a doable thing. Thirty years later, almost all of which have seen the world’s science community increasingly pleading for the world’s governments to do something about a slowly-emerging disaster, the progress on greenhouse gasses has been dismal. If we cannot count on the governments of the largest economies to fix the problem, we need to shift the economy.

A couple of years ago, the NWEP held a showing of the Bill McKibbon short film ”Do The Math” that made the case for fossil fuel divestment. If interested, I wrote a long piece about it at the time. The short version: investing in stranded hydrocarbon assets is a bad idea for long-term financial reasons, and for ethical reasons.

So back to the question of what we can do. As a municipal government we can shift to greener fleets and more efficient buildings, we can encourage energy efficiency in the community and in our corporate functions. We can encourage a form of development that results in lower GHG production: transit instead of freeways and compact, pedestrian-friendly mixed-use city centres instead of sprawling suburban expanses. We can even ineffectually express concerns about pipelines being built to facilitate the export of bitumen, and try to resist the expansion of thermal coal exports through our ports. But these will not be enough if we are continuing to fight the tide of an economy that does not serve our future.

The City can, however, divest from the companies that are pushing that unsustainable future. We can make the choice to not invest our money in the stranded assets that will, if dug out of the ground and burned, diminish the ability of the next generation to prosper. It isn’t just something we can do, it is something we should do.

So I moved the following at the June 22 Council Meeting:

WHEREAS: The City of New Westminster’s financial assets are invested with the Municipal Finance Authority, which includes pooled funds and direct investment in hydrocarbon extraction and pipeline operation companies;

WHEREAS: The City of New Westminster recognizes the global concern and risks of Anthropogenic Climate Change and has taken efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas impacts of its internal operations and in the community in general, and

WHEREAS: Investments in fossil fuel extraction carry numerous risks, including economic risk to market value of fossil fuel companies based on stranded assets through increased worldwide transition to renewable energy sources, including Canada’s own commitment to moving towards reduced GHG emissions and the G7 commitment to a carbon-free economy by the end of the Century;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That New Westminster support ongoing efforts by communities and public institutions across Canada and North America to divest public investments from fossil-fuel related assets by calling upon the MFA to develop a plan to divest from these assets.

We are also not alone.

On Thursday, the City Council in Victoria will debating a motion to divest their assets from fossil fuels, and I suspect it is going to be successful.

As is typical these days, Canada is lagging behind the United States on this important environmental and social justice issue, as San Francisco, Seattle, Eugene, Boulder, an many other US Cities Seattle have already committed to fossil-fuel divestment.

Divestment does not have to be a sudden move to be effective. Although it represents less than 5% of our GDP, the oil and gas industry is still important to some regions of Canada, and we are going to be using hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future. However, if we agree that we need to continue to improve the quality of life of people on earth, we need to start the transition away from burning of coal, petroleum, and gas for our energy needs right away. We also need to give the industry, and the customers, a chance to adapt to the new reality, while easing the market forces into the right direction. A broadly-supported divestment strategy that rolls out over five or ten years will change the economics of the industry, and allows investment in alternatives, instead of continuing to invest in squeezing the last bit of prosperity out of last Century’s energy sources.

Community Update – June 29

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I spent most of last week doing what the rest of you were doing: sweating. I worked, I rode my bike, I attended several community events as outlined below, but mostly I sweated.

QB meeting

On Wednesday, I stopped off at the Queensborough Community Centre after work to see what the conversation was around the Eastern Queensborough Neighbourhood Node plan. Both City Planners and the Developer were on site to talk to Q’boro residents and answer questions about the plan we discussed in Council a few days earlier. The room was full (which is great to see in any Open House!) and seemed generally positive. The most frequent comments I heard from residents were concerns related to traffic (no surprise there) and a general feeling that local retail couldn’t come to eastern Q’Boro soon enough!

On Thursday, I was able to attend the NWSS graduation ceremony. I serve on the City’s Youth Advisory Committee and have spent some time meeting Youth Ambassadors and other volunteers in the school community, so there were a few familiar faces walking across the stage. Or, in a few cases, strutting across… GradI was only a little chagrined to see that mine was the only bike in the rack, amongst the couple of thousand students, parents, siblings, supporters and dignitaries at Queens Park Arena that night! Well, I guess it was kind of a fancy-dress occasion.

The second place where my bike was the only one in the rack that night was at the Annual General Meeting of the Royal City Curling Club. I’m not on the Board anymore, but the new team is doing a great job. We had a very successful season: our ice is basically sold out, our leagues are nearly full, our Junior and Little Rocks programs are as successful as they have ever been, and revenues were stable enough that we were able to retire the last of our debt after a few years of solid financial work. I sure am proud of the volunteers and staff of the Club – the best curling facility in the Lower Mainland by far.

Saturday a few members of Council and the New Westminster Youth Ambassadors attended a fundraiser at the New Westminster Lawn Bowling Club. Council was challenged by the Ambassadors to a mini-tournament in the hot afternoon sun. The team of Trentadue and Johnstone showed their rookie status by being outscored by about 13-1 over two games. However, the Mayor and Councillor Harper showed their experience and guile by taking a tight final game, and securing the Challenge Cup for City Hall:Bowles

In there defense, the second place Ambassador team had graduated High School two days previously, and were working on a combined 4 hours of sleep.

Saturday was such a nice evening, that @MsNWimby and I spent the evening on a long walk along the River, enjoying two exceptional New Westminster lounging activities, one at the Urban Beach at Pier Park:recline

Another at the far western end of the Boardwalk, where the first Biennale piece provides a unique lounging / river watching / selfie / breath-holding-contest / being-a-goof experience:

blowing

On Sunday, Council joined several thousand people at Ryall Park in Queensborough to celebrate the 9th annual Nagar Kirtan and celebration honouring the 5th Sikh Guru , Guru Arjan Dev Ji organized by the Gurdwara Sahib Sukh Sagar. As always with the Sikh community, the crowds were huge, the music engrossing, the organization remarkable and efficient, and the food plentiful, delicious, and free. It is an amazing event the entire community is welcome to, and Council was honoured to be invited to the stage to address the assembly. If you get a chance to attend a Nagar Kirtan (Sikh Parade), do so!

Finally, the weekend ended with the celebration of the first birthday of one of New Westminster’s best new businesses. Steel and Oak Brewing has had a remarkable first year, and has clearly found a winning formula: exceptional product, a talented and adventurous brewmaster, an eye for design, social media savvy, and a gregarious and professional staff. Happy Birthday S&O and congratulations to Jorden and James. It’s been fun watching you guys succeed after all of the hard work and stress of the previous year! Sand) bday

Short note on progress.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

It was such a beautiful weekend in New Westminster. I had a couple of events downtown on Saturday, and enjoyed my time wandering around between them, and something occurred to me.

The Northwest Fan Fest was occurring at the Anvil Centre. There were something like 10,000 people drawn to downtown New West on the weekend, spilling out onto the street, filling the sidewalks and Hyack Square – geeking out and having fun.

fanfest

And they spilled over to Pier Park, to mix with the usual families and locals using what is coming to be seen as one of the great public spaces in the lower mainland.

Pier Park2

Yet this is the weekend when a full half of the Parkade was closed to start the repairs, which will eventually see the west side removed. Parking chaos? Hardly.

parkade
Saturday, early afternoon. Yes, every parking spot behind me was closed for construction.

And I was reminded why I ran for Council. This City is on such a positive path. We are moving forward, setting plans and reaching for a better future. There are bumps along the way, some tough decisions to make, and some difficult setting of priorities.

But during the last election, not 6 months ago, there were people running who thought this was a waste of money that no-one would ever use:

20150530_121234
Westminster Pier Park. Saturday, May 30. Early afternoon.

Yet this was a valuable resource we cannot possibly afford to be without:

parkade empty
@HulkParkade, with all parking behind me closed and thousands of people in town for Fan Fest, Saturday, May 30, 2015, early afternoon.

I am happy to say I spent 10 hours in Council meetings today with people who see a more positive vision for the City, and we are moving ahead.

Talking Taxes (pt. 2)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

A little while ago, I blogged about Property Taxes, and tried to put some context to where New Westminster compares regionally around residential property tax levels. I used this dataset provided by the Province, as comparing the financial documents of all 21 Lower Mainland municipalities from their on-line reporting is a bit of a challenge. I demonstrated (I think) that New Westminster is neither the highest of lowest taxes municipality, but was either in the top third (if you take a very raw measure) or right about in the middle (if you actually count how much the typical household or resident pays).

But what about businesses? During the last election, it was suggested in print by one of the (unsuccessful) candidates that taxes charged to businesses in New Wesmtinster are “the highest in Metro Vancouver”. This did not make sense to me at the time, but didn’t rise to the point, as I wanted to be able to put number to the issue. The simplest method, of course is to compare how much is collected from businesses of every type on a per-capita basis:

Table3

You can see that New Westminster is 8th in the crazy category of most taxes per capita from businesses of all types. If you look only at commercial businesses (blue), we are the 6th highest. This is where you can see some of land use choices affecting the numbers. Delta has huge tracts of industrial land on Annacis Island that provides almost half of its non-residential taxes, and Port Moody hosts a lot of major industrial use. Meanwhile, Vancouver is truly post-industrial, with their largest “industry” being non-industrial commercial businesses. There is nothing here that makes New Westminster anomalous.

However, this is a rather useless comparison. Unlike residential taxes, you cannot evaluate business taxes on a per-capita basis. With the varying levels of residential/business mix, you can’t really count up the number of businesses or business owners or leasable square footage and divide the taxes collected between those groups, as the variables are way too…uh…variable. So how do we compare apples in this diverse bowl of fruit?

One way would be to look what proportion of the total property tax revenue is paid by residents, and what proportion is paid by businesses. To index this, you need to compare it to the proportion of assessed land value that is zoned Residential vs. that zoned Commercial. This allows you to recognize anomalies like Anmore and West Vancouver (which have almost all of their land in residential use) and compare them to places like Langley City and Port Moody, where commercial land use is proportionally large.

First, compare the percentage of land value that is in residential property with the percentage of tax revenue drawn from that residential land:

Table1

You can see that in Anmore 100% of the property is residential, therefore that is the only source of revenue. At the other end of the “best fit line” is Burnaby, where 80% of the land is residential, but only 50% of the tax revenue comes from residential taxes. Note the green line, which represents an even balance between proportion of residential land value and tax revenue. The best fit around which all municipalities cluster is well above that, which makes sense as all municipalities charge a higher Mil Rate for businesses and industry than for residents. The amount more they charge is the “Multiplier”.

In New Westminster, our Multipliers in 2015 are shown on the table below. The first number is just New Westminster taxes, the second includes all the School, GVRD, MFA, etc. taxes that the City has no real control over.

Property use    Multiplier (City Only)     (all taxes)
Residential                            x 1                               x 1
Business                                x 3.475                       x 3.403
Light Industry                      x 4.566                      x 4.131
Heavy Industry                    x 8.102                      x 6.444

But back to the graph above. If a municipality charges less to residents in proportion to their property value than they do to business and industry in comparison to other municipalities, then they appear below the best fit line. For lack of a less-pejorative term, I’ll call these municipalities “resident friendly”. Those above the line are more “business friendly”. Langley City is anomalously “resident friendly”, where North Van City and Port Moody are more “Business Friendly”.

However, much of what controls the proportion of industrial land is structural to the economy and geography. Today’s Delta won the lottery in 1955 when the island was designated as the region’s first Industrial Park, and the high-multiplier property taxes started rolling in. Another way to look at the above graph is to flip it over looking only at commercial business taxes:

Table2

This time the best fit is under the (green) equality line because every business in every municipality pays more than its share of property taxes. The further under the best fit line, the less “business friendly” a Municipality may be considered. Vancouver is the obvious standout (the attractiveness for major businesses of being located at the central business district of the metropolis demands a premium), but New Westminster, Coquitlam, and the District of North Vancouver also appear a little below the line, and have very different land use proportions when looking at residential vs. industrial vs. commercial.

This raises a question which is completely rhetorical, but well worth asking: what should be the balance between residential and business taxation? Should a City like New Westminster give business owners a bit of a break to encourage job creation, or should we keep residential property taxes lower to manage the affordability of living here? Should businesses subsidize residents, or vice versa? If “neither”, what is the balance?

Just for the fun of it, I plotted every municipality’s details on the same graph. Population is on the X axis, and the total land assessed value on the Y axis. The area of the pies represent the annual tax revenue, and the colours of the pie charts represent the tax revenue by land use. Note that Vancouver and Surrey are both way off the chart here. Both their populations (640,914 and 504,661 respectively) and assessed land values ($221 Billion and $85 Billion) put them in a range that is out of scale with the rest of the graph.

Table6

I don’t have much to say about this graph except that New Westminster is snugly right in the middle on pretty much every measure. The amount of tax revenue collected and the proportion of residential vs. other types of taxation is pretty much right where you would expect for a City of our size and population. It is clear that we do not, by any measure, have the highest taxes in Metro Vancouver, nor are we the lowest, regardless of whether you are a business or a resident. We are somewhere in the middle, proportionate with our land use and population size.

All of this data is from 2014, and the new 2015 reporting to the Provincial government is starting to trickle in. This year, New Westminster Council approved a 2.42% tax increase, which is higher than the 1.3% increase in the Consumer Price Index over the fiscal year 2014-2015. This raises the question of whether our tax increases are happening at an anomalous rate. I’ll try to dig out some data for that and bring you a Part 3.

Too Busy!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

This is another in my semi-regular series of excuses for not updating this blog in a timely enough manner. I have been busy.

To clarify what that means, I think people know I have a job. Regular take-a-lunch-box-to-the-office 5-days-a-week three-weeks-vacation fill-out-timesheet type stuff. Fortunately, my employer has adopted a fortnight flex day schedule for all employees (meaning I work 7.75 hours for 9 days every fortnight, and get every second Monday off) and my employer has agreed to a small concession of unpaid leave for alternate Mondays when I have New West Council duties (which turns out to only be about 12 days a year). This still means I spend (on average) 35 hours a week completing Comfort Letter requests, administering dewatering agreements, reviewing Site Profiles, managing contaminated sites investigation and remediation projects and coordinating the technical aspects of PS3260 Accounting Standards compliance. It is fun and I work with a great team of people, so no complaints on my part. But it does eat into my time.

This week (as an aside, but to demonstrate the general chaos of my life right now), I took a couple of hours of my vacation time (with prior approval from my boss) to have a morning meeting with representatives from The Shops at New Westminster Station, Fraser Health, TransLink Police, NW Police Department, and New West Bylaw Enforcement to do a walkaround at New Westminster Station and the surrounding bus loops, retail areas and sidewalks to discuss a collaborative approach to making the area a more inviting pedestrian and public space, with an emphasis on how the various Provincial and City anti-smoking bylaws could be applied to address one of the primary complaints about the area (see pic above). Wow, that was a long sentence. I hope to be able to report an update on that meeting soon.

After work most nights, my schedule is rather chaotic. This week, I had a frustrating committee meeting with the Royal Lancers on Tuesday, and pinch-hit for Councillor Harper to chair a much more positive and productive Residents’ Association Forum on Wednesday. Thursday is free (hence me writing this), but I have, since Monday’s Council Day, received about 50 e-mails to my Council address, which will take some time to triage and decide what requires a response. Some may even require multiple e-mail exchanges with staff or others to gather the data required for a useful response. If you e-mailed me and I have not responded yet, my apologies. I have read it, and will try to get back to you as soon as practicable. And on Friday, I receive the Council Package I need to review in detail before Monday. I also have to organize my Jane’s Walk for Saturday, so that will have to be done tonight or Friday night, as I work Friday. I will probably get something figured out by Saturday Morning.

This is not meant to be a whine. I chose my path (and as has been joked, I went door-to-door begging for it!). So this is more an explanation why my blogging and other correspondence is, occasionally, less timely than I would like it to be. There are a few “Ask Pat” posts in the queue, and I am late assembling the April 27 Council Report. It also explains the lack of copy editing on this blog – any attempts at scanning for typos likely occurred after midnight.

On the plus side, I did get a great bike ride in on Sunday morning, and the New West Lit Fest last weekend was a great event, so it isn’t all toil. Actually, I am loving it.

The Future of the Region – Yes or No.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

A few interesting developments on the Referendum front, and it has been a while since I wrote about it. Unless you have been living under a rock, or work in a phone bank for the BC Liberal party*, you are aware there is a referendum going on to decide how we will invest in transportation in the region.

We are less than two weeks from when ballots go in the mail, so it is a good idea for you to look into how you will vote, so you don’t lose your franchise. Elections BC recently released the full details of how the Plebiscite** is going to work. A few details:

If you were born before May 30, 1997, have been a resident of BC since November 29, 2014, are a Canadian resident and live in Metro Vancouver, you can register to vote online at the Elections BC website or call their 1-800 number (you need a Driver’s Licence or a Social Insurance Number). You will get a ballot in the mail. If you don’t get a ballot in the mail in March, you should contact Elections BC and request one. You have until March 29 to return your ballot. The Mayor’s Council set up this helpful graphic to show you the timelines of the vote.

timeline

Like my council Colleagues across the region, I have been busy with this campaign. As unique as the voting mechanism is, this is just an election campaign, and identifying your vote and getting it out requires a lot of organization. I have been talking to community groups, helping with phone volunteers to identify support bases, and helping develop the get-out-the-vote plan, etc. etc.

I’ve said before that democracy is not what happens on election day, but how we, as citizens, get involved between elections to get the most out of our elected representatives. If you think this referendum needs to be won, if you think we need to put the brakes on the cuts to transit service and enter a new era of transit expansion in our region, then I ask you – what are you doing about it? Get in touch with me, with the City of New Westminster, or the Mayor’s Council to see how you can help.

When I have time to be involved in the “air war”, I have concentrated on two things (an links below are to others doing exactly that):

1: Outline in as much detail as the audience needs about the myriad of benefits, tangible and otherwise, that this plan delivers to New Westminster and the region; and

2: Hit back aggressively at specific mistruths being propagated by a few very prominent members of the NO side.

One thing that always gives me a chuckle is the plethora of advice for how the YES side should be campaigning, mostly delivered by people loosely connected to the no side (for example, the wife of the guy who is coordinating the NO campaign for the CTF) and wrapped in sanctimony. We have been told, at times, to stop using scare mongering and stick to the facts; that we can’t rely on facts but should instead go for emotion; that we need to describe the plan in detail so people understand; that we need to simplify the message; that we need to appeal to “Joe Sixpack”, or “Students”, or that we should stop relying on “special interest groups”.

I thank them for the advice, but to me, the most effective message I have heard was delivered by Gordon Price at the PechaKucha New West event two weeks ago. It was an inspiring 6 minutes on the past, present and future of the region. After it ended, I thought “we need to get this on YouTube”. Turns out people (as usual) were way ahead of me, and a (slightly shortened, better produced) version has just been made available by the good folks at Modacity. If you do nothing else before you vote, take 4 minutes to watch this video***, if you want to understand what this referendum is really about:

Vote Yes. For nothing less than the future of the region as we know it.

*I received a phone call from a BC Liberal**** fundraiser on Wednesday evening. I allowed him to go through his script about balanced budgets and good times ahead before I asked him what the party was doing to encourage support for the Referendum that the Leader had called, and was (tacitly) supporting. The poor guy had not even heard that there was a referendum going on. He claimed to be in Burnaby (and I have no reason to doubt him, as he seemed to understand what TransLink was and claimed to watch Global News, so he wasn’t in Topeka or Bangalore). I made what I think was a compelling case for the reasons to support the Yes side, and he asked if the result of the referendum would be a deciding factor in the next election for me. I said no, but the leadership shown during the referendum definitely was. He thanked me for my time, and actually forgot to ask for money.

**Yes, this is a Plebiscite, not a Referendum. The differences are rather arcane. In most jurisdictions, the words are synonymous. In BC, they both mean “a vote on matter of public concern”. Where a Referendum is governed by the Referendum Act and “is usually binding on the government”, a Plebiscite is governed by the Elections Act and “may be binding on the government”. Remarkably, this vote is not being regulated by either, but by something called the “South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Funding Referenda Act”. Regardless, the Provincial Government changed the language from referendum to a plebiscite when the ballot was released, you can make up your own reasons why. Safe to say, whatever it is called, the results of this vote will be politically binding on the government, if not legally binding.

***Note the book at 1:03 in the video. None other than Charles Montgomery’s The Happy City. Nice touch.

**** Since I wrote that footnote*****, I have noticed that some of the strongest messages coming out on the YES side are coming from BC Liberal MLAs, so I am glad to give kudos to the members of the party who are seeing the importance of this vote, and are putting their political capital into it. We need more of this in the next month.

***** This footnote thing is getting out of hand.  

Fare Evasion and Jordan Bateman

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 4 Comments.

There was furious action on the War on Public Transit this week, as our local Libertarian hypocrite from the misnamed Canadian Taxpayers Federation again got unexplained media saturation by suggesting that fare evasion on lower mainland transit is some sort of a scandal, or worse – proof of incompetence at TransLink. It sounds compelling, but it is just predictable CTF misinformation.

Allow me to explain.

The latest CTF anti-transit rhetorical volley is based on data released on the “no fare paid” button on TransLink buses. This is the process through with bus drivers account for improperly paid fares (fare evaders, those paying too much, those crossing a zone boundary without paying the premium, etc). Drivers counted 2.76 Million incorrect fares in 2013, which is an increase of 250,000 over 2011. This, in the rhetorical world of the CTF, proves that TransLink is irresponsible, inefficient, and cannot be trusted with the public’s purse. It is further implied that if they could only solve this simple problem, TransLink may not need those new funds being requested through the upcoming referendum.

There are several problems with this narrative, and I might be accused of senseless idealism when I expect our “liberal media” to point them out instead of just parroting Bateman talking points.

For example, the media could put the numbers in perspective. 10 seconds on Google, and one can find TransLink’s financial disclosures, and find that there were 355 Million boardings in the TransLink system in 2013. That means 2.76 Million “non-fares” represent 0.8% of the boardings. In a rational world, an organization as worried about the public purse as the CTF would be touting TransLink’s phenomenal record of collecting fares from 99.2% of passengers on a crowded, chaotic, distributed system with literally thousands of moving fare collection stations comprising what is, essentially, an honour system*.

The CTF makes further hay out of the trend. A 10% increase in “fare evasion” since 2011 sure sounds like a trend should be worried about. Except again, no. TransLink collected $433Million in fare revenue in 2011 and $481 Million in 2013. Over those two years, ridership basically flatlined (356M boardings to 355M boardings, thanks to “rationalization” of routes) but fare revenue went up by 11%. Again, the CTF fails to tout that TransLink is doing an 11% better job squeezing users for revenue, reducing the burden on the poor taxpayer the only way they can without senior government approval.

What about the lost money though? Surely this means TransLink is hemorrhaging money due to scofflaws and lazy drivers? Again, the data says something different. Assuming those fare evaders would have paid if forced to (instead of just walking or hitchhiking or dying where they stood, whatever) that would have resulted in about $7 Million more revenue. Compare that to the $481 Million in fare revenue collected in 2013, and it represents a 1.4% revenue bleed, which is not unsubstantial, but hardly breaks the bank. In comparison, the Congestion Improvement Tax (ugh, still hate that stupid moniker) will raise about $250 Million per year, all of which will go to Capital Projects, not operations.

When Bateman says “TransLink can’t properly manage the system they already have – they certainly can’t be trusted with another $7.5 billion of our money,” he is suggesting not just that this fare evasion is a huge problem, but that TransLink is incompetent at stopping it. What he doesn’t suggest is a way to close that gap, and there is a good reason for that: diminishing returns.

Yes, we could put an armed guard on every bus enforcing payment and issuing receipts, and fare evasion would approach zero, but it would be prohibitively expensive, and the return on revenue would not cover the cost. This has been the central story all along on the Falcon Gate fiasco – TransLink was forced by the Former Minister of Transportation to install an expensive faregate system that TransLink knew would never cover the cost of the fares evasion it was meant to prevent. (Oh, and it is just a coincidence that that the guy who tried to get that same Minister of Transportation made into the Premier is now going to lead the NO campaign for the CTF, but I digress).

Any rational person has to understand that fare-evasion-zero is not possible (just like Zero Tolerance on parking meter violations or speeding or drugs is impossible). A rational person with any business sense at all says that reasonable effort should be made to push that evasion towards zero, up until the point where the cost of those efforts exceeds the money saved through enforcement. Pushing past that point makes no monetary sense if the goal of fares is to earn revenue. I frankly don’t know what that magic point is – at what point further enforcement costs more than it is worth – but if I was a betting man, I would put my money on something around 1%, because that is a common number the tolerance TransLink and other transit systems gravitate towards. Bateman thinks it is a different number (closer to zero), but I’d like to see him (a person with no experience running a multi-modal transit system) demonstrate what that number is, and explain his rationale.**

But he won’t, because he is not interested in public policy or rational discussion. He is interested in getting headlines by making irrational arguments that clip well in order to get donations for his organization. And our media provide him that free advertising every day.

If you think I am being mean to Jordan Bateman, you are right, because he used to be someone I respected. As a City Councillor in Langley, he was a voice of reason and an excellent communicator. I didn’t often agree with his politics, but always liked the way he tried to explain his thought process through contentious issues. I know people who worked for him, and he had a reputation as a Councillor who did his homework, collected the data he needed to understand issues, and defended his decisions based on that knowledge. He knew that there was an objective truth and that good governance required it. He was the kind of City Councillor I want to be. This makes him a disappointment whenever I see him acting like a clown for the TV cameras.

Back then, Bateman not only had a much more rational approach to taxation, he was a supporter of increased capital funding to TransLink to provide improved light rail and transit service, specifically so his children would not be cursed with another generation of entrenched motordom. Unfortunately, he is now the one person in the province most interested in leading the campaign against exactly what he called for 7 years ago. And he has yet to provide any meaningful reason why he changed his mind.

And that is a shame. For him, for his kids, and for all of us who want to improve our region.

And I know just by responding to him, I am falling for some sort of Streisand Effect trap he is setting. The result? Just watch, 4 months from now, when the referendum campaigns are in full swing, scofflaw fare evaders and TransLink’s refusal to address this issue are going to be major points repeated uncritically in the media, as Bateman and his ilk keep hitting that drum while providing no actual context to the discussion, until it becomes just another part of the “common sense” that no-one can deny. The lie will become truth, thanks to a guy who used to know the difference.

*Actually, the ever succinct Canspice points out bus boardings in 2013 were actually 228 Million, my number includes SkyTrain boardings. I’m not sure which number is better to use, but I guess whether you are trying to make the point that Bus Drivers are useless or that TransLink is incompetent. As noted by Canspice, if your argument is simply the CTF’s standard “ALL TAXES BAD!”, then I guess it doesn’t matter.

** In looking for this number, I found two fascinating research papers, one using Game Theory to determine if Fare Gates make sense for a public transit system (Optimal choices of fare collection systems for public transportation: barrier versus barrier free: Yasuo Sasaki, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological Volume 60, February 2014, Pages 107–114) and another using multi-variable calculus and economic modelling to determine what the optimum fare inspection rate is for a proof-of-fare transit system like SkyTrain (Fare evasion in proof-of-payment transit systems; Deriving the optimum inspection level: Benedetto Barabino, Sara Salis, and Bruno Useli, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Volume 70, December 2014, Pages 1–17).

    

Inauguration

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

OK, we are a little more caught up now: on my sleep, on post-campaign tasks, on re-aligning lifestyles, and with the reality that my reality has now changed. I guess I should blog about what it is like to be a City Councillor, now that I have something like 24 hours of experience.

Yesterday’s inauguration was a good symbolic break from the many times I sat on the pews to the time I get the comfy seat. Without a “real business” agenda, it allowed me to get more comfortable with the new setting. So the strangeness of the experience wasn’t overcast by our need to get some work done. That’s next week’s story.

I’m not often one for pomp and ceremony, so some parts of the ritual seemed a little strange for me. The legal requirements for the oaths are understandable, but there are other parts of the tradition that I’m not too sure about. It was nice, however, to see so many faces in the crowd that were supportive during the campaign, and some I had only met during the campaign. I really appreciate people coming out to see us off on this new adventure.

I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t have an opportunity to introduce “new business” to the agenda, as I would have called for an emergency motion to strike the word “pecuniary” from all future oaths. Surely “financial or monetary” would suffice, no? (sorry, not an inside joke, but you need to watch the video if you weren’t there!)  Funny thing is we had not seen the oath before it was handed to us, but heard it the first time when Mayor Cote said it, and a few of my council colleagues could be heard faintly whispering “peck-EWE-nee-airy”” before their turn came up, it was clearly the word of concern. Once reading, I ran into it so quickly I didn’t even see it coming – jokes on me. All said, considering we were reading something unrehearsed into a microphone in front of cameras and a packed house, I guess we got away with it pretty well…

Less said about the Parcel Tax Roll Review Oath the better. Clearly the voters can elect a Council, but they can’t be trusted to elect a Choir.

So, aside from yesterday’s Inauguration Meeting, I have had an opportunity last week to sit down with a few senior staff in the City and start my training. I have had a lot of interaction with Staff and Council in New West in my volunteer life, so I have some basic understanding of how New Westminster operates at the superficial level. I have also worked in a City Hall, so I have some understand of the major day-to-day operational parts of a local government. However, none of that is useful without understanding the cultural and organizational differences between the two workplaces, and seeing how the operation is viewed from inside, which is inevitably different than the view from outside. I have another all-day session planned before Christmas with senior staff from each department to drill down a little deeper into existing operational plans, strategies, and outlooks. I am definitely on the steep part of the learning curve, but that where I love to be.

I also filled out a bunch of HR paperwork. So it wasn’t all fun and giggles.

Finally, I have had some discussions with the new Mayor about strategic planning for the upcoming term. As disclosed during his Inaugural Speech, there are no real surprises: his priorities are clear (transportation, economic development, leveraging the RCH expansion, community engagement) and I look forward to working with him and the rest of my Council team to see those visions realized. In the short term, Council has our first “real” meeting next week, then some time over the Christmas break to get our Committees and Task Forces organized. The members of Council have provided the Mayor our “preferred” list of committees, and I think I know where I will be most useful, but ultimately it is one of His Worship’s supreme powers to decide who chairs which committees. As soon as I know for sure where I will be assigned, I’ll let you know.

Pipelines and Strawmen – UPDATED!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Sorry to be out of touch, I’m still on the steep part of the learning curve, and have a variety of tasks to get done, while trying to recover from one of the busier months of my life. All good stuff, just time consuming. Also still working on the post-got-elected plan a far as social media, and will have that worked out by the new year. Until then, I will still be writing occasional rants here as things bug me enough that I stay up late writing about them. Like this one.  

In rhetoric, there is an argument technique called “the strawman”. This is a logical fallacy where one reduces one’s opponents’ argument to a single ridiculously simple argument, then beats that argument to death. This is meant to make it appear that you have beaten your opponent’s actual argument, which might not be so weak. Except you are not beating your opponent, you are beating a weak and easily defeated parody of them; hence “strawman”.

There are a myriad of examples of this technique; if you at all pay attention to modern media-driven politics, it is hard to go through a day without hearing someone beating down the strawman version of their opposition. Unfortunately, the dumbing down of journalism, driven by the one-two punch of cost reduction (so fewer traditional media can afford to pay highly skilled professional journalists to do a proper job) and social media dominance (where the narrative is often reduced to a compelling photo and 140-character missives) only serve to push strawmen to the front of the argument. It is much easier and cheaper to push forward the extremists and their strawman arguments and feed the conflict that attracts eyeballs than it is to tell the full complex story of conflict that underlies so much of today’s political landscape.

As a consumer of media, and a person interested in politics as a solution to conflict, I find it useful as a first step to determine if the rhetoric you are hearing is an extreme position. All political arguments have extreme positions, and rarely (never?) is the solution found at those extremes. However, it is important to understand where those extremes are, if only so one can work their way between them, and see where in the vast field of grey between the black and white the solutions may be found.

So I went to Burnaby Mountain last week.I talked to people standing at the line, demonstrating their concern about the introduction of a crude oil pipeline to the Burnaby Mountain Conservation Area. I talked to one person I know well, who was arrested a few days previously for crossing the arbitrary court-ordered “line”, because (and I am paraphrasing based on previous discussions I have had with him) he feels that it is his moral imperative to protect his children’s future by taking whatever action he can to slow anthropogenic climate change. I also talked to a few other people of varying walks of life who showed up, some to see what was going on, some who were opposed to this project in particular, and some who had wider-ranging opposition to the political direction of the country, with this project being a local manifestation of this. There was a lot of variety of ideas in that crowd.

(disclosure: I actually know the scientists overseeing this drilling investigation on Burnaby Mountain from my time at SFU; we worked together, and I consider them friends, so I effectively knew people on both sides of the police tape!).

I found that visit more informative than reading the silly extreme arguments you might normally be exposed to by “responsible journalists” like those at the Vancouver Sun or Black Press. So I thought, just for fun, I could outline strawmen being deployed in the biggest political story in British Columbia right now, one from each side of the debate, so we can be clear on what the “extreme” position is, and waste less time arguing against those strawmen and instead spend our time more usefully mucking about in the grey in between.

Extreme Position #1: We need to immediately end all use of hydrocarbons, and natural resources extraction in general.

Extreme Position #2: Any act that curtails or slows Canada’s expansion of natural resource extraction and export using the current model will destroy our fragile economy.

These arguments are both, unfortunately, commonly used in “opinions” expressed by such mainstream media as our local PostMedia Newspapers of Note(tm).

The first may be held by a vanishingly small number of environmental activists, but it is implied in every social media (or other) comment that says (I paraphrase) “the protesters use nylon tents made from petroleum – therefore they are hypocrites”, or more subtly when one opines “the world needs oil, therefore we need to build this pipeline”.

The second is the natural counterpoint to the first, and is commonly expressed, sometimes rather indirectly, by varied groups from the Dan Miller to the Fraser Institute. In social media comments, this manifests as something along the lines of “BC’s economy has always relied on resource extraction” (which is not the least bit apropos to this pipeline project, but I digress).

I think (hope?) we can agree that these are the extreme outer points of the argument, and there is a world of grey where solutions will be found, and where the useful politics are. I see the middle ground as including a discussion of national goals are as far as energy and resource extraction, especially considering we only have one chance to take this stuff out of the ground and make money from it. We need to figure out how we are going to catch up to our major trading partners, the United Nations, the World Bank, etc. in our approach to Climate Change policy. We need to figure out what type of growth is sustainable, when the current pace is creating both labour shortages and ginormous profits, while corporate taxation hits an all-time low and basic services of government suffer for funding. I would even love for us to have a discussion about a national energy policy, just to find out if the approach taken by Norway, Iceland, or even the UAE, makes better long-term sense for the citizens of Canada than our current course. I suspect we would be well served to better isolate our economy from volatile hydrocarbon price shocks, and increase, not reduce, or energy sovereignty. I would also like to be confident that the long-term environmental consequences of these large and unprecedented projects are considered, that protections are in place where needed, and that the revenue generated by these project will fund these protections.

These are not “extreme” ideas, but are instead rational approaches that should inform good governance. But it is hard to fit those in a tweet, and short of the very few longer-form examples of journalism still around in Canada (mostly easily dismissed as the ramblings of intellectual elitists), these discussions are hardly occurring in the public realm. God forbid anyone raise them during an election.

Now, go back and read the two “extreme” arguments above, and ask yourself who is making those extreme claims? Note than one is being made by a small fringe of the environmental movement. The other is being made, today, by the government ruling Canada. You should be scared of both, but only one is a clear and imminent threat to good governance in this country.

Or maybe I’m just beating on a strawman.

UPDATE – There is nothing else to say about this long piece by one of our Province’s most unimaginative climate-change-denying industry apologists except to say it demonstrates clearly my point about the ubiquity of the silly “you need oil, therefore this pipeline” line of reasoning. Thanks Keith, I knew I could count on you to pull out a strawman and give it a good old fashioned thrashing!