Tag: New Westminster

Council – Feb 8, 2021

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

It seems we are meeting a lot these days, but we also have relatively short open agendas, amazing how that works out. This week’s meeting started out with a great staff presentation on the draft budget:

Draft 2021 – 2025 Financial Plan
There is a report here, and a power point presentation with some great diagrams about the 5-year financial plan. Staff will now put this plan together into the appropriate empowering bylaws.

We have been through several workshops, and have done the most comprehensive consultation with the community of any budget process I have been through in 6 years on Council. We have spent a lot of time working on the Capital Plan especially, as it is especially significant this year. All of this discussion and compromise and debate is going to, inevitably, to be distilled down to one number. And this year that number looks to be 4.9%.

The proposed property tax increase is made up of a 2.3% increase that is a result of inflationary pressure on the existing program (both inflation for fixed costs and bargained wage increases), 2.0% to go directly to financing the debt on the NWACC project, which we are going to have to start paying for in 2021, and another 0.6% increase that represents new services. Utility rates are also going up, mostly due to increased fees being charged by the regional suppliers, though we are also continuing to invest locally to assure our long-term reserves are healthy.

We will read and potentially adopt the Bylaw on February 22nd, so if you have opinions, please let us know here! But please at least read the report first or watch the Power Point in the Video to get a sense of where this is coming from.

We then had a DVP for Approval:

Development Variance Permit DVP00686 for 632 Carnarvon Street
An operator wants to open a much-needed-in-downtown childcare space in the old Fisheries Building downtown, but needs to repurpose some outdoor space to play space to meet Fraser Health requirements, which will erode their ability to provide off-street parking for their staff to meet our zoning minimums for the use. This requires a DVP, which we put notice out about last month. We received a single piece of correspondence concerned about traffic impacts on the Court building. Council moved to approve the DVP, and I can’t speak for everyone, but my only thinking was that childcare space is in much greater need in downtown than parking space.

We had three items on the Consent Agenda, two of which we removed from consent to talk about, but you’ll have to watch the video to see which ones! Ha!

Recruitment 2021: Appointments to Board of Variance (BOV)
The Board of Variance is a provincially-mandated committee the City has to review variances if the person who is requesting the variance would rather appeal to someone other than Council. Ours does not meet very often, but we assign people to it, because that’s the law!

Landscaping Guidelines for Laneway Houses in Queen’s Park
We had a delegation a few weeks ago concerned about a chain link fence in the Queens Park neighbourhood. Seriously.

Indeed, chain link is not a preferred material in the design guidelines (which are guidelines, not laws), and as fences are typically not subject to permits or inspections (aside from having limited heights), fencing materials may be included in guidelines applied for new construction in the HCA… I honestly cannot believe we spent staff and Council time digging into this when there are an almost infinite number of more important things going on but…

Turns out we got an e-mail from a neighbour, and there are some weird details here around how the existing fence was removed that fall under that nebulous world of Fence Law which is actually a fascinating body of jurisprudence that doesn’t really involve the City directly unless there are building permits. Anyway, we are going to ask staff to go back and help the neighbours work this thing out if they can.

Westminster Pier Park Management Oversight Committee: Westminster Pier Park – Fire Recovery Update
The good news: the playground inside the loop of the new ramp entrance is being built as we speak, and will be ready this spring. The bad news: the entire damn park is still closed, and it may take until April to get it opened again. The reasoning here is a need for a level crossing access for vehicles for public safety reasons.

We had a bit of discussion here, and I am frankly disappointed where we are. The Fire department feels we need to be able to drive a vehicle into the Park for emergency response before we open it. This seemed strange to me, as there are two foot accesses to the park, one at each end, and there are many places in the City where you cannot drive a vehicle that are nonetheless accessible for park use. The middle of Hume Park, the “beach” in Queensborough, areas of Glenbrook Ravine. I am not a first responder, but it was not really made clear to me what the operational restrictions are, or if efforts were found to address those restrictions that didn’t involve months of negotiation with the railways, procuring road building, etc.

My point for pushing here is that I just didn’t feel a sense of urgency, or an understanding of how important this par space is for the many people who live in Downtown New West. This is an area of the community where density is, where many residents are renters, and many don’t have access to outdoor private space. The Pier Park is literally their back yard, and vital to the livability of the community for them. During COVID we have lost so much of our social and collective space – people are feeling trapped in their homes – they need this space, and it has been closed for almost 5 months now, with another couple of months of closure on the horizon.

It is a diminished space, and yes I know it is winter, but to have a sunny day like last Saturday and for the thousands of people downtown to have no access to their premier park space – that is not the level of service our residents should expect. We need to do better, find a creative solution, and get this park space back into the hands and under the butts of our residents.

Finally, we had a Bylaw and related Motion:

Zoning Amendment Bylaw (457 East Columbia Street) No. 8227, 2020
The operator of the Arcade in Sapperton wants a liquor primary license. We adopted the Rezoning Bylaw that made that happen, and moved the resolution the province needs from us to get the Liquor Primary licence approved.

The operator of the Arcade in Sapperton wants a liquor primary license. We adopted the Rezoning Bylaw, and moved the resolution the Province needs from us to get the licence approved.

And look at me getting my Council Report out the morning after the meeting!

Council – Feb 1, 2021

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Yep, Council met last week, and we had more than just that one item on the agenda. I’m late getting this out (and have another Council Package to read this weekend!) so here is a quick summary, that started with a Presentation:

ReDiscover New West Campaign Presentation,
The City is working with our BIAs and Tourism New West to promote locals helping our local business community to help reframe 2021 after a slightly dismal 2020. There is a great video with familiar (masked!) faces and places, promotions of local businesses, and a contest you can take part in to support out local business community right now. See it all here.

We are really fortunate in NewWest that our BIAs (formal and informal) are really effective advocates and great partners to the City. Send your local favourites some love in February – it is always a bad month for the restaurant business especially, so let’s help them out so they will be here for us when we emerge from our mandated slumber.

The following items were Moved on Consent:

COVID-19 Pandemic Response – Update and Progress from the Five Task Forces
This is our regular update on the work of the City’s COVID taskforces. We got Federal funding for part of our Food Security work, are working on providing better access to showers for unhoused people in the City, continue to work on the Health Outreach Centre, and continue to work with the business community to keep them connected and find out what types of supports we can provide.

COVID-19 At-Risk and Vulnerable Populations Task Force: New Westminster Digital Inclusion Project Update and Potential City Contribution to Project
One of the goals of our Intelligent City Action Plan is to make digital connection more inclusive – so people who cannot necessarily afford a phone or home computer can be connected to some internet services – as so much of our public services are oriented around internes connectivity. Partnering with Douglas College, Purpose, and other community organizations, with a SPARC grant, we can get phones to people. We can also provide WiFi hotspots and connectivity hubs in the City to access the internet with those devices. The City is also providing older devices (iPhone 7s) to the cause.

34 South Dyke Road: Development Variance Permit Application to Vary Access to Tandem Parking
This 16-unit Townhouse development in Queensborough was approved by Council last year, but we overlooked the need for a DVP to allow the parking to be tandem-style instead of side-by-side. So we are giving notice that we will consider this DVP, likely at the March 1st meeting. If you have opinions, let us know!

Sapperton Green: Official Community Plan Amendment Section 475 and 476 Consultation Report
Sapperton Green are working through their revised Master Plan to accommodate increased affordable housing, as was presented in a preliminary way to City Council a year ago (yes, this stuff takes time). As this increases the residential density beyond the current OCP, we are required by law to do formal consultation regionally before it comes back to Council for eventual Public Hearing. This report outlines who will be consulted. Yes, it includes the Board of Education for School District 40.

759 Carnarvon Street (The Metro): Rezoning and Liquor Primary Applications – Preliminary Report
The Metro is a banquet hall Downtown where people have been holding events without any trouble for something like 13 years. They have operated on Special Event licenses when those events included alcohol sales (something like 100 nights a year!) and they want to get a Liquor Primary license. They are not planning on changing their business – it’s not becoming a pub, for example – but trying to simplify their operations and align better with changes in the Provincial licensing regime. An LP license requires a change in the language of the Zoning Bylaw. We are doing an expedited process here, but will likely go to Public Hearing in March, so I’ll hold further comment until then.

2020 Filming Activity Overview
This is the annual report on filming activity in the City. The City has a Film Coordinator on staff who manages the myriad of ways film operations interact with the City’s operations – road closures, policing, use of City buildings, permits, etc. We also charge permit fees to recover these costs, to the tune of more than $700,000 a year. This is a bit down from the peak of 2017, but still a significant budget item. This is just City revenues, and does not include the salaries paid to the nearly 1,000 New Westminster residents who work in the film industry, or the money paid to home and business owners to lease their spaces for filming.

There was also a story on the TeeVee News that was ostensibly about Vancouver as Hollywood North, but ended up having a bunch of New West content.

Youth Advisory Committee Recommendation re Indigenous Workshop for City Committee Members
The Youth Advisory Committee sent a recommendation to Council (as is their job!) asking that include training for Advisory Committee members on Indigenous issues and reconciliation. It is actually a good idea to expand the scope of the training we are undergoing with staff to include Advisory committee members, I think it will result in better informed advice coming to Council and it will be a value add for the members who volunteer their time to help the city.

The following items were Removed from Consent for discussion:

E-Comm nominations for 2020-2021
As one of the cities that receives 911 service from E-Comm, we get a part vote – shared with the Tri Cities – on two seats on the Board that governs the organization. The last time a New Westminster had a representative was Councillor Trentadue few years ago. We recently ran into some challenges in filling recent vacancies, with New West a bit of a hold-out as we are trying to encourage our partners to consider gender and diversity in their nominations. And it has been, unfortunately, a challenge. So a vacancy remains.

We are escalating a bit here on an issue that has been going on somewhat in the background for a couple of years. The report lays out how hard we have tried to make our case to our neighbouring communities, and the various steps forward and backward along the way. We have now asked staff to prepare formal correspondence to the entire EComm board asking that they take some responsibility and commit to improving the diversity of their board, and asking that our partner Cities commit to gender diversity immediately by assuring all future nomination include at least 50% women or non-binary representatives. We are also going to elevate this to the Lower Mainland LGA. More to come here.

805 Boyd Street (Walmart): Development Variance Permit Application to Vary Sign Bylaw Requirements for Directional Signage
Walmart in Queensborough wants to add some signage to point people to their new pick up area, that doesn’t strictly meet our Sign Bylaw limitations, but they are pretty small and on the side of a Walmart, so the impact on neighbourhood aesthetics seems pretty limited. Regardless, we are giving notice that we will consider this DVP, likely at the March 1st meeting. If you have opinions, let us know. “I hate Walmart” is, frankly, not really useful input here, this is about wayfinding signage, not global capitalism.

Single-Use Item Reduction Advocacy for Consistent Regional Regulation
Following up on our talk about single-use plastics two meetings ago, Staff have provided some guidance on a path forward for regional and senior government advocacy.

Finally, we had a bit of New Business:

Bill C-213, an Act to enact the Canada Pharmacare Act
Councillor McEvoy brought this motion, similar to what numerous municipalities across the Country are asking for right now:

BE IT RESOLVED THAT New Westminster City Council support Bill C-213, An Act to enact the Canada Pharmacare Act.

It helps that the Bill was introduced by our own Member of Parliament, but this is a long-overdue promise made by several Liberal Governments, and it is well past time to hold them to their promise. As the ancient proverb says, the best time to introduce Universal Pharmacare is 20 years ago when the Liberals first promised it; the second best time is now.

And that was it, see you again Monday!

Police Budget redux

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

We had a full Council meeting on Monday, with several important topics on the agenda, But I am really busy his week, and I want to write about this one first and separately, because it seems to have caught a little media attention, and wouldn’t hurt from a more detailed discussion.

Before I start, I want to do one of my regular reminders that this blog is, as always, my personal opinion, and not official City communications. There are a spectrum of opinions on Council about this, and we have had a few split votes, so I don’t want anyone to think I am providing an official position of council, or that I am speaking for my Council colleagues. I respect where my colleagues are coming from here, this is a difficult topic, and will try really hard to avoid putting word in their mouths. There is a video available if you want to hear the full discussion.

New Westminster Municipal Police Board letter dated January 25, 2021 regarding New Westminster Police Department 2021 Budget
The Police Board has replied to Council’s previous request that they review their enhancement requests and revise the budget increase requested for 2021. They have replied with the assertion that the requested 2.9% increase is inflationary and does not support increasing police services, but maintains the status quo as far as service levels. That is an unfortunate turn of phrase, because the entire point of this discussion is that status quo needs to be challenged, but I don’t want to get mired in pedantry.

I’ve written previously in this post and this post about the jurisdictional challenges here. In short, Council has no authority to direct how police do their work, or even how they allocate their budget, that is the job of the Police Board. Council are required by law to approve a budget. If we do not approve the one offered by the Police Board, then the Minister of Public Safety is asked to adjudicate. In the past when Councils have not agreed with Police Board requests, the Minister has always sided with the Police Board. We know where this was going.

I had honestly hoped that the Police Board would come back to us with an adjusted budget, or a more detailed explanation of where their specific budget pressures are. They did not really do that. They did make it clear, however, that this was the budget they were offering. It did not include all of the enhancements (which is the term we use in municipal budgeting for “things we want to do/pay for this year that we didn’t do/pay for last year”) they were originally looking for when the budget process began, but it similarly did not represent an increase in service levels. It effectively equaled an inflation adjustment over last year. It is hard for me to challenge this, as one of the uncertainties I feel on Council is that the scale and nature of the Police budget is not as transparent to us or the voting public as most the rest of the City budget. This is by design of the Police Act, and it is troubling.

For those so interested, there is more information about the budget available in the Police Board agenda, which you can read here: (the “package” is the agenda with the attached reports and police budget tables).

If you read the correspondence between the Police Board and Council here, it seems we agree on a few principles. The Police Board acknowledges that aspects of the services they currently provide may be better provided by a non-policing model, and if you draw a Venn diagram of how this overlaps with “Police Reform”, it certainly wouldn’t be a circle. However, The Police Board strongly feels that until those alternative delivery models are in place, they cannot responsibly suspend, or in any way reduce, the current delivery model. This puts us in a chicken-and-egg quandary, as there is currently no one with the jurisdiction, resources, and willingness to bring those delivery models into place. So it could seem we are stuck.

Ultimately, change is going to require the Police Board to resource some review of their internal operations. It is going to require Local Governments to identify how their residents want services delivered, and potentially to see what services the Local Government can deliver and fund though alternative models. Mostly, it is going to require the Provincial Government to reform the Police Act, and to resource the Health Authorities, the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, and potentially other agencies to deliver their resources differently. This is going to take coordination, and cooperation.

The good news is that everyone is signaling that they want to do this. The New West Police Board has sent us some more details about their plan to begin addressing this process. It isn’t perfect, but it is clear in its intent. The Provincial Government has also begun to work on a Police Act reform consultation, and the City of New Westminster has made it clear to them that we want in at the ground floor on those discussions – we are the right City to be in the center of this, with our own Police Force, a very proactive group of community service agencies, and all partners willing to see change.

So, to get back to the decision before Council, the options now were to approve the budget presented by the Police Board or not. There is no mandate for negotiation. As much as I want to push for systemic changes that the Board is alluding to, that Council and the public have asked for, and that may arise from the provincial Police Act review, I am not sure these ends are served by the Police Board spending the next few months engaging in a Provincial Government appeal process to get their budget approved. This feels like time wasted when it seems certain the Province will deliver the budget the Police Board requests. There may be a message to be sent by forcing the Public Safety Minister to issue that order, but I think we have other pathways to send that message, including two new MLAs who are in a caucus with that Minister and are itching to represent New Westminster in Victoria.

So I voted to support the budget as proposed, and supported Councillor McEvoy’s follow-up motion to call on the Police Board to be more proactive in engaging with Council and the Community in the work we all agree needs to be done. I hope we can use our time more effectively rowing in the same direction, and I expect the Police Board to be accountable to the community they serve for the commitments they have made to the community along with asking for this maintaining budget.

Council – Jan 25, 2021

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

We had a surprisingly short Council Meeting on Monday. We were anticipating a couple of longer Public Hearings, but staff became aware late in the afternoon that the Zoom invite sent out did not point participants to the right place for the Zoom meeting, for obscure Zoom-related technical reasons. The legislative requirements for clear public access to a Public Meeting are already strained a bit operating under our remote work COVID Ministerial Orders, so our staff made the prudent last-minute decision that the Public Hearings should be re-scheduled. It’s a bit unfortunate, but mistakes happen when everyone is working with new processes, and we are always better served to err on the side of assuring legislative requirements are met. I understand now the delayed Public Hearings will occur on February 22nd, but best check with City Page updates and not rely on my Blog to schedule your participation (have I mentioned recently that this Blog is not official communications from the City?)

The delays left us with a single item on the Agenda:

40 Begbie Street (Lower Mainland Purpose Society): Temporary Use Permit for a Health Contact Centre (Overdose Prevention Site) – preliminary Report
Council has been advocating to Fraser Health to help bring more support to people impacted by the poisoned drug supply crisis. One of the approaches we have asked the Health Authority to support is an overdose prevention site – a place where people using drugs can do so with health supervision, and where users can access the kind of health services they need, including referral to treatment and other services. The New West Overdose Community Action Team has been working with Purpose (large P and small p) to bring these services to New West.

Overdose Prevention Sites save lives. They are not the solution to the opioid crisis, but they demonstrably reduce deaths, and improve health outcomes for a cohort of drug users. They are one piece of a big, complicated puzzle, but an important one.

For this to operate in the location made available by Purpose, we need to adjust the zoning language. Staff are recommending a Temporary Use Permit to do this, and have outlined a community consultation and approval process that is typical for a TUP in COVID times. Council raised concerns about the potential delay of our process. This is a Public Health Emergency – it is not hyperbole to say people may die waiting for this centre to open. There is still some work to do by Purpose, Fraser Health, and the City to get it up and running, but the message sent by Council was that we don’t want to be the ones slowing things down.

I also wanted to say a few things about the consultation around this proposal, but first I need to talk a bit about the word “consultation”. The organization for professionals who do community engagement work for a living have identified a spectrum of consultation that informs the City’s Public Engagement Strategy:

When Cities (or anyone, really) do public engagement, it is good to know where on the spectrum your engagement lands. At one end, you are just informing people about a decision that was made by the City (“we have hired a new Chief Financial Officer”), at the other end you empower the public make the decision (“And the winner of the online poll is, Boaty McBoatface!”). When it comes to the engagement about this project, we are going to land around the consult part of the spectrum.

Council, in a public motion several months ago, asked Fraser Health to provide this service in New Westminster. The Health Authority has agreed, provided a funding model, and found a partner to provide the service though a procurement process. The location meets the provider’s needs, the Health Authority’s needs, and the client’s needs. What we intend to consult with stakeholders in the community on now are parameters around how the Health Contact Centre will operate. How we will ensure compliance with the City’s good Neighbour Policy, which partners are responsible for any mitigation efforts for negative community impacts if they occur, and how communications with the community should work. The City has set up an engagement site where some questions may already be answered, and you can provide feedback.

And that was all we had on the agenda. See you all next week!

Council – Jan 18, 2021

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Our Council meeting this week was efficient, helped along by a fairly short agenda with not a lot of meat on it (that will, apparently, be next week). The following items were Moved on consent without discussion:

Poet Laureate Program 2021-2023
New Westminster has a Poet Laureate, an honorary role where a local artist is provided a small honorarium and support to bring voice through literary arts to our community. If you have been at a major community event over the last three year, you may have heard Alan Hill reciting verse and telling story of the event. Alan is the 4th Poet Laureate, and his 3-year term came to an end in 2020, so after a bit of a COVID delay, we are starting a search for a new artist.

Major Purchases September 1st to December 31st, 2020
Every 4 months we publicly report out on from whom we bought majors items or services from as part of our transparent procurement process. Here’s how we spent the money.

Recruitment 2021: Appointments to Advisory Committees, Commissions, Boards and Panels
Here is where we report out on who has been chosen to serve on City Advisory Committees, Boards, and Panels. It is a bit of a strange year with COVID, and some terms were extended due to the inability to have full meetings last year, but there is also a bit of a refreshment on most committees. Alas, we were also not able to have a Volunteer Appreciation dinner, so we will have to ramp it up next year after everyone has their shots. It’s been a long time since we go the community together to celebrate our community.

Amendments to the City’s Secondary Suite Requirements: Amendment Bylaws for Consideration of Readings
The City has a pretty progressive secondary suite policy. That’s no feather in my cap, it has been that way since the late 1990s, and has provided a significant contribution to our more-affordable housing stock. With the building code changing in 2019, we need to update our requirements to match these changes, and in the meantime staff hope to streamline and simplify the process in City Hall a bit to formalize a secondary suite.

Essentially, this limits code enforcement to life safety and livability issues for exiting secondary suites, and removes from our local rules those that are regulated by the BC Building Code. At the same time, regulations to improve livability (such as separation of heat systems, providing separated outdoor space, etc.) will be applied to new builds.

As these changes impact the City-wide Zoning Bylaw, these changes will go to a Public Hearing. If you have an opinion, let us know!

632 Carnarvon Street: Development Variance Permit Application to Vary Off-Street Parking Requirements
A Childcare operator wants to operate in the “Fisheries Building” across from the Law Courts on Carnarvon, but there isn’t sufficient off-street parking space for that use based on the zoning bylaw. Well, there may be, but the operator also needs an on-site outdoor play space according to Fraser Health.

This requires a Development Variance Permit, which we will consider at our February 8th meeting. If you have opinions about childcare spaces and parking downtown, let us know!

The following items were Removed from Consent for discussion:

COVID-19 Pandemic Response – Update and Progress from the Five Task Forces
This is our regular report of what our internal task forces are doing in regards to the COVID pandemic response.

Many things reported out here are happening a bit in the background (until there is enough detail worked out to provide a full Council report) including ongoing work with BC Housing to try to find a viable location for an Emergency Response Centre for up to 50 temporary supported homes with applications for additional funding underway with CMHC, and some progress has been made on a Health Contact Centre to house harm reduction services for people living with opioid addictions. More to come on these programs. There was some discussion about how we will manage Childcare programs over the Spring Break, as regular parks and rec programs are still COVID-limited, and staff is working on it!

BC Building Code Update: Tall Wood Encapsulated Mass Timber Construction
The BC Building Code is being modified to allow larger mass timber buildings, up to 12 stories, and a few Cities have already opted into this. There are some sustainability advantages to mass timber construction, some that may not have been realized yet as the technology is evolving. Up to now, our process to approve this technique is a bit complicated, where if we opt into the approval process, it adds this to the options for developers in town to fill the 6-to-12-storey gap where current construction methods are not particularly economical.

Council supported us moving in the direction of opting into this, but wanted a bit more info about potential costs. As it will involve different permitting and inspections than existing established building techniques, there may be some staff training cost (especially in Fire Inspections), but in general practice inspection and permitting costs are meant to be covered by fees on the builder, not general tax revenue, so this creates a bit of uncertainty for Council. So we decided to support opting in in principle and asked for better reporting on potential costs before we add staffing costs to a financial plan.

Single-Use Item Reduction Update
Council asked staff to develop a strategy around the reduction in single-use plastics, and it appears senior governments are working on similar strategies, so we want to align, and not waste resources on redundancy. There have been nascent attempts in other municipalities to bad plastic bags or straws, and these have not been problem free (legal challenges in Victoria, questions about ableism and the role plastic straws play for people with some disabilities are two off the top of my head).

This work has been delayed by COVID, and at the same time we have changed our shopping and eating patterns which have likely exacerbated the issue, as we are using more single use plastic than ever.

The provincial government announced late last year that they will change the Community Charter to support a local-government approach to single use produce bans, unfortunately at the same time the industry is telling governments they want a synchronized senior government approach. They also suggest expanding the existing EPR program to include these plastics, effectively putting the plastics industry in charge of plastics, and in the face of clear evidence that recycling is not a sustainable solution to this problem. At the same time, the Prime Minister assures us the federal government takes this issue very seriously, so we can count on them not doing anything.

The report did not go into Metro Vancouver’s role. They are ultimately responsible for solid waste in the region, but their role has traditionally been about managing where waste goes (recycling, incineration, landfilling) and not about reducing at the front end. They put together a Single Use Item Reduction Toolkit that suggests ways 21 local governments could set up their own bylaws to ban or put fees on items and take on the expensive and cumbersome enforcement role. This is contrary to the results of every consultation that has been done, where businesses and consumers have made clear they want a region-wide consistent approach.

New Westminster does not have a representative on the Zero Waste Committee at Metro Vancouver, so I moved that we ask staff to put together correspondence to the Metro Vancouver Board and Zero Waste Committee asking them to take a more active role and develop a region-wide single use plastics reduction strategy that takes the Principles of the Single-Use Item Toolkit and integrates them into a regional regulatory regime.

And after reading a few Bylaws, that was the work for the evening. See you next week!

Assessments 2021

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Assessments are here. For those who own homes, this means a letter arrived in the mail telling you what the assessed value of your property was on July 1, 2019. It also tells you what the assessed value was over the previous three years. Some people are very upset to find their property has gone up in value, which means their property taxes are going up. Others are very upset that their assessed value has gone down, and their investment is losing value. At least, that is what I glean from Social Media, but maybe I need to get out more.

I have written before about the relationship between property assessment and property taxes, and about how the assessment process works, so this will be a bit of an update/summary of those posts. A bit of redundancy, but with new numbers.

First off, your assessment does impact your property taxes, but not as directly as you may think. The City has not passed a 2021 budget, so I do not yet know what the 2021 Property Tax rates will be, but in our last discussions, we seemed to be settling towards something like a 4.9% increase over 2020. I will round that up to 5.0% for the purposes of this discussion as long as we can all agree that is speculative and the numbers may change between now and when you get the bill.

That 5% means the amount of revenue the City will receive in property taxes from existing taxpayers will go up 5%, but it does not mean the cheque you write in July will necessarily be 5% higher than the one you wrote in 2020. First off, it only impacts the portion of property taxes that the City gets to keep. Last year, your residential Property Tax Bill looked like this:

So 58% of your property tax goes to the City, 35% to the provincial government through the School Tax, and about 7% to other agencies regulated by the provincial government. Everything else I talk about below here relates only to that to-the-City portion of the tax bill. To find out how the School Tax is set or how the BC Assessment Authority spends it’s 1%, you need to go to someone else’s blog. All this to say if the City put your municipal property taxes up by 5%, the amount of money you pay only goes up about 2.9% (that is, 5% of 58%).

If you look at your Property Assessment letter, you will note that the average change in property values in the City of New Westminster was a 3% increase. Because the City calculates its property tax rate based on this average value, a 5% increase will be based on this value. If your house went up in value by the average, then a 5% tax increase means the municipal portion of your property tax bill will go up 5%. The relationship between these two numbers is linear, so to calculate your potential increase, subtract the average value increase from your own value increase, and add the 5% increase the City is proposing:

My assessment (1940 SFD on a 5,300sqft lot in the Brow) actually went down by 11% since last year. So my Municipal taxes would go down by (-11)-(3)+5=  –9%.

My friend in Sapperton (1920 SFD on a 4,000sqft lot) saw her assessment go up by 20% over last year, so her Municipal taxes would go up by (20)-(3)+5= 22%.  Yikes.

Assessment is a dark science, and every year there are weird local effects of property values in one neighbourhood going up or down relative to others, and it is not always clear what the causes of these changes are. A recent example is the Heritage Conservation Area in Queens Park which was either going to cause housing prices to go through the roof and make the neighbourhood forever inaccessible to young families, or was going to crater the value of the houses dooming young families to inescapable debt, again depending on which Social Media account you followed. The reality is, it had little perceptible effect when compared to similar properties in Glenbrook North or the West End over the last 5 years. The market is bigger than one neighbourhood.

Properties actually sell “above assessed value” or “below assessed value”, a metric that is often used as an indicator of a market trend, since assessments are always at least 6 months old. However, it is important to remember that, in aggregate, things just don’t shift as much as they do in one-off conditions. If the person up your street who spent $50,000 on a new kitchen sells their house, they are likely to get more than the neighbour who has a black mold farm in the basement, even though both houses may look the same from the outside. Assessments are approximations of how the “typical” or median house of the size, age, and lot dimensions in your neighbourhood should be valued, not an evaluation of your wainscoting. Individual results may vary.

If you think your increase or decrease this year is unfair, there is a process to appeal your assessment, but you can’t dawdle. Local governments have to know the official assessed values by April so we can set our tax rates and get those cheery bills into the mail, so the Assessment Authority has to provide official numbers by the end of March. Therefore you only have until February 1st to file an appeal, but if you think you might want to do so, you should contact BC Assessment immediately and get the details about what you need in order to make that appeal. The important part is that the onus is on you to provide evidence that the appeal is wrong, not vice versa.

Council – Jan 4 2021

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

A New(!) Year(!!) is here, and we had Council Meeting right off the bat. The open agenda was fairly short, so it was soft landing back into the real world. We started with a piece of Unfinished Business:

New Westminster Police Department letter dated November 26, 2020 and report regarding Response to the Calls for Justice – Listening and Learning through Respect and Understanding
This report was sent to Council from the Police Board in response a motion we passed a little while back asking several of our partners to respond to the Calls for Justice that arose from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Our request to the Police Board was to respond to the Calls for Justice relevant to policing, and champion and lead a regional police task force to address them. This report provides a summary of the work being done, some of it relevant to the Calls for Justice, some that more generously might be characterized as community outreach. This second category is important and positive, but not specifically relevant to the Calls for Justice, and in not differentiating these, in some ways take away from the value of the report.

I think the parts of the report that speak to relationship building are good, and indeed this probably reflects that the Department has already understood the need for this work, and I think emphasizes a strength the NWPD has from which further work can build. However, fear a bit the report is stuck in the present (if that makes sense) in that it does not do enough looking back at the historic role policing played in building and supporting the systems that failed Indigenous women. It also talks more about what the force is doing now, and less about what the force would do differently if we were able to move past systemic racism.

That said, we did not provide a critique or specific feedback to the report in the meeting, as we determined it was better to have a formal review of the report through Council’s Reconciliation and Inclusion Task Force, who can provide recommendations to Council, and I suspect this is going to be a more detailed conversation between Council and the Police Board.

The following items were Moved on Consent:

718 Twelfth Street (Canadian Islamic Cultural Society): Renewal of Temporary Use Permit – Consideration of Issuance
There is a hall on 12th Street that the CICS has been using for religious assembly of a relatively small group for a couple of years on a Temporary Use Permit. It isn’t a permitted use in the Commercial zone it is in, but Council has previously asked staff to look at this designation and whether this type of use on upper floors of commercial storefront buildings may be appropriate – but we just haven’t had a chance to do that work yet. Council is being asked to consider a three-year extension of the Temporary Use Permit to both give staff time to do that police work and to give the CICS a chance to figure out if they want to stay there or go elsewhere.

1135 Tanaka Court: Rezoning for Cannabis Infused Product Manufacturing Facility – consideration of First and Second Readings
A company wants to use a light industrial property in Queensborough to manufacture cannabis-infused food products (“edibles”). If it was a food manufacturing facility, they wouldn’t even be coming to Council, but the regulations around cannabis are still prohibition-based, so we need to go through an extra zoning process, in this case a zoning amendment. This is a first and second reading, and will go to Public Hearing, so I will hold my comments until then.

Our Bylaws readings included the following for Adoption:

Zoning Amendment Bylaw (Patio zoning relaxations) No. 8246, 2020
This Bylaw that extends the current relaxation of patio rules through to the end of 2021 was adopted by Council. Better put on a wooly hat!

Zoning Amendment Bylaw (805 Boyd Street) No. 8214, 2020
This Bylaw that allows “self-improvement schools” in the big box Queensborough Landing area was adopted by Council.

We had one late addition piece of New Business:

Westminster Pier Park Fire Recovery: Request for Construction Noise Exemption
The Pier Park fire clean-up is complicated. A very short version of the story is that a creosote-and asphalt fire dropped debris in to the river, and we need to clean that up to the satisfaction of the Ministry of Environment, and that work really needs to be done in a way that protects fisheries habitat, and preferably before the salmon start to run down the river. Our contractor is concerned about timelines, and wants to have the ability to do this work outside of our regular construction hours, which needs a construction noise bylaw exemption because part of the work is on City titled lands. Council moved to allow that.

Now everyone get back to work and we’ll see you in two weeks.

Ask Pat: Making Home

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

ASP asks—

Hi Pat – What are your thoughts on Kennedy Stewart’s pilot project to build up to six housing units on lots zoned for single-family homes? Also, do you think something like this could work in New West?

I will avoid wading into City of Vancouver politics here, but if you buy me a beer (post pandemic) I might regale you with my strongly held opinions about the way this was handled from a political point of view. Today, I’ll instead try to answer the questions from a public policy side. I have not done the deepest dive into this (see all the caveat-form ass-covering below) but am basing my critique on the proposal as outlined here on the Mayor’s own website.

Skipping past the “pilot 100 lots first” part of it, the big idea was to pre-zone standard single-family lots in Vancouver to allow up to 4 living units in what I assume would be a fourplex or clustered townhome configuration. The new building would operate as a kind of Co-op ownership model where the price of three of the units were based on market prices (which would be, presumably, less than the Single Family Detached house it replaced) and the price of the fourth would be tied to some regional determination of middle-income affordability for initial sale, and for perpetuity through a Section 219 Covenant on title or other mechanism. In some larger lots, this could be expanded to 6 units (4 market, two moderate-income).

To assess this, I want to break it into two parts, while recognizing they are intrinsically linked: land use and affordability.

Land Use
There are about 40,000 Single Family Detached homes in Vancouver (data from here), out of a total of about 280,000 households, yet SFD is by far the most dominant land use by area. It is likely that most of these SFD have more than one dwelling unit in them, be that a basement suite and/or a laneway house, with varying levels of legality, but it still means less than a quarter of the living units cover a vast majority of the residential land in Vancouver.

I have sometimes pushed Gordon Price’s buttons on this, as he speaks frequently of the “Grand Bargain” inherent in the politics of urban planning in the Lower Mainland for the past couple of decades: we will allow bigger towers, mostly on SkyTrain lines, as long as you keep your hands off of the sacred and ill-defined Neighbourhood Character of our single family houses. I suggest that the “Cities in a Sea of Green” narrative of the Livable Region Strategy has boiled down to more localized “Towers in a Sea of Single Family Houses”. This unfortunately has far-reaching effects on housing variety and flexibility, the cost of providing things like utility and transportation services in a community, and the viability of our communities.

We have already accepted (tacitly at first, but now more formally) that basement suites and carriage homes are acceptable, and that they provide a valuable from of more affordable housing that the region would be hard-pressed to function without. With the overall shrinking of the size of families even compared to 20 years ago (never mind the Vancouver Special peak of the 1970s) the reality is that many of our Single Family Detached neighbourhoods are shrinking in population, even as the region’s population swells. Corner stores, community schools, recreation leagues cannot operate on a shrinking population base, especially if we continue to shift our mode of travel from the private automobile to more sustainable forms.

So putting four small families in well-designed compact homes of the 1,000 square foot scale on a single 4,000 square foot lot (FSR 1.0) with 50% lot coverage is, in my mind, a preferable form of land use than similarly-sized single family homes with a legal basement suite. Maybe not everywhere, as no one housing form solves all of our housing needs, but in huge swatches of that RS-1 zoning map, this change would make for better, stronger, more resilient, and equitable neighbourhoods.

Affordability:
When a random Vancouver-Special-having single family detached lot in East Vancouver has $1.7 Million in land value and $100K in improvement value, it is hard to see how “working class” affordability fits into this model. The mortgages required to buy a starter home like this costs something like $6,000 a month, which puts the annual mortgage cost perilously close to the median annual pre-tax income of Vancouver families (about $75,000). If we think of an East Van Vancouver Special as a luxury only 5% of the population can afford, then we perhaps have to talk about why we are allowing the vast majority of the residential land to be preserved for this use?

Of course, many of these houses provide for an increasingly inequitable form of serfdom where basement suites act both as “mortgage helpers” for the gentry, and limited-franchise housing for the peasantry. This proposal would, I think help in closing that gap by introducing a more equitable Co-op type model at the single-lot scale.

This relies on a few things that are uncertain, which is why I suspect the Mayor’s proposal was for study and piloting as opposed to wide-spread adoption. Making these projects economically viable so a median income family mortgage fits the market component housing would require them to be salable in the $700,000 range. This may mean pre-approved design (we could call it a “New Vancouver Special”) and perhaps even some training of the building community to find the most efficient way to build a Step Code compliant building of this scale and form.

I would also throw in a caveat that cities have become reliant on development to fund the infrastructure expansion to support population growth – and I’ll use the building of better sewers here as my example. Going from 35% to 50% lot coverage means we need to address things like storm run-off at a different scale. It also means sanitary sewers have to be upsized or we will need to shift building codes to reduce the volume of sewage generated. When a City permits the building of a high-rise or even low-rise apartment building, we can suck tens of thousands of dollars out of each unit in the form of DCCs and CACs to pay for this work. With thousands of individual small projects across the City (if we are going to treat these small projects like we currently do replacement single family homes), the balance between keeping those re-builds affordable and providing the necessary infrastructure backbone is even a bigger challenge. I suspect it can be done, but there are details to be worked out here. This needs work.

The other big caveat is the potential loss of a stock of low-income housing in the form of those legal and illegal basement suites in single family homes across the City. In theory, the one-subsidized-unit-per-lot part of this plan will offset that, but I want to see some numbers. The limited franchise of the renter in the illegal basement suite situation is still better than those people being unhoused in a rental market with persistent sub-1% rental vacancy. Though I resist the whattaboutism of expecting any single new housing policy to solve all housing problems, we do need to put the policy into the context of the multiple housing crises in our region. In practice, I suspect the uptake of this type of new housing would be slow to start, giving time to assure we are building appropriate supportive housing for anyone displaced – but this only adds to the urgency of building that type of housing instead of taking away from it.

Would it work in New West?
It would work differently, but I’m not sure it could work. And again I’m going to try to avoid the politics of it here (I have no idea if the community or Council would embrace this idea) and try to look at it as a policy.

Land values in New West are still quite different than in East Van. A standard lot in the West End of New West has an unimproved value of about $1M, and in Lower Sapperton closer to $800K (to pick two neighbourhoods of mostly-single-family homes where you could see something like this work). So off the bat you may think it would be easier to pull off here, especially as you consider our median family income is about the same as Vancouver’s. However, this also means knocking down an old house and building a new SFD on it (with a carriage house & basement suite, as we currently permit) can already provide three residential units at a buy-and-build price that is still in reach for a wider range of income levels, though still not the median income earner. You would have to compete with that option to convince a builder to invest in the build of a new four-plex or six-plex model.

This would make it more imperative that savings could be found and risk reduced through streamlined approval and standardization, which is complicated in New West. We have a rich diversity of “standard” lot sizes here: 130×50’ in Queensborough and the West End, 120×50’ in Connaught Heights and Glenbrooke North (unless you have a lane, then 100×50’ is typical). Sapperton is typically 45×112’ or 40×100’. Though Upper Sapperton may make the most sense, their lot dimensions and slopes may make it most difficult. We also have some aging infrastructure problems (such as ongoing sewer separation work) and some building-on-steep-hill problems that impact building costs and make standardization harder. Finally, I think having 10% of the population and revenues of the City of Vancouver makes it harder for New West as a City to do some of the planning and design work to make this the most viable option, and would still be a less attractive market than Vancouver for private industry to do that work. It is much harder and riskier for New West to be the bleeding edge on a program like this.

The Vancouver Special was developed in Vancouver (and adopted in some adjacent communities) because it was a governance and market response to needing a bunch of affordable-ownership housing during rapid growth. I like where this proposal went, because it applied that kind of thinking to our current housing situation. To answer your question in TL;DR form (after the fact!): I like the idea, I don’t know if it would work, but I wish Vancouver had given it a try.

As a final caveat, I want to say I am almost perfectly the wrong person to ask about this. I am not a builder, a professional planner or a land economist, but am an elected official expected to approve policy based on the best advice of these professions. That probably means I am speaking here from a Dunning-Kruger knowledge nadir. I would love to hear more experienced people talk about this model, and point out the complications I am too knowledgeably unaware of.

Making Hay

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I’m not the only one who blogged a Year in Review. At the risk of giving them a little more Streisand Effect attention than they deserve, local political Council Watchers have risen a bit from the political shadows to throw a little light mud towards City Council. I would normally let it pass without comment, except that a comment by their sole elected member is misinformed and misinforming in a way that I think undermines the work of Council and the School Board. So I’ll risk a retort.

In her year-end letter to the community, Trustee Connelly suggests the following:

The truth of the matter is that since the Trustee was elected in 2018, the City has altered the Official Community Plan with exactly four amendments:

OCP Amendment Bylaw #8156 (to remove Heritage Conservation Area protection from 7 houses, on account of their lack of heritage value);
#8122 (To support the Heritage Conservation the Slovak Hall at 647 Ewen Ave);
#8151 (a housekeeping bylaw to fix some designations that didn’t match current use); and
#8145 (to allow a Childcare operation in a hall attached to a church on Sixth Ave).

Of those, only one involved an increase in density: the Ewen Ave amendment permitted the building of 5 townhouse units in exchange for permanent preservation of the Slovak Hall. The Sixth Ave amendment was to permit the addition of 114 childcare spaces to a Heritage-protected church location, and the housekeeping amendment was to fix minor errors included in the original OCP regarding four properties – including one (ironically?) requested by the School District.

But the OCP is older than the tenure of this School Trustee, as it was adopted in 2017. So let’s test her assertion against all of the amendments made before the Trustee was elected:

#7956 (allowing childcare spaces on vacant City land in Queensborough);
#8025 (preservation of heritage single family houses in Queens Park);
#8021 (44 units of Temporary Modular Housing for women in need of support in Queensborough);
#7982 (appending a small portion of commercial land to a Townhouse and Childcare project in Queensborough);
#8039 (requiring builders of new mutli-family buildings provide EV charging infrastructure);
#8042 (expanding the Heritage Conservation Area in Queens Park).

So, to reframe the Trustee’s concern: the City has “alter[ed] their new official community plan to accommodate more densification and growth” by a grand total of five (5!) family-friendly townhouse units and a Temporary Modular Housing project to support women facing homelessness. The question may be asked: which of these OCP amendments would she have asked Council to vote against?

I know what you are going to say: “What about all the towers!?” And that is a fair question. What about them?

In the time since the Trustee was elected, there have been two high rise residential developments approved in New West. The first was a 237-unit building in Uptown which was the first major residential development approved in Uptown in more than a decade. It was also recently amended – without added density – to go from mixed strata and rental to 100% Purpose Built Rental – filling a dire need in our community. The second was an increase by about 190 units at 100 Braid to support a shift from Strata to Purpose Built Rental. Other than the units in these two towers, there have been fewer than 80 dwelling units approved through rezoning in two years in a City with more than 34,000 dwelling units in the midst of a regional housing crisis. To be clear, none of these rezonings required altering the OCP. All of those units were fully in alignment with the existing Official Community Plan. They were also in alignment with the Regional Growth Strategy approved a decade ago by New Westminster in conjunction with all 22 regional municipal governments and the Provincial Government, who funds the building of new schools.

The Trustee is free to argue that the City is growing too fast or changing in ways she doesn’t like, if that suits her political motivations (though I would note the sum of all approvals above represent a growth rate of less than 1% a year). But it is disingenuous to claim OCP Amendments are instruments to create growth. They are actually the responsible governance response to growth, and looking at the examples of OCP amendments in New Westminster, are more likely to *restrict* densification through Heritage Conservation than actually support it. Even the rezonings  are not examples of City Council forcing new population to move into areas underserved by the School District, but the building of much-needed housing in areas consistent with a decade-old regional plan and and Official Community Plan that the School District was not only consulted on, but provided meaningful feedback to.

No doubt there are challenges related to regional population growth for School Districts, and anticipating how growth impacts the School District is a significant aspect of how the City reviews development plans. This is not a “particular challenge for New Westminster“, but common across the growing region. That is one of the reasons we have a Regional Growth Strategy and an Official Community Plan in the first place.

This is also why we have Section 476 of the Local Government Act that specifically requires Local Governments to have this consultation with the Board of Education. The Trustee would like “a coordinated effort to accommodate this growth as it translates to schools” and I retort with Section 476 of the LGA, and the active role the School District has taken in the OCP and OCP Amendment process. We do this not just because it is the law, but because it is a good idea. We do it so when the School District is planning, for example, a replacement for McBride Elementary, the School district and their funders in Victoria know what capacity is needed. This is also why Council has been supporting the School District in their aggressive capital plan over the last decade, bringing new schools on line and anticipating their needs in the decade ahead.

I recognize that part of politics is making hay.  Political Science is often about finding local wedge issues and figuring out how to use them to separate yourself from *them*. But when your argument is disconnected from the way governance works (both in practice and in legislation) then it seems disingenuous. Maybe it’s a dog-whistle, maybe it’s just misinformed. I’m not sure which is worse. We all want the residents of the City to have access to great schools, and the Board of Education and City Council have a good working relationship based on an honest understanding of the pressures we both face, and a strong desire to deliver on those needs. Happy New Year.

Ask Pat: Smoking fines

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

ThRe asks—

Hello Pat, Where can I get specific data about fines to smoking bylaw offenders in New Westminster? Thank you

Smoking Bylaws are a bit of a funny beast, because there are more than one enforcement bodies that stick their nose into where you can or cannot smoke. A few years ago, I did a bit of a dive into smoking bylaws around New Westminster Station and some of the “nuisance behaviours” at this primary entrance to the City. I learned that in some areas smoking was prohibited by the TransLink regulations and Transit Police were the enforcing authority, in others the City Bylaws applied, and Bylaw Officers were the relevant authority, and in other areas such as patios and buffer around the doors to restaurants Provincial Health Authority enforcement staff were the relevant agency, but could only apply fines to the proprietors who failed to stop smoking in the public plaza, not to the actual smokers, presumably putting the Mall Cops in charge of any kind of active enforcement. Knowing which side of a metal strip on the ground or how many metres you were from a doorway was important to know who is supposed to enforce the Bylaw in that particular spot. We also apparently cannot enforce smoking bylaws within strata buildings (such as on your residential balcony) as that is something that the provincial Strata Act manages.

Add to this that smoking enforcement is by its nature difficult as it is an ephemeral act, so with overlapping and gap-prone administrative boundaries I would assume actual fines are very, very rare.

The City’s smoking Bylaw is available online: Smoking Control Bylaw 6263, 1995 (last updated in September 2018) lays out the details of what we can enforce in the City. The actual fines for violating the Smoking Control Bylaw are found in the Bylaw Notice Enforcement Bylaw 7318, 2009 (last updated in August 2020), or the Municipal Ticket Information Bylaw 8077, 2019 (last updated in August 2020). And there is a difference.

“Bylaw Notice Enforcement” is a local administrative fine process, run completely by the City. We use this for a bunch of smaller offences (it is limited by Provincial Law to fines under $500) and would be familiar to anyone who has gotten a parking ticket. The adjudication process is run by the City, which is easier and cheaper than relying on provincial Courts. Your ultimate appeal measure would be to come to Council if you disputed it (or the Provincial Ombudsperson, I guess, if things went really bad). Here are the available Smoking fines under that process:

The “Municipal Ticket Information Bylaw” process relies on the Courts, and is more akin to a speeding ticket. You can, if you wish, go to court and appeal to a judge, and they are able to determine an appropriate fine given your situation, up to $1,000. The fun part here is that it turns out pretty much anyone with a badge has the legal authority to enforce it (though City Councillor is suspiciously absent from the list):

So those are the ways Smoking Bylaws may be enforced in the City. If you are more curious about how often or where this enforcement happens, and how many fines are actually collected, You are asking the wrong guy. I would first suggest you contact the City’s Bylaws Enforcement division and ask if they collect this data, and if they are free to share it.

The City is subject to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA), which is a funny two-part set of provincial regulations, one part giveth, one part taketh away. A good way to think of it is that the City must share public information under FOI unless they are strictly forbidden from sharing it under PPA. In practice, the City has to determine if there is Privacy Protection component to any information it shares,  which means staff need to comb through it and skim the privacy protection parts off. It is probably important to note that Council is completely separated from this process – except we are sometimes requested to provide information such as our correspondence. The City has professional staff who are well versed in FOIPPA who do those reviews, and under the act, the City is permitted to bill anyone asking for that information to cover the cost of that staff member’s time. It’s not a perfect system, but it is the system we have.