Halfway

Posted on November 9, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The half way mark in this Council term arrived yesterday, and an interesting two years it has been.

People often ask me if it what I expected, and my honest answer is not really. The job is different than the Councillor job, and there is no doubt we are in a different political environment now than we were two years ago. Folks who followed my path here (Hi Mom!) know that I got into this work without a “politics” background, but a background of working and volunteering in the community. When your mindset to problem solving has always been what works best practically (follow the evidence) and where does the community want to go here (follow the community), the shift to include how will this be torqued for political speaking points (follow the meme) takes learning a new set of skills, and a tremendous amount of patience. Not being a trained political lobbyist, this is a steep learning curve.

That said, there are many successes to celebrate from the last two years, and more clarity on the challenges facing us in the next two. In my mind, there are three big news stories in the first half of the term:

Changing Legislation. The provincial government took some bold action on the overlapping housing crises that have been plaguing our region for a decade or more. There was a lot of talk about this, and some pitched political battles between a few local governments and the province. I didn’t stay out of the fray. I said at the time, and continue to believe, that big changes had to happen, and to my Mayor cohort who were gnashing teeth and rending garments, my response was mostly to say “you really should have seen this coming”.

The path we were on was not sustainable, and as radical as the changes proposed seemed at the time, they are not immediate shifts, but long-term system changes that will take a decade or more to demonstrate their value. I am still concerned that the changes they emphasize the wrong tool (“the market”) to solve a problem caused by overreliance on that same tool. None of these changes will make a substantial change unless we have senior governments significantly increase their investment in building non-market housing. And I continue to push to province on our need for investment in schools, child care, and other infrastructure the needs to come with new housing.

Like in other Cities, the sudden legislative changes caused significant work load challenges for staff. Unexpected and foundational shifts in our OCP and Zoning bylaws are not easy to implement, and our new Housing Division did incredible work, met our regulatory deadlines, but also set a path to a new OCP that fits in our community. We were also fortunate to have secured Housing Accelerator Fund support that overlapped with this work, and allowed us to staff up and bring in additional resources to get the job done.

Opening təməsew̓txʷ. No doubt the opening of the single largest capital investment the City has ever made is big news. The doubling of aquatic and recreation space is an important investment, as our population has almost doubled since the CGP was opened in 1972. As expected with a state-of-the-art facility (filter and water management technology that is first in Canada, being the first Zero Carbon certified aquatic facility) of its scale, there were a few technical teething problems, but they are being managed under warranty, and have not taken away from the popularity of the facility. To find out it was listed by the Prix Versailles as a 2024 Laureate is unexpected and something the City of New Westminster should be proud of.

The big decisions about təməsew̓txʷ were made by the previous Council (including the critical “Go-or-No” decision during the uncertainty of summer 2020 that almost certainly saved the City a hundred million dollars), but the opening of the pool means that a myriad of operational decisions, and finding room in the budget for the new staff compliment, is something this Council oversaw. And now with the Parks and Recreation Comprehensive Plan being developed to envision the next decade of recreation investments, it is an exciting time for asset renewal in the City.

One Man Down: Jaimie McEvoy having a serious heart attack and missing a big portion of this year was also something the framed how Council operated, and the work that the rest of Council was able to get done. It also created some procedural uncertainty around what we do when a Member of Council needs to take a medical leave longer than a few days – believe it or not, we didn’t have procedures around this, nor does the Community Charter, or (as best we can tell) any other local government in BC. We are glad Jaimie is now able to transition back into the job and provide his voice to Council, and do those many other things in the community that keep us all grounded.

Halftime is also a goodtime to measure how we are doing in the goals we set for ourselves as a Council. Fortunately, we have two recent reports to Council on this. At the end of September, we received a report called “Council Strategic Priorities Plan Quarterly Status Update” which outlined staff’s assessment of where progress is on the 5 Strategic Priorities and the 49 action categories, using a traffic light model. The majority of items are “green”, indicating we are on track and meeting our performance indicators. Sixteen are “yellow” – meaning at least one performance indicator is falling behind and there are concerns to address. There are seven items that are “red”, indicating we are not on track, and there are concerns about our ability to achieve them.

The biggest challenge in the “red” category is simply resources: staff time and the ability to finance more staff time. There are also some senior government regulatory and funding issues we need to be more effective in advocating toward. However, progress on track or near track for 86% of our objectives is an excellent measure.

The bigger question isn’t how staff feel we are doing, but how the community feels about it, and the good news here is found in our recently-completed Ipsos Survey of the community. This was discussed in Workshop last week, and you can read it all here.

These kind of things always work better graphically, but the short story is that 88% of New West residents find the quality of life in new Westminster Good or Very good, 77% are Satisfied or Very Satisfied with the level of service they receive from the City, and 78% think they get Good of Very Good value for their tax dollar in New Westminster.

On Council Strategic Priorities, most residents feel are doing a good job on most of the priorities:

Meeting the City’s housing need is the only area where the majority feel we are not meeting community expectations, but traffic safety also comes in lower than most. It is perhaps no surprise that housing affordability, homelessness, and traffic are the biggest issues in the community in the extended survey questions. We know this, we can feel it when we talk to folks, but it is good to have come confirmation that what we hear in the bubble is connected to what is happening in the community. With all due respect to Facebook comments and partisan jabs, it is valuable to have actual random survey data that connects with the community and gets a defensible “mood of the room”. If I can summarize: we are doing well, mostly on target, but most certainly have some work to do. That is a good half-way mark check in.

The one thing we are not doing as well as I would like to celebrating our wins. There has been great foundational work this term – region-leading work – that hardly gets the fanfare it deserves, because it is hard stuff to “cut a ribbon” in front of. Our new Code of Conduct Bylaw and functional Ethics Commissioner; bringing the Electrical Utility and Climate Action together into a new Department of Energy and Climate; amalgamating various service areas into a new Department of Community Services; changes that fast-track Childcare and Affordable Housing approvals; our provincially-recognized and lauded Community Advisory Assembly model. This is progress that builds us for future success.

No resting on laurels, but I do feel proud of the work we have done to date, especially considering significant political headwinds and a surprises like the new provincial housing regulations. On to year three!

Council – Nov 4, 2024

Posted on November 7, 2024November 7, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

We got through a significant agenda fairly quickly this week, though we still had the time for some political performance, which is a good reminder that along with reading the agenda and reports, you can always watch the video of any Council meeting here. We started with two Opportunities to Be Heard:

Inter-Municipal Business Licence Agreement Bylaw No. 8487, 2024 and Inter-Municipal Business Licence Scheme Bylaw No. 8475, 2024
The City collaborates with other municipalities on the Metro West Inter-Municipal Business License Scheme to issue multi-city business licences to business that operate across municipal boundaries – so they can operate legally with a single licence. We are proposing to add Health Care Professionals and Services to this scheme, recognizing the nature of home Health Care as a business. Nothing controversial here, no-one sent correspondence or took the opportunity to be heard, so Council approved the Bylaw changes.

Business Licence Bylaw No. 8473, 2024
We talked last meeting about the work Staff has been doing to update our long-in-tooth Business Licence Bylaw. It is a good body of work that will streamline things, make it easier to start a business, in New West, and reduce some staff workload. No-one came to speak to the opportunity here, so Council moved to approve the Bylaw.

We then had a Temporary Use Permit to approve:

Temporary Use Permit No. TUP00033 for 28, 32, 34 Sixth Street and 606 Clarkson Street
Lookout Society has been providing supportive housing at the Cliff Block for many years. They have a space appropriate for expanded services that they can immediately open for emergency weather shelter. They have longer-term plans for the site related to a health outreach centre, so are only seeking the TUP for emergency shelter for this winter season, when the need is immediate and acute.

We did receive some correspondence on this, and it is important that we acknowledge the community concern we are hearing whenever increased services for the unhoused are raised. We hear you, we know that you don’t want to see people sleeping in alcoves, are chagrinned by human waste and other litter related to people not having homes, and that some in the community correlate this with a feeling of being unsafe. No-one is ignoring or belittling these concerns, instead, we are working on many different approaches to address these while we wait for the bigger, systemic solutions (which will require substantial senior government investment). I have talked about Crises Response, and other efforts we are undertaking, and emergency shelter is one part of this suite of approaches. Every person in an emergency shelter bed is a person not sleeping in an alcove or lighting a warming fire to stay alive during the winter season.

Council moved to approve this Temporary Use Permit.

We then had a Report for Action:

Appointment of Municipal Director to Metro Vancouver
As reported by the Record, I am finding Metro Van Board and Committee work is taking up more of my time, and I would rather spend that time back here in New Westminster working on local initiatives. The half way mark in a term (both here in the city and at Metro) is a good time for me to reflect on where my energies are best applied, especially as the new Board Chair has signaled changes in the committee structures may be upcoming, and this opens up new opportunities for some of my Council colleagues to take on some additional regional roles.

I intend to continue to serve on the Mayors Committee at Metro, and the Mayors Council at TransLink, but am happy to step back a bit from regional committee work and open up those opportunities for my Council Colleagues. Council (yes, this is a Council appointment, not an appointment I make as Mayor) appointed Nadine Nakagawa, who was serving as my alternate, to the role, and Jaime McEvoy as her Alternate. The appointment of members to Metro Committees is not done by Council or me, but by the Chair of Metro Vancouver.

There was some interesting discussion of this appointment at the Council table, but not alternate appointment was moved. I have some strong opinions about why Nadine is the right choice for this role, but that gets into politics, and I’ll save it for my Newsletter (subscribe here!)

We then approved the following items On Consent:

Amendments – Massey Theatre Working Group Terms of Reference
The City established a Massey Theatre Working Group to help communications between the Massey Theatre Society Board and the City through the work the City is doing to restore the theatre. There are changes being made to the term of reference to better reflect the way the Working Group has been operating over the last year.

New Provincial Housing Legislation: Official Community Plan Amendments – 2025 Work Plan
We are now one year in since the new provincial regulations were introduced that require us to update our Official Community Plan to include the new Transit Oriented Areas (TOA) and Small Scale Multi-Unit Housing (SSMUH). Fortunately, we received Housing Accelerator Fund money and capacity funding from the province to support us in getting this work done. The first phase of implementation work has been done, and this report outlines the work plan for staff to get the next phase of work done over the next 12 months. This will include some public consultation in early 2025 and eventual Council consideration of an updated OCP in summer 2025 to meet our Provincial deadlines.

I am really proud of how our small but mighty Housing Division staff have taken on this totally unexpected task and made it work, and have confidence that the long-term results of this will be good for the City and the region.

Temporary Use Permit: 502 Columbia Street for Emergency Shelter Use
The operator of the shelter at Army and Navy will need to renew or replace their Temporary Use Permit if they want to continue to provide this service. They have applied for a new TUP, and this report is the background and notice that the permit will be considered in a future Council meeting.

This TUP would permit 24/7 operation, though there is still some code work to make that a reality. The proposal also includes a community advisory committee to manage potential conflict with surrounding users (a model that worked well in Queensborough for a supportive housing building there). Council having supported this on Consent, we will consider this permit at our next meeting on November 18.

Uptown Business Association and Downtown New Westminster BIA – 2025 Business Promotion Scheme Budget Approvals
The City’s two Business Improvement Areas collect a small tax from their members (the commercial property owners in the BIA area) and use that to do “business improvement”. As this is a program regulated by the Local Government Act through the City, the BIAs are required to submit to the city what they plan to do with the money they collect every year. These are their reports.

Zoning Amendment Bylaw: Electric Vehicle Ready Requirements for New, Non-Residential Buildings
The City already requires that all off-street parking spaces for residential buildings must be “ev ready” – not necessarily have a charger, but must be wired and energized so a resident can plug in their charger (which may be proprietary to their vehicle type) if they want without re-wiring the building. This zoning bylaw would bring a similar requirement to new non-residential buildings (commercial and office), but only require ev-readiness in 50% of spots, recognizing that home charging is likely to be the default form of charging in the post-carbon economy.

This was approved on Consent, though the subsequent three readings of the Bylaw raised some questions about the public outreach that took place. Questions answered in detail in appendix 3 of the report.

The following item was Removed from Consent for discussion:

Crises Response Team Pilot Project: Grant Funding Application under the new Emergency Treatment Fund
There is a federal grant available to which we think the Crises Response Team work we are doing in the city applies. So we are applying for said grant, hoping to reduce impact of the CRT on our property taxes while strengthening the work our CRT can do by expanding the scope and reach.

We then had two Motions from Council

Guide Dog Access Awareness
Councillor Campbell

WHEREAS September is Guide Dog Access Awareness Month and is about educating people on proper guide dog etiquette, the rights of guide dog handlers and the legislation that protects them, and championing equal access for guide dog handlers.
WHEREAS Canada’s provinces and territories, human rights legislation prohibits discriminating against a person with a disability who is working with a guide dog and despite the legislation, people partnered with guide dogs continue to encounter discrimination when they’re denied access to public places and services, such as stores, restaurants, hotels, and taxis.
WHEREAS many of the barriers guide dog handlers face stem from a lack of awareness and refusing access to a guide dog team.
BE IT RESOLVED THAT The City of New Westminster place Guide Dog Welcome decals the entrance of all any municipal buildings to raise awareness that guide dogs are legally allowed anywhere the public has access and provide City Staff with Guide Dog Etiquette information from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB)
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED That the City promote placement of Guide Dog Welcome decals at the entrance to New Westminster businesses/organizations and, in the promotion, provide information from Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) on where to obtain decals.

This is a motion arising from direct advocacy from the community, and though the request for us to designate Guide Dog awareness Month came too late for us to get it on our Proclamation schedule, the follow-up conversation by Councillor Campbell was centered on what tangible actions we can take a City. Happy that Council supported this.

Providing Equity in the Delivery of Energy Saving Programs for New West Electrical Customers
Councillor Fontaine

WHEREAS New Westminster Electric Utility customers are not being treated in the same manner as BC Hydro customers when it comes to accessing a variety of program offerings; and
WHEREAS New Westminster Electrical Utility customers are not currently eligible for the BC Hydro Solar Panel and Battery Storage program; and
WHEREAS BC Hydro currently offers rebates up to $5,000 on eligible grid-connected solar panels and up to an additional $5,000 for battery storage systems to qualifying residential customers; and
WHEREAS New Westminster Electrical Utility customers are not eligible to participate in BC Hydro’s demand response and peak saver programs
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT staff be directed to report back as to how the City could systematically provide better alignment regarding program offerings between BC Hydro and New Westminster Electrical Utility; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT staff be directed to report back on the cost and feasibility of establishing our own hydro solar panel and battery storage program and/or partner with BC Hydro to offer their program to New Westminster Electrical Utility customers

There is a bit to unpack here, but the end result of the discussion at Council is that this is an item to be referred to the Electrical Utility Commission, and was discussed at length at the last EUC meeting. Staff in Climate action are already actively engaged in this work, but have not yet reported the results of that work to Council.

There are some details in here that are worth talking about. New West Electric customers have been able to receive the benefits of BC Hydro incentive programs such as air conditioner and heat pump rebates, and at times have had access to additional incentive programs funded by Energy Save New West. The Solar/Battery program mentioned in the motion is not a BC Hydro program, but a Provincial government program that they tasked BC Hydro with delivering. The difference between a program funded by “ratepayers” and those by “taxpayers” may seem a bit arcane, but is actually fundamental to whether New West customers (and those in Fortis-served areas and other municipal power utilities like Nelson and Summerland) can apply. The Demand Response and Peak Saver programs mentioned above also cannot be implemented until our AMI rollout is completed, because it requires modern metering technology. It seems funny to me that the guy who tried to defund the AMI meter program is interested in something only the MAI program can deliver, but nothing shocks anymore.

This is an ongoing body of work for the Electrical Utility commission, as they have the mandate and ability to evaluate what programs like this the City should support, and can make recommendations to Council on fundamental questions about whether a program should be supported by ratepayers or taxpayers.

Section 105

Posted on November 4, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Most of you have heard by now that the City’s Ethics Commissioner ruled on a complaint about my participation at the Local Climate Action Summit and COP28 last year. Our (New! Updated!) Code of Conduct process requires Council to receive and consider the ruling, and any suggested remedies. That happened in Council today, and I have been reluctant to write too much about this before Council completed that process today.

If you want all the lengthy details, there is a long report on the complaint here, including all of the spaghetti-at-the-wall complaints that were dismissed by the Commissioner.

A summary report from the Ethics Commissioner here outlines the issue that was the subject of the investigation.

And a link to my formal response (written to the EC and Council) here.

The short version in that response covers all I need to say to the process. Our Code process allows the option for me to attend the Special Council meeting and plead my case, but I don’t see that as a useful way to spend Council or the Commissioners time when I fully agree with the findings and recommendation (I have nothing the “plead”). I think the brief response makes that clear, and better for Council to deliberate on that report without me staring them down or seen to be putting my finger on the scale. That said, now that is over, I can expand on that brief response and talk to the community about process and what I see as some initial learnings may be.

First off, I do think it is important to apologize for getting us all involved in this process, and I am disappointed that the adjudication process makes it difficult to do so before now. I honestly had no suspicion that my actions constituted a breach of Section 105, and (as the Ethics Commissioner clearly states in her findings) there was no reason for me to doubt the soundness of the advice that I had received. Still, no-one but me holds the responsibility for my actions, and for the downstream results of them. There was a breach of the Charter, and good faith or not it has been an un-needed distraction from the important work we are doing, and need to continue to do, on climate action. I take responsibility and apologize for that.

It is important to clarify where the breach occurred, because it is not clear in most of the reporting around this issue. The Commissioner determined that there was no problem with the City’s participation in the Local Climate Action Summit or COP28, with the way I communicated about this event with staff, Council, or the public, or with the travel itself. The commissioner found that I acted in good faith with the motivation to further Council’s stated goals relating to climate action, and that my participation was consistent with the duties that accompany the office Mayor.

Even the receiving the benefit of the participation in COP28 was determined to be “received as an incident of the social obligations that accompany the office of Mayor and consistent with his duties” and therefore not a breach of Section 105, which is consistent with the legal advice I received from counsel at the time. However, it was the “luxury” nature of the travel – that being Business Class travel and what is being interpreted as a luxury hotel – was not consistent with these duties, and that part of it constituted a breach of Section 105.

This is definitely a nuanced legal interpretation, and I leave it to the lawyers to debate that. I appreciate the Commissioner’s recommendation that coaching be offered on this, and I’m sure it will be in interesting conversation as the detail is all in how one interprets the sections of the Charter, not the language of the Charter itself. As I mentioned in my response to the Commissioner, a request for coaching on Section 105 was adopted by Council back in January. Now that this review is behind us, we can get on with that.

Finally, I do commend the Ethics Commissioner for the thoroughness of her work, and to staff and counsel who helped Council develop this (New! Updated!) Code of Conduct process. I can’t claim to be happy that I am the “respondent” to the first complaint to make it to this resolution stage, but I am proud that we have a process that brings procedural fairness, transparency, and arms-length review. When we see how Codes of Conduct and ECs are facing challenges around the province, I am happy New Westminster is once again showing leadership. I might further argue that these processes would operate better, and would build more public confidence, if they were led consistently by a Provincial body, and not by local Councils, but I also know we are not a City that shrinks away from doing important work because it is “someone else’s job”.

That includes Climate Action. As COP29 starts next week in Baku, there is no Local Climate Action Summit component, with the LGMA mandate being fulfilled through the CHAMP process that was ultimately the product of LCAS at COP28. We will have some better idea about the success of this model when Belém hosts COP30 next year. Until then, Local communities will still be leading the way in direct climate action, in empowering youth to take power over their future, and in addressing the impacts of a disrupted climate.

Council – October 7, 2024

Posted on October 8, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

It was quite the Council meeting on Monday, not because of the regular business of Council, which was pretty straight forward, but because the level of political performance that occurred in the last half of the evening was outstanding. Some of my more unfiltered feelings about that part are best saved for the Newsletter (subscribe here, its free!), so I’ll keep to the straight goods on the agenda here.

We started with one piece of Unfinished Business.

Metro 2050 Type 3 Amendment Application: City of Surrey (7880 128 Street)
When a city in Metro Vancouver makes an Official Community Plan change that impacts the Regional Growth Strategy, it requires an RGS Amendment to be approved by the Metro Vancouver Board. There are a few different types of amendments, and Type 3 amendments require “consultation” with the member communities of Metro Vancouver. We are able to ignore this, respond to it saying “hunky dory”, or reply saying we don’t support it. The Metro Board will consider our feedback when making a decision, though they are not required to follow our recommendation.

This Type 3 amendment in Surrey is pretty minor in its regional impact, but New West Council asked for more info on it before sending feedback. Surrey declined to provide more info or present, and Council voted to send a note indicating we do not support this amendment.

We then moved the following items On Consent:

Construction Noise Bylaw Exemption Extension Request: 330 East Columbia Street (Royal Columbian Hospital Redevelopment Project)
There has been significant traffic disruption as underground and surface paving works have been occurring around the RCH expansion. The priority here is always assuring emergency vehicle access and the safety of pedestrians in such a high-traffic area. This means convenience for through drivers has suffered quite a bit, but this is a unique place to do major road works. The final paving will be happening in October, and they need to do some of it at night in order to manage the traffic and assure road safety and emergency vehicle access, which requires a Construction Noise Bylaw exemption. There will be *significant* disruption for a three-night window here, so plan alternate routes if you can, folks.

Construction Noise Bylaw Exemption Request: 100 Braid Street (Wesgroup Contracting Ltd) – Crane Removal
The crane on 100 Braid Street is coming down, and its proximity to one of the busiest intersections of the City makes this much more viable at night, which requires a Construction Noise Bylaw exemption.

Expanding the Metro West Inter-Municipal Business Licence to Include Health Care Professionals and Services, and Annual Licence Fee Increase
The City works with our adjacent municipalities to allow shared business licences for those types of businesses that move across City boundaries, and we are adding home care providers to that list, meaning health care professionals can get just one license to operate in Vancouver, Burnaby, Delta, Richmond and Surrey. This simplifies their lives considerably. This report reads the Bylaw but provides an Opportunity to be Heard at the November 4 Council meeting before we adopt it. If you have opinions, let us know.

Licence Agreement at 203 Pembina Street
Folks are building townhouses in Queensborough, and need to pre-load a laneway, and will need to bypass a sanitary sewer through that laneway during pre-load, meaning they need to get a license agreement with the City to manage risk and liability.

The following items were Removed from Consent for discussion:

Guidelines and Decision-Making Matrix for Designating Municipally Significant Events
British Columbia’s liquor laws are archaic. Several events in the City over the last two years have sought to be designated “Municipally Significant” so they can serve a different sized beer (believe it or not) and can set a price for alcohol that actually makes them a bit of money running a beer garden as part of their event. But there are no criteria for what is considered “municipally significant”.

This criteria (and delegating the authority to staff) is a first step, but in the report it is clear staff are working on some more comprehensive liquor licence reforms in the City, because the current provincial/municipal interface on this is Byzantine.

Update Regarding Council Motion Re: Improving the Public’s Access to Trees during the City’s Biannual Tree Sale
This report is no report – they are just to report that staff are going to report back once they have had the time to do the work required to inform the report.

We then had the following Bylaws for Adoption:

Anvil Theatre Fees and Charges Bylaw No. 8209, 2020, Amendment Bylaw No. 8482, 2024;
Climate Action, Planning & Development Fees and Rates Bylaw No. 7683, 2014, Amendment Bylaw No. 8478, 2024;
Cultural Services Fees and Charges Bylaw No. 7875, 2016, Amendment Bylaw No. 8477, 2024;
Electrical Utility Bylaw No. 6502, 1998, Amendment Bylaw No. 8476, 2024;
Engineering User Fees and Rates Bylaw No. 7553, 2013, Amendment Bylaw No. 8472, 2024;
Fees Bylaw No. 6186, 1994, Amendment Bylaw No. 8479, 2024; and
Fire Protection Bylaw No. 6940, 2004, Amendment Bylaw No. 8481, 2024
These Bylaws that all set their respective fees and charges rates for 2025 were adopted unanimously by Council. Now we can start working on the budget.

We then had a full schedule of Motions from Council:

Requesting an Inquiry Under Section 765 of the Local Government Act regarding Metro Vancouver
Submitted by Councillor Fontaine

WHEREAS the governance model at Metro Vancouver is over 50 years old and an independent review should be undertaken by the Province of BC; and
WHEREAS the Inspector of Municipalities of British Columbia has significant statutory powers including the ability to investigate any bylaw, order, decision, or action of the Greater Vancouver Regional District Board; and
WHEREAS to date the Province of BC has not agreed to undertake a governance review of Metro Vancouver;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Mayor write a letter on behalf of Council to the Premier and request the Province of BC to immediately initiate an independent review of Metro Vancouver’s governance structure.

This was a weird motion, as it was never explained what the relevance of Section 765 of the LGA was about, but we don’t vote on the “whereas” sections, so opportunity lost for clarity there. Council agreed to send this letter, though I wonder what the purpose is (other than getting another media cycle out of this horse well flogged) as we are now onto a year of a very few people asking the same thing (including pervious motions at this Council) and no leader of the three parties vying for the Premier job in two weeks have expressed any interest in undertaking this right now, as it solves no problems and we have actual problems to solve.

Supporting Increased Tourism in New Westminster through the Introduction of a New “Photographable” Sign on Pier West Park
Submitted by Councillor Minhas

WHEREAS Pier Park West is now reconnected to the eastern part of the Quayside boardwalk and provides a pleasurable place for locals and tourists to enjoy views of the Fraser River; and
WHEREAS a number of cities around the world have used enlarged signage in highly visible and photographable areas to attract visitor and help market their cities; and
WHEREAS we have the opportunity to install a large “New Westminster” sign on our waterfront with the backdrop including several bridges and the Fraser River;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT staff reach out to Tourism New Westminster and advise that Council would be supportive of installing of a large “New Westminster” sign on our waterfront as one additional method of attracting tourists to our city and downtown district.

Yet another weird motion, as it seems like a notion someone had that could have been an email instead of a Council motion. The will result in an email saying we might support something that is not defined to an organization that has not clearly indicated any intent to do the thing, so innocuous enough. And Council voted to support it.

To quote a colleague, I have a lot of questions around the actual proposal (do people actually travel to places specifically to get a picture of the place name? What is the evidence this will drive any of the massive spin-off economic development benefits the mover suggested, and how will those benefits be offset by the mover spending his time on regional media describing the neighbourhood as a dangerous, abandoned place few dare to tread? Isn’t this Tin Soldier Erasure? Wouldn’t it be more compelling and drive more regional interest if to have the sign say “Sto:Lo” or “sχʷəyem”? and many more, if we get to the point of actually reviewing a project).

Supporting increasing Cycling, Tourism and Economic Activity through a Pilot “Cycling Sundays on Front Street”
Submitted by Councillor Fontaine

WHEREAS the Province of British Columbia has already closed Front Street for extended periods of time and redirected traffic to other routes throughout the City; and
WHEREAS there is currently no ability for cyclists to easily and safely ride their bikes from Pier Park West to the Brunette Fraser Regional Greenway in Sapperton; and
WHEREAS other cities across North America have successfully closed roadways on weekends to permit alternate modes of transportation such as cycling and pedestrians.
BE IT RESOLVED THAT staff report back on the feasibility and operational issues pertaining to the development of a pilot project that would: during daylight hours, close Front Street on Sundays from May to September 2025 to vehicular traffic; and a during the period noted above, open up Front Street to cyclists, pedestrians and other forms active transportation while it is temporarily closed to vehicular traffic; b. seek interest from food trucks and other micro businesses who may want to set up on Front Street during the ‘Cycling Sunday’ closures.

This idea, first brought to you by Mayor Cote during COVID times as part of the “Streets for People” program of the time, is something the City always meant to explore further after the Pattullo Bridge project stopped occupying the space. It is still a god idea, not without its challenges, as there are significant costs involved, we need to work with the regional goods movement sector, the connections to Sapperton Landing Park still require Railway oversight, and the resultant impacts on Royal and Columbia Street of diverted truck traffic. Still, it’s a good idea to get a report back to Council on opportunities and challenges here. Council supported this motion.

Seek Support from the BC Ministry of Transportation to Undertake a Feasibility Study to Expand the Crossing Capacity between Queensborough and Connaught Heights
Submitted by Councillor Minhas

WHEREAS the City of New Westminster is currently undertaking a community consultation around the 22nd Street SkyTrain station which could result in up to 30,000 new residents moving into the neighbourhood; and
WHEREAS the residents of Queensborough can often suffer quality of life issues pertaining to delays crossing the four-lane Queensborough bridge during peak periods and beyond; and
WHEREAS it will take a significant amount of time, planning and inter-governmental discussions to undertake a future replacement or expansion of the Queensborough Bridge;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT Council direct staff to develop a consultation plan to determine the level of interest from our residents/businesses regarding prioritizing the future expansion or replacement of the Queensborough bridge; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT any expansion or replacement proposal should prioritize the movement of TransLink operated buses, cyclists, taxis, ride-share and pedestrians across the bridge; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT the Mayor write to the BC Ministry of Transportation to invite them to partner with the City during our Queensborough Bridge community consultation process.

This is one I will unpack a bit more in the Newsletter, because there are layers of weird governance ideas in here. In short, we just approved the Queensborough Transportation Plan in May after more than a year of public consultation and working with the Ministry of Transportation and are now implementing that plan. Consistent with the QTP, staff reported to us recently that active transportation and transit priority work is going on related to the bridge entrances, on both sides, both through the QTP and our recently approved partnership with TransLink on Bus Speed and Reliability program approved by this Council in July. So why this motion now, just as we are starting implementation of those plans?

I also have concerns with the language here, first because it asks the City to launch Public Consultation on a project that doesn’t exist to address a piece of infrastructure that doesn’t even belong to the City. Worse, it seems to envision expansion or replacement of the bridge, which is not consistent with our Transportation plans in the City, regional Transport2050 goals at Metro Vancouver or TransLink, or the Province’s own CleanBC goals, where the existing strategies for bus speed and reliability and active transportation are aligned with all of those.

Finally, I don’t want to get into a lecture here about the Fundamental Law of Traffic congestion, but adding lanes to a highway in an urban area has never solved congestion, and has almost always resulted in significant negative impacts on the communities through which those freeways are driven. This is not the first time someone has proposed that a community be plowed down and paved over in order to save that neighbourhood has been proposed, and in the end all that neighborhood got was more traffic, more congestion, more noise and pollution. The future here is alternatives, and the work that staff are doing to bring bus speed and reliability and safer active transportation connections on this route is the sustainable path that meets the Province’s CleanBC goals, the regionals Transport2050 goals, and the City’s Transportation, livability, and sustainability goals.

So Council severed this motion, didn’t support the first “Be It Resolved”, did support the second and the third, after the third was slightly amended to make clear the City will not lead a consultation. But if the province want to take this up, let us know.

Sue Big Oil Class Action Lawsuit
Submitted by Councillor Henderson

WHEREAS the City of New Westminster manages, maintains and prepares municipal infrastructure to protect our residents from future heat waves, wildfires, flooding, and other climate impacts, thereby safeguarding the health and safety of our residents and their property and as a result faces massive costs due to climate change, which are expected to increase; and
WHEREAS fossil fuel companies were warned by their own scientists decades ago that the ongoing burning of fossil fuels would cause massive suffering and climate costs, and chose to lobby against action on climate change so that the industry could continue to earn on average over a trillion dollars in profit each year in recent years; and
WHEREAS it is unacceptable and creates a perverse incentive for irresponsible fossil fuel development that local governments and taxpayers bear the full extent of these climate costs whilst multinational fossil fuel companies take no financial responsibility for the harm caused by their products; and
WHEREAS over 20 local governments in the United States and around the world, including nine local governments in BC, have filed lawsuits to recover a share of their climate costs (e.g. for loss and damage, adaptation, and climate preparedness) from fossil fuel companies, and Canadian legal experts recommend that Canadian local governments do the same;
BE IT RESOLVED that staff report back on opportunity and cost for New Westminster to join the Sue Big Oil Class Action Lawsuit and present potential cost and staff resource needs as part of the draft 2025 Operating Budget; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the cost of joining the Sue Big Oil class action lawsuit be first assessed via the Climate Action Decision-Making Framework to determine the appropriate funding source.

This also gets a mention in the newsletter, because I cannot square indicated concern about the cost of this motion with a weird attempt to strip the City of Millions of dollars of Low Carbon Fuel Credit revenue in an attempted amendment, but that’s just politics.

I supported this motion, and it was supported by the majority of Council after several public delegations and a bit of a raucous Council debate. I can only speak to my reasons to support. The costs are real and being downloaded onto communities from one of the world’s most profitable industries every day. The Municipal Insurance Association of BC and UBCM are both calling for funding to address unprecedented climate disruption costs. We don’t have the power to end fossil fuel subsidies or tax big oil to the level that would reflect their corporate responsibility. What we can do is join our cohort municipalities across BC to use the courts to hold them accountable through the courts.

There can be no doubt that the oil industry knew that their products would have catastrophic impacts on global climate, and spent decades funding doubt-sowing “research” and suppressing their own evidence about this reality. Not only emulating the tobacco industries “deny at all costs” strategy about the horrific impacts of their products, but hiring the very same people (seriously, google Fred Seitz and Fred Singer) to run the denial machinery. They knew, they lied, and local government taxpayers are paying the bills for that choice they made. That should not go unpunished.

Finally, this motion is well drafted to add our support notionally, recognizing we will not be out of pocket unless a class action occurs, and allows us the opportunity to fund this small cost (in the scale of the cost of climate impacts in our community, this is tiny) through money we receive from the oil industry through the polluter pays principle and our Low Carbon Fuel Credit program. We are going to use the industry’s own money to sue them, and there is some elegance in that.

Finally, we had one piece of New Business:

Reconsideration of September 23, 2024 Motion on adoption the Interim Density Bonus Policy
After the last-minute decision last meeting to amend the Interim Density Bonus Policy for the City, I had some conversations with members of Council and staff about the implications for numerous in-stream applications. I was compelled to bring the Policy back to Council for reconsideration, because as amended, it varied greatly from our long-established and successful practice of incentivizing Purpose Built Rental over Strata in new development by not by giving them a free pass from DCCs and other development costs, but by exempting only the Density Bonus charge for space used for PBR. In staff’s attempts to make simpler and more transparent this very strange time with Provincial housing regulations being blended into our existing process while approvals continue to move forward, Council inadvertently made it less clear and more confusing by turning back on one of our key policy directions of the last decade.

Recognizing this is an interim measure, and Council always has the prerogative to vary from policy when it comes to approving any development, in the interest in supporting staffs efforts to keep the wheels moving during the transition, I suggested we adopt the motion Staff recommended in September, waiving DB payments for PBR as a policy until the full set of growth financing policies complaint with Bill 46 can be adopted next year. Council voted to support the reconsideration.

And that wrapped Council right at 10:30, the hour at which we are required by Bylaw to move for extension if we go past. So we’ll call that a full day.

Council – Sept 9, 2024

Posted on September 10, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

September’s first meeting continued our tradition of holding one fall meeting in Queensborough every year. It is a bit of a logistical challenge, and if you watch the video you see us managing as best we can with unfamiliar tech and layout, but I think staff did a great job in supporting us and it was good to see a full Queensborough audience at the event.

There is also something nice about holding a Council meeting in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a green park with young families and seniors walking by and kids playing on the playground equipment. It reminds you of the work we do, and how it impacts people’s daily lives, even if they don’t realize we are doing it right now on the other side of that window.

Our agenda started with the following items Moved on Consent:

Construction Noise Bylaw Exemption Request: 220 Salter Street (Metro Vancouver Sewer Inspection – Fraser River Crossing Project)
There are major regional sewer lines under Salter Street, and they need nighttime (when the water is low) inspection, which requires a construction noise exemption for two weeknights, which Council is granting.

2024-2034 UBCM Canada Community Works Fund Agreement
The City will be getting a grant of about $160K to support infrastructure investment in the City, but need to sign this agreement to get the cash, and agree to spend it on qualifying projects as per the agreement. Easiest grant ever.

We then had these following items that were Removed from Consent for Discussion:

2025 Permissive Property Tax: Exempt Properties – Review of Application Result
There are two types of properties that are exempt from Property Taxes – Statutory and Permissive. The first are by Provincial Law, and are why most churches and private schools are exempt. The second are at the pleasure of the Local Government, land use we can choose as a City to exempt from property taxes. These could include social housing, sports clubs, social service not-for profits, and the such. They must apply every year, and in my time on Council, we have not added many to the list of permissive exemptions, though we often get new applications. As a policy, the City directs not-for-profits to the City’s generous grant program if they need financial support, as that is a more accountable process.

The current list of permissive exemptions equals about $1 Million (this is reported every year as part of our annual report), and this year we got applications for 6 more, totaling $244,000 more. Two new applications (both established church properties with new congregations) totaling about $30,000 were added to the list of exemptions as per the established policy.

Budget 2025: Fees and Rates Review
As a normal part of our annual Budget process, we need to set fee bylaws fort next year. This has to happen early, because financial modelling of cost recovery is part of what informs the rest of the budget, and cost recovery is obviously impacted by fees. If we reduce business license fees, for example, that’s not “free”, it impacts the tax rates we need to charge next year. Most rates are adjusted annually to meet CPI, as a proxy for what I costs us to deliver the service, and to avoid larger and more intermittent price spikes. CPI estimate this year is 3.0%.

There are others that need bigger adjustments, like the cost of providing brass plaques for the cemetery have gone up quite a bit, requiring a 24% increase to recover those costs. Others have external controls, such as our towing charges being set by ICBC. Yet other fees are adjusted to align to market conditions (on street parking not going up this year, short-term parkade parking rates going up a bit due to demand increases), and yet other being shifted to better align with regional municipal comparators (e.g. Fire Safety Plan Review fees).

All told, these changes average aout to about a 3% increase, driving an extra $450k in revenue. For context, $450K is about as much revenue as we would draw from a 0.4% property tax increase.

Business License Bylaw Modernization Update
Staff have been working on a Business License Bylaw update for some time now. Not just looking at fees, but making sure our approach to issuing licenses reflects the modern reality of the local business community. Business license counts are way up, we issue almost 4,000 a year, which is about 20% more than Pre-COVID 2019. Still, staff want to streamline the license process, remove outdated requirements, and provide more flexibility for start-up businesses so it is easier to start a business in New West. Regular readers will also remember that a comparison with surrounding municipalities was conducted and changes to the fee schedule are proposed to align better with regional trends.

There has already been several stages of engagement with the business community here, but there will be another check-in now that proposed changes have been developed. This report simply to update Council before it went out to consultation, and to check in for any red flags.

Response to Council Motion Regarding “Tenant Protections”
As per a motion put forward in a previous meeting, staff are going to update our tenant protection measures. There is an ongoing rental affordability crisis, and recent changes to provincial housing regulations may result in increased pressure to demolish and re-develop our most affordable rentals, which puts a lot people in a very precarious situation. Alongside this the Province has brought in new tenant protection powers through Bill 16. It’s time to update our progressive-in-2015 Tenant Relocation Policy to assure we don’t exacerbate the homelessness crisis.

We then had several Motions from Council (not necessarily in this order, as we delayed a couple until after Public Delegations because we had people come to speak to Council in favour of a few motions).

Regulate the Unsolicited Distribution of Graphic Images Depicting a Fetus
Submitted by Councillor Campbell and Councillor Henderson

WHEREAS New Westminster residents have expressed concerns that unsolicited flyers showing graphic images of aborted fetuses are being delivered to homes and causing harm; and
WHEREAS a number of Canadian municipalities in Alberta and Ontario have established bylaws that; and
WHEREAS in accordance with British Columbia’s Community Charter, Section 8 (3) (i) A council may, by bylaw, regulate, prohibit and impose requirements in relation to public health; and
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT that staff provide council with proposed bylaw amendments to require all print collateral delivered to any premises or distributed to the public that shows, or appear to show, a graphic image of a fetus be delivered in a sealed opaque envelope with a graphic content warning, identify the name and address of the sender, and include measures to ensure individuals are not inadvertently exposed to graphic content on a leaflet, pamphlet, paper, booklet, postcard, or any other printed collateral.

This motion was driven by calls form the community we have received a few times over the last few years. I don’t have much to add to the wording above, except that this is just the beginning of a bit of a process Staff will have to go through to determine what our legal abilities are here, and how best to structure a bylaw so it is effective. I don’t know if anyone in BC has done this before, though local governments have been successful in Ontario and Alberta, so we will need to find a local context that fits with our Community Charter and Local Government Act. This was supported by all of Council, so more to come!

Lower Mainland Local Government Association Tracking and Reporting of Votes on Motions and Resolutions
Submitted by Councillor Nakagawa

WHEREAS Local Government Associations, the Union of BC Municipalities, and the Federation of Canadian
Municipalities advocate for issues that impact their member municipalities; and
WHEREAS municipal Mayors and Councillors are financially supported to attend these conferences in order
to advocate on behalf of their local constituents, yet there is no way for constituents to know how their elected representatives vote on motions and resolutions,
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of New Westminster submit the following resolution to the Lower Mainland Local Government Association:
“THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Lower Mainland Local Government Association begins tracking and reporting how attendees vote on motions and resolutions and that they submit a motion to UBCM and FCM advocating for those organizations to do the same.”

Your local government is represented at these regional meetings by elected members of Council, and advocate to senior government for policy changes. It is probably a good idea for you to know what your local elected officials are advocating for – or against. It seems like a good step towards improving transparency and accountability. There are some technical challenges that might be easiert to solve at the relatively small Lower Mainland LGA than the much larger UBCM and FCM, and it will involve some investment of resources by those parties, so it is appropriate to structure this as a request for those organizations to evaluate if that is something they want to do. Council moved to approve this.

Selecting an Inclusive and Accessible Site for the 2025 Canada Day Celebration and Festivities
Submitted by Councillor Minhas

WHEREAS Canada Day offers the City of New Westminster an opportunity to celebrate and bring residents together in celebration and reflection; and
WHEREAS the Pier Park location for Canada Day festivities currently offers little opportunity for shade on hot days which often occur in early July; and
WHEREAS Queen’s Park has played host to previous Canada Day celebrations and offers more opportunities to keep participants cool on hot summer days;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT staff seek feedback from the public through our Be Heard system regarding their preference for the 2025 Canada Day festivities and celebrations; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT several locations across the City be offered to the public as a potential site for the 2025 Canada Day festivities including at least one site in Queensborough.

This was a bit of a complicated conversation as Council got a bit into the weeds, but it was nonetheless a good discussion that will hopefully lead to a good community discussions, and I think the direction is clearer with some amendments.

Be Heard New West is part of a community engagement toolbox, not a public survey tool. As Councillor Nakagawa said, “Public Engagement isn’t just asking if a hotdog is a sandwich”, it is a process of sharing information and asking for feedback in ways that have meaningful input into decision making. The decision by Council was to have staff report back with resource needs to do a proper engagement on this.

There was a bit of preemptive discussion about locations as well. There is a complex history why the “main”
Canada Day program moved from Queens Park to Pier Park, and those decisions were made in consultation with the many partners that are required to make the event happen. In the pre-COVID times we got to a point where there were two locations, with some overlap. Post-COVID the Pier Park location became the primary location, and the numbers reflected a much higher interest in people being there than Pier Park (thousands instead of hundreds in attendance). However, it is important to note that Pier Park festivities were not the only events coordinated by the City at Canada Day in 2024. There were activations all long weekend in Queensborough, at Queens Park, at the Anvil, and other locations.

Finally, The City’s festivals budget is fairly limited, and massive expansions of the event would require budget decisions, and increased staff resources. Many events in the City are primarily run by partners (Uptown Live, Pride, Hyack Parade and Festival, Fridays on Front, etc.) with some significant City support, but City-run events have been pretty limited to “civic” dates, like Remembrance Day (our largest City-run event), Canada Day and Truth and Reconciliation day, where partners support the City more than vice-versa. But it is clearly a spectrum between the two end members here.

Anyway, this will be an ongoing discussion. Let us know what you think!

Increasing Openness and Transparency at City Hall by Registering Lobbyist Activities
Submitted by Councillor Fontaine

WHEREAS lobbyist registries are intended to provide a public record that is accessible to residents of interactions between public servants, elected officials and lobbyists and to allow for rules regarding lobbyists to be enforced; and
WHEREAS British Columbia does not currently allow municipalities to use the provincial lobbyist registry nor does it extend the legal authorities municipalities would need to enforce lobbyist rules with a local registry; and
WHEREAS it is important for a functional local democracy that any lobbying efforts by entities such as corporations, labour unions, foreign governments or other similar foreign-based organizations be recorded and publicly reported in a timely manner
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City request the Province immediately take one of the following two actions:
The Province amend the Lobbyist Registration Act to cover the City of New Westminster and other similar mid-to-large-sized cities and administer the regulation of lobbying in the city; OR,
The Province amend the Community Charter to allow the City to establish a lobbyist registry and give the City the legal authority to register lobbyists, create rules for lobbyists’ conduct in their interactions with elected officials and public servants, as well as the power to enforce those rules. In addition, the Province further empower the Provincial Registrar of Lobbyists to work with the City to share information so as to reduce duplication and costs for both orders of government.

This was also a good discussion, and it was clear that everyone saw transparency and accountability as ideas worth supporting. There was a bit of procedural adjustment (to add this as an advocacy issue to the Lower Mainland LGA along with a letter to the province), but all in the interest in making our call for this louder.

I raised some concern about the difference between local politics and provincial/federal politics, and the need for us to clearly define what Lobbying is. I have dozens of conversations every week with people nt he community, residents, business operators, non-profits, and most some include discussions of City Bylaws or policies or practices. I would hate to think that every time I set up the Ask Pat booth at the Farmers Market that I would need everyone who asks me a question to register as a lobbyist. That said, there are clearly a few meetings I do have with people or organizations who are paid to advocate to me and fit the strict definition of Lobbyist. I just wonder if we can clearly draw a line between those two without finding exampled that straddle that line. So we have work to do there.

Finally, I added an amendment that asked that we engage the City’s new Ethics Commissioner, and ask them to report back on potential procedures or practices we could adopt as a form of practice disclosure for when we are being lobbied. I think the public is less interested in reading the names of lobbyists, and are more interested in what meetings we are taking and the purpose of those meetings.

So, more to come on that!

And with that we wrapped our Queensborough excursion, and considering the list of things above that ended with “more work to do”, I feel confident in saying we are back into the thick of it.

Labour Day ’24

Posted on September 2, 2024September 2, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The days are getting shorter, the evenings are starting to cool off, the PNE rains have come and gone. Though the Equinox is three weeks away yet, most of us are looking back at the summer that was, while everything we put off until “after the break” is starting to loom large in our calendars for September. Labour Day always arrives with a mix of feelings: summer’s last hurrah, excitement of a new school year and a new recreation schedule, imminent pumpkin spice.

Labour Day is not just another day off, it is a day off won by working people organizing and asserting their rights. It is a celebration of battles won, a reminder of the quality of life granted to all working people because of 100+ years of work and sacrifice and solidarity though organized labour. It is also a call to assure that the rights won and economic prosperity driven by fair wages are not lost to the imaginary economies of neoliberal austerity.

Workers continue to build this City, this Province, and this Country. At the same time, right-wing politicians at every level are working to protect the record profits of multinationals at the expense of working people. They may talk a long yarn about “affordability”, but they are conspicuously silent when we discuss the erosion of real wages, or how austerity hurts the very social fabric that makes a society livable. They speak about supporting workers, but their votes tell a different story.

In New Westminster, our community is served every day by the professionalism and dedication of members of CUPE, the IBEW, the NWPOA and the IAFF. In the broader sense, our community is also served every day by the Teamsters who are right now fighting the rail multinationals to protect their hard-earned workplace rights and the safety of not only their workers, but all in their community. Our community is also served every day by the ATU members fighting right now to assure reliable and publicly-operated para-transit service remains available to the most vulnerable people in our community.

I was proud to spend some time up at Edmonds Park today showing solidarity with my friends in the Labour Movement: the leaders at every level, and the folks who show up every day and quietly build community while they provide for their family. The fight goes on. Not just on Labour Day, but every day.

Pride 2024

Posted on August 10, 2024August 10, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

It’s Pride week in New West.

For the 15h year, New West is marking its own Pride Week with a series of events, you can check out the entire calendar here, because it isn’t just about the Street Festival on the 17th.

As the week kicked off with the Flag Raising at Douglas College (the DSU and the College itself have been incredible supporters of New West Pride, and were there to help it grow from a small, one-day walk to a week-long-plus event!), and a flag Raising at Friendship gardens at City Hall, and a flag raising at the NWPD department on Columbia Street. These events have had be thinking a bit more recently about the evolution of the Pride movement (represented in part by the evolution of the Pride Flag), and how recent events, locally and globally, have changed the context of Pride.

I think some of us (yes, there is a cis-normative and euro-colonial bias here) have felt that the “fight” has been won, and Pride is more of a celebration of that than a protest against continued injustice. Right to have your marriage recognized, protection from state discrimination or persecution, the end of sodomy laws, these were big fights worth celebrating. But there are active movements right now here in North America to move backwards on these rights, and to prevent basic human rights and appropriate informed medical care to people who are not cis-conforming, with Trans and Intersex people facing the brunt of the intolerance and hate. The inclusive pride flag reminds us that until we all have rights, none of our rights are safe.

It shouldn’t take the persecution of a cis-gendered woman on an international stage, simply because she didn’t conform to a Eurocentric standard of beauty or sense of gender stereotypes for people to speak out about the harms faced every day by Trans and Intersex people, but here we are.

I am not trans, I am not intersex, but I try to be an ally, and often don’t know what allyship looks like, especially when I have this bully pulpit (that term being used in the strictly Rooseveltian sense). It is one thing to say we will not tolerate offensive of discriminatory speech in Council Chambers, and to take action to limit that even with public delegates, but what about the broader discourse in the City? There are a few vocal anti-Trans activists in New Westminster, and a small number of familiar local Social Media denizens who post discriminatory and often hateful rhetoric about members of the Trans and Intersex community. What is my duty as a leader in the community to call this out? To call these people out?

Should I stay out of it or be more vocal? Would I only be calling attention, adding to their audience or even legitimizing their “alternate view” by daylighting it, considering they are operating in a small bubble? Do I run the risk of being a “bully” (in the literal sense) by punching down at people who are, in turn punching down? Or am I being complicit in my silence when I see it and don’t denounce it every chance I get? What’s the balance?

I have taken to opening this conversation with folks I am chatting with at Pride events, especially to people I recognize from social media. Because I think I need to take some guidance from the community on this, and from the community impacted. What’s my role? Learning, listening and thinking about this is my work this year to exercise my allyship. I’m sure it won’t be a consensus on what my role is in combatting local on-line hate, but I’d love to hear from you if you have an opinion.

TransLink Funding

Posted on July 27, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I don’t spend a lot of time doing on-the-nose politics on this page. You need to subscribe to the newsletter for that, or drop by the booth, or stop me on the street, etc. However, Thursday was a big politics day on the topic of Public Transit, a topic that means a lot to me personally and professionally, so I’ll wade in on polite company here.

The Mayors Council put out yet another media release imploring senior governments (Federal and Provincial) to make some commitments about longer-term transit operational funding. There is nothing new in this ask, we have been at this since the day I first joined the Mayor Council almost two years ago. The new news here is that the Mayor’s Council received a report from staff that begins the work to plan for what happens if that funding commitment doesn’t happen. And it’s dire.

If we cannot find a new operational funding model, we will need to react to the operational deficit by cutting services drastically. The recent efficiency report identified some savings we can undertake (and are undertaking) that will not impact service to customers, but after than $90 Million, the next $510 Million will need to come from service. That means less funding for roads and active transportation, but it also means reduced transit routes and reliability. This is a bit difficult to model (and I encourage those interested to look at the report) because as we reduce service, there will be a reduction in ridership which reduced fare revenue, which drives further service reductions. This is the Transit Service Death Spiral we avoided during COVID.

To know how we got here, you need to understand how TransLink pays for its service. It is a unique body with many revenue sources, but most of them are going down, or not increasing to keep up with inflation and regional growth. TransLink’s revenue looks like this:

The level of Fuel Tax drivers pay at the pump is fixed by Provincial Legislation, but the amount of revenue it returns continues to go down as overall gasoline consumption drops. The Mayors recently agreed to a short-term increase in regional Property Tax to match a recent Provincial government contribution to address overcrowded bus lines, but Property Tax is being asked to fund an increasing number of services, and the Mayors recognize there are limits to how much we can push that. In New West, about 7% of your property tax bill goes directly to TransLink. The regional parking tax (which has gone down with work-from-home) and the levy on your electricity bill (not changing much as efficiency measures like Heat Pumps and LEDs offset increases from electrification) are both fixed by Provincial legislation, and combined only make up about 5% of our revenue.

On the Transit Revenue side, fare increases are limited by provincial legislation, and have been going up tied to inflation, however our fare system is shifting as we go through COVID recovery. With flexible workspaces, people are buying fewer monthly passes and are travelling less in traditional peak times, so overall fare recoveries are not rebounding as fast as ridership. “Other” revenues from transit includes things like advertising on Buses and fee-for-service, and are not going up. Direct senior government support varies quite a bit as it mostly reflects transfers to pay for capital projects or one-time funding, which makes it hard to plan around. TransLink also gets a bit of money to offset the revenue lost when tolls were taken off of the Golden Ears Bridge – but that pays for the financing, operating, and maintenance of that bridge. Finally, investment income is up a bit related to interest rates, but as we spend our reserves to keep the wheels rolling, this will go away.

The diversity of revenues is a good thing from and eggs-in-basket perspective. The challenge is that Property Tax is the only part that is 100% under the control of the Mayors Council, all of the other sources are limited by Provincial legislation – meaning we need permission from the province to raise them. Any new source of revenue would also require provincial legislation. It is this legislation that the Mayors Council has been asking the Province to change, a new “Funding Model”, because we are projecting ahead to 2026 when this revenue model will fall $600 Million short of projected operating costs.

So with that background and the new operational impacts report in hand, the Mayors Council is using the opportunity to call public attention (again) to the operation budget issue as we enter into the whirlpool of a provincial election – without doubt a political move. The Mayors expected, even hoped for, responses from Provincial leaders. And we got them, so let me review, in the order they hit my radar.

BC Cons: To be fair, the 900,000 people (like me) who rely on TransLink transit services to get around the region are not John Rustad’s base, but his response looked like he missed the memo and needs to do a bit of reading and listening before he starts throwing accusations in place of solutions. On almost every point he makes, he is either misinformed or misinforming.

The financial support that the BC government provided (or to use Rustad’s words “funneled to”) TransLink through COVID was a brave and defining commitment to public transit. The funding was needed because TransLink (by legislation) is not permitted to run a deficit, and because of how those revenue sources listed above all went down dramatically due to pandemic response measures. Unlike transit regions across North America, TransLink didn’t have to slash routes and reliability, because the Provincial Government recognized that hundreds of thousands of people still had to go to work through the pandemic – health care workers, first responders, people who maintain critical services like utilities that keep our communities operating. They were able to get to work, and as COVID restrictions waned, we had the fastest rider recovery of any public transit system in North America. While the other revenue sources have not yet recovered (and likely never will), we are limited (by legislation) how much we can raise fares, while our costs have gone up with inflation and we now have more ridership than pre-COVID.

Despite the protestations of Mr. Rustad, the numbers do actually add up, have been audited, are publicly available for his review, and the TransLink Mayors Council have been very transparent over the last two years about those numbers

His solution is yet another audit (just completed, actually, with $90M in potential savings found, which still leaves us $510M short), address overcrowded routes (dude, the Access for Everyone plan is Right Here!), stop-gap funding (which has, frankly, been the NDP solution that he was just complaining about, and is a problem if you need to plan transit expansion years in advance, like we do), and “accelerate the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain project”, which is a weird thing to suggest when there is nothing to indicate it is not moving forward as fast as possible, and we will still have no operational funding for it until we get the new funding model the Mayors are asking for anyway.

It’s clear Rustad has not read the file, has no idea what the problem is, and has no useful solutions.

BC United. Kevin Falcon’s news release on the same day announced a new 10-lane bridge at Second Narrows and a SkyTrain to the North Shore. I can’t flatter this by calling it a “response” because it is so disconnected from everything happening in the regional transportation conversation that it must have been developed in an impermeable bubble located in a deep bunker under miles of concrete. It makes Rustad look like a strap-hanging Buzzer editor in comparison.

I’ll skip past the obvious joke in Kevin Falcon finding a “10 Lane Bridge” as the solution to everything, but the regional Mayors (all 21of them) agree on transportation priorities for the region, and wrapped them up with a nice little bow and call it the “Access for Everyone Plan”. This plan not only shapes the transportation future of the region, it does it in a way that that supports and is supported by the Regional Growth Strategy. Mr. Falcon has surely seen this plan, and surely knows it is not funded. It’s not helpful when the region’s Mayors (who agree on very little) are all on the same page on something as fundamental as this to have a provincial leader ignore that page and start drawing your own multi-billion-dollar lines on a map.

Finally, and I cannot emphasize enough, if Mr. Falcon commits TransLink to building a SkyTrain to North Vancouver without first dealing with the funding gap the Mayors are currently talking about, we will have no funding to operate the SkyTrain line he just built.

BC NDP: Short of any official statement, Premier Eby was quoted in some media saying the NDP election platform would be clear in supporting TransLink. I heard the (outgoing!) Minister of Transportation on the radio this morning saying that the “worst case scenario” presented in the Mayors Council report would only happen if the Conservatives are elected, and that it is “certainly not going to happen under our government”, which sounds like a commitment. He also emphasized their admittedly excellent record in funding transit expansion (SkyTrain lines) and support funding to address operational gaps during COVID. He also gave the Mayors Council credit for finding some room to raise property taxes to match the $300 Million offered by the Province earlier this year to support the expansion of bus services to address overcrowding on some routes. So the messaging is all onboard, but we are short of an actual commitment, and that makes it hard for us to plan.

In concentrating his messaging on how Rustad is bad, he tellingly failed to even mention Kevin Falcon, though he did mention a former Premier and her disastrous referendum that set us back for 5 years or more.

BC Greens: Sonia Furstenau put out a short statement indicating full support for Public Transit and finding a sustainable funding model.

So overall, the Greens and NDP seem to hear the message and are responding to it with expressions of support, if not specific deliverables. We will have to wait for the election platforms to be released to see what that support looks like. Neither the Cons or the United seem to have any idea what the problem actually is. And everyone is playing politics. Welcome to silly season.

If you area Transit user, or even if you are driver who wants TransLink to still spend money on road maintenance, and don’t want 900,000 regular transit users getting in your way in traffic, you might want to take this opportunity to tell your provincial representative that TransLink funding is important to you, and that you will be voting to keep public transit running.

Workshop – July 8, 2024

Posted on July 14, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Council has been holding more “workshop” style meetings, with the idea that these meetings are where staff and council can dig into more details about programs, strategies, or ideas, prior to them coming to Council. There are a few advantages to this. They reduce the number of staff who have to come to evening Council meetings, which can go quite late, leading to significant overtime costs. They also allow us to have a bit more informal presentations and toss around ideas, raise concerns prior to Bylaws or strategies being fully cooked for approval at Council.

I rarely report out on Workshops, as these are generally preliminary things that will be reported out in the evening meeting when ideas are more fully baked. However, our workshop last week had 6 items that I thought were interesting to write about, and fit a bit with the theme of the evening meeting that I reported out on here (and complained about in the newsletter, for you subscribers). Workshops are public meetings, so you can watch them here and read the agenda if you like.

Massey Theatre Capital Project Additional Scope Items
The City made a decision more than a decade ago to “Save the Massey Theatre”. At the time, the theatre belonged to the School District and the School Board of the time decided that they didn’t want the hassle of updating or maintaining an end-of-life theatre with 1,300 seats, and determined it would be demolished with the old NWSS. A community uprising ensued, and City Council decided to take on the theatre in a land swap with the School District.

Of course, the Council of the day had no idea what the financial impacts of that decision would be. The Massey is a 75 year old building, and the School District did not spend a lot on maintenance or upgrades for quite some time, expecting the building to be demolished. We have already committed $22 Million in what we consider important life safety, building envelope, and accessibility upgrades, including the demolition of the north gym, for which there is simply no business case for preserving. That work is ongoing. It was hoped that the gym removal and envelope work would allow us to get a few more years out of the end-of-like HVAC systems (as it would significantly reduce the load on those systems). But it looks like the AC is failing sooner than we hoped.

Staff are going to develop a project plan for HVAC repair, upgrade, or replacement. Very preliminary estimates of replacing the heating and AC systems is $8 Million, but again, this is the kind of thing where estimating costs is not easy until you start doing the planning work. There is hopefully opportunity for us to avail ourselves of Green Municipal Fund or other senior government grants. There will no doubt be energy saving and greenhouse gas reductions coming with these upgrades (the Massey is now the largest single source of GHG emissions in the city’s facility stock, another unanticipated cost Council might not have thought of 15 years ago), and that combined with the Heritage and Arts and Culture aspects, make it a pretty attractive project for senior government partnership.

Council Strategic Plan – First Annual Report
A compliment to the Annual Report that was presented in regular Council, this report is more of a status report on progress toward the Strategic Priorities Plan that was adopted by Council in early 2023. There is a bit of a “stoplight” report here, with green for things on track, yellow for things falling behind, and red for things not moving forward enough.

Clearly, the elephant in the room is the massive shift in housing regulations that we could not anticipate when developing our Strategic Plan, and the workload related to those changes in regulation. I think when it comes to the need to increase housing supply near transit, and diversity of infill housing, our approach to these provincial changes will support goals in the long-term, though the road may be a bit rockier than we anticipated. I am still disappointed in the lack of rapid funding for affordable and supportive housing, never mind our persistent lack of a 24/7 shelter, but we continue to advocate to the province for these.

One of our strategic Plan pillars was around making transportation safer, and though we are doing the engineering work, there are identified safety governance and culture challenge. I will be bringing a motion to Council by the fall that asks for support to commit New Westminster to become a Vision Zero community. Bringing a safe systems approach to road safety and that may be a test of our ability to coordinate between departments in the City and other government agencies. We have suggested this direction in our strategic plan, but I think we need clear direction from Council if staff are to make this a priority and commit the resources to make it happen.

I also note that the biggest risks identified to moving our priorities forward are staff and resource shortages. We have been hiring, and are filling positions as fast as possible in this hypercompetitive labour market, but we still have a lot of staff doing too much off the side of their desks, and are at the limit of what we can deliver as a City until we give staff some space to breathe. The other stress is increasing cost escalation for all engineering projects – construction cost inflation is much higher than CPI right now, and our capital plan will be strained to keep up.

It is worth while watching the presentation from staff here, as they did a great job framing not just the pillars of the strategic plan, but also talking about how staff are keeping us abreast of the “lenses and foundations” part of the plan – how we are assuring the things we are doing are being done in a way that aligns with the expressed values of the Council around reconciliation, DEIAR, and climate action (for example).

For reasons never made clear, because there were no question or comments offered by the members to explain why, two members of Council voted against receiving this report.

Comprehensive Public Toilet Strategy Council Motion: Confirming Direction
This was actually a short discussion, as the direction from last week’s meeting on the Public Toilet strategy was from Council directly, not from a staff report. So staff put a quick report together to reframe those instructions in a way that is clear for them and aligned with previous instructions, and gave it to us to approve. The majority of Council moved forward with, and get us to approve it, but two Councillors voted against moving forward with a public toilet strategy.

Budget 2025 Public Engagement Methodology
We are going to do a commissioned survey on budget priorities to help inform the next Budget discussion. This is external to the Public Engagement process we usually go through, as it isn’t really “public engagement” as it would be defined by IAP2. There is a good article talking about the challenges of surveys as engagement here. However, it has been a few years since we did a public opinion survey in the City (I seem to remember one in my first term of Council, 6 years ago?), and so I’m not opposed to going through this process. However, we do need to be sure we put it in the right context.

I also thought it was funny to see this exchange on BlueSky the week we approved this:

Not an opinion I necessarily endorse, just one that made me laugh.

Procurement Policy Update
This is very Inside Baseball, but our procurement strategy has not been updated since 2013, and there have been significant shifts in construction costs over that decade. One part of the change is to align our thresholds for public procurement with those in the New West Partnership Agreement, a public procurement agreement that covers all of Western Canada. The second part is to update the values at which an emergency sole source contract can be awarded by the Purchasing Manager or CAO to align better with practices in neighboring communities and keep up with practical needs. A couple of Councillors voted against the second part here, but the majority of Council supported the update.

Development Application Process Review
One of the common narratives in the current housing crisis is that municipalities are to blame because we are slow approving new homes. There is no doubt that the steps to approve a new high-density building are complex, and include a huge number of geotechnical, engineering, building code, and other approvals to assure the building is safe, but also reviews about how a new building connects to the sewer system, the electrical grid, the road network, etc. The City of New west has been, since 2023, going through a Development Application Process Review to find out if there are redundancies, pauses, issues that make the process slower than it needs to be. The initial report from the Consultant is clear in its conclusion: “the City’s current development review process does not include any fundamental steps or requirements that would unnecessarily lead to slower approval times”. This is good. But there are opportunities to make things work smoother and more predictably in our approvals process, including better recordkeeping and increased digitization of records. These processes will require people to do them, but we fortunately have access to grants to pay for those people while the processes are updated, and permit fees for development should pay for most of their work going forward.

The purpose of this report is twofold. First, to seek Council’s endorsement of the results of the City’s Development Application Process Review, and second to seek Council’s endorsement of bringing new staff positions to the 2025 Budget discussion, recognizing the positions would be initially be offset by the UBCM Local Government Approvals Grant.

Council voted in a slim majority to approve this work, with two members voted against both receiving the report and doing anything about it, raising concerns about possible future impact on taxpayers. But I need to put this particular “no” into context. It was a year ago (May 29, 2023, I wrote about it here) when a motion asking for this very thing was proffered by a City Councillor. Council at the time voted it down because these processes were already going on, and the motion looked to be doing nothing but adding layers of bureaucracy to it. But Council voted that motion down knowing the work would go on because it was already happening. Now that the DAPR process has returned results, that Councillor who was so interested in “reviewing the effectiveness of and efficiency of our planning processes and procedures” opposes both the receipt of a report that outlines this, and the allocation of resources to make those processes and procedures work better. It simply baffles the mind.

After all that, the summary is that we are getting the work done, from Massey to DAPR, the City has a lot going on, and are making progress on so many fronts. I’m really proud of this work, but we have a lot more to do.

Housing and Growth

Posted on July 9, 2024. by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The discussion around provincial housing regulations hasn’t slowed down, as the first of several deadlines related to bills 44, 46, and 47 came and went. Some Cities have complied, some have chosen a different path. In New Westminster we adopted two Bylaws in June that make us complaint, and staff are busily working on the next steps- a renewed Housing Needs Assessment, OCP updates, and revising our DCC, ACC, and Density Bonus programs.

City staff are also working with provincial staff on their Housing Target Order methodology, so we can respond on the expected timeline, likely in August. I was on the radio last week alongside the Mayor of Langley Township talking to Belle Puri about this (you can listen here!), and we had slightly different takes on the core issue. I actually agree with the Minister that the introduction of Small-scale Multi-Unit Housing and Transit Oriented Area regulations will be a good thing. IT is clearly a massive hassle and staff time suck to implement, and will likely slow down development for a short period of time while everyone finds their path through the massive changes, in the end it will be a positive for the reshaping of the next era of regional growth.

My problem remains that we have had some significant tools taken away that we have used to fund infrastructure and amenities in our community. Equally troubling is that our ability to compel developers to build childcare, to provide spaces for new schools or parks, or to include affordable housing as part of their developments, has been eroded at the same time that the cost for development has gone up. It is unclear whether the Province is going to give us the money needed to make up for these shortfalls, or expect property tax to fill the void.

That said, I did appreciate the Minister’s thoughtful responses the next day (you can hear them here!). We are all trying to get the same thing done on housing, and I hope that the province brings the kind of aggressive, proactive change to our funding model that they did to our building approvals model. Dare to dream.

There was another related piece of news that snuck out last week, and it was related to a report we received at Metro Vancouver Regional Planning Committee. Metro staff working with academic demographers have created updated regional growth projections. These are not “targets” the region is aiming for, but instead projections of what is likely to happen given demographic changes, birth/death statistics, immigration, and inter-regional and inter-provincial migration patterns. The numbers are all here in this report.

The local angle on this might surprise some folks, especially my colleague on the radio last week from Langley Township who always refers to his community as the “high growth region”, that the City projected to grow fastest over the next 6, 16, and 26 years is New Westminster. Here’s the numbers:

These are numbers for the medium-growth scenario, but both the low-growth and high-growth scenarios have us in a similar spot: top of the charts for proportional growth.

There are a lot of factors that drive this, including our commitment to Transit Oriented Development and the large proportion of our City that is near that transit, but also the balance of housing types, the “sweet spot” between affordability and location on the north side of the River, and the attractiveness to both young families in the growing stage, and new arrivals to Canada and the Lower Mainland – for every reason you choose to live here.

This speaks to our Housing Needs Report, but it also speaks to our need to invest in infrastructure now to support that growth, and the community amenities that residents want in a thriving, growing community. Adding austerity to this trend will be a disaster for the livability of our community, we need to show leadership to shape a community that serves today/s residents, and the people arriving tomorrow.

Patrick Johnstone

Fan of cities; Mayor of the best one.

Tag: Politics