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Keeping the Johnson Street Bridge

Reading and watching the Vibrant Victoria forum thread on Victoria’s famous Johnson Street Bridge – also known as The Blue Bridge – is keeping me up at night.

It wrenches my heart (and my head) to know that our city leaders, “incentivized” by engineers and the possibility of getting some Federal infrastructure grants, are benighted enough to plan tearing down a bridge that people around the world recognize as a heritage-worthy and unique signifier in Victoria’s urban landscape.

Take a look at these photos, and marvel at the “ugly” bridge that’s supposed to be replaced by a slab of concrete:

Vibrant Victoria forumer “gumgum” took this photo while approaching the bridge in his canoe.

Here are two more:

and

(See the rest here.)

I wrote about the bridge in the current June issue of Focus (read the article, Blue Bridge Blues) and I’ve blogged about the impending disaster of tearing the bridge down (here, here, and here). And now I just joined two Facebook groups, formed to Save and Keep the Blue Bridge.

The whole issue is complicated by the fact that the usual spokespeople for heritage preservation (often enough a NIMBY and anti-development crowd to boot) are NDP stalwarts (even at the Federal level – ex-Victoria City Councilor), and since plans to tear this bridge down were proposed by our reigning NDP mayor, who has an NDP majority on council (including the alleged heritage advocate, Councilor Pam Madoff), the partisans have all closed ranks and decided to just not say anything at all …which is very curious indeed.

The only explanation that comes to my mind is that it’s all about partisanship, which infects and clouds local politics in the worst way. I would like to say to the partisans: for once, forget about party affiliation and just do the right thing already. If the BC Liberals had proposed tearing the bridge down – no matter how good the reasons – the heritage preservation crowd and every NDP-inflected City Councilor would be on the barricades.

Instead, we get this:

But this (the image ^ above) shouldn’t be a civic leader’s inspiration.

It also creeps me out that our leaders are listening quite hard to the City’s engineering department, which (from what I gleaned at an April committee of the whole meeting) seems intent on building a new bridge (boys will be boys, and these boys want to build something new). City engineering furthermore hired a consultant (to assess the condition of the old bridge), but this consultancy is in the business of building only new bridges, so why wouldn’t they furnish the City with a report that recommends building a new bridge?

Add to all this the galling fact that most Victorians are blissfully unaware that the bridge is even in danger – and that worst of all, they have no idea what they, what we, stand to lose here.

Here’s where Vibrant Victoria’s forumers are keeping me up at night… Forumer “aastra” has diligently compiled the numerous examples of other North American cities – some much smaller and poorer than allegedly “quainte” and oh-so-cash-strapped Victoria – that not only celebrate the value of trunnion or bascule bridges from this era, but that actually spend significant piles of dough in refurbishing them and then in addition have the audacity to express civic pride in their preservation.

Incroyable, you say? Well, it’s not unbelievable. Take a gander at these, courtesy of “aastra”:

This is a photo of an almost identical Strauss-built bridge in San Francisco – restored and preserved. (See source.)

Next, there’s this image, of the same bridge:

Same bridge, different photographer (source).

Toronto also has a Joseph Strauss designed trunnion bridge, and they restored theirs and are keeping it, while we plan to nuke ours. aastra wrote:

So did we all know about the Cherry Street Trunnion Bridge in Toronto? Built in 1931 by some bozo named Strauss.

Quote:

…designated under the Ontario Heritage Act by the City of Toronto in 1992 as Architectural Historical.

That’s the problem with Toronto. It’s such an impersonal big city that’s lost all connection with its past.

(The bridge is green. Good call by Torontonians. If it were another colour it would probably be gone by now.)

The sarcasm and his last sentence expresses frustration over earlier banter about whether our bridge was always blue and whether it was always famous, or famously blue. His point was that the color hardly matters. It’s like saying it matters whether ivy or roses clamber up the Empress Hotel on Victoria’s Inner Harbour.

aastra finds another bascule bridge – preserved, not torn down (and it’s even blue!):

Quote:

The Ashtabula lift bridge (also known as the West Fifth Street bridge) is a Strauss bascule bridge that spans the Ashtabula River in the harbor of Ashtabula, Ohio. Built in 1925, it is one of only two of its type that remain in service in the state of Ohio. In 1985 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was restored in 1986, and was also closed from March to December 2008 for repairs and repainting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtabula_lift_bridge

In Ohio it’s history. Something to be proud of. In Victoria it’s junk. Hallmark Society, where are you?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/83132978@N00/1364138744/

The really amazing thing is that it’s blue and yet they still decided not to replace it.

And there’s more… Chattanooga, Tennessee has one (slightly different design):

Market Street Bridge in Chattanooga, TN:

Quote:

The Market Street Bridge construction began in 1914. It is a bascular-type draw span bridge and is owned by the State of Tennessee. Because of its current condition, the bridge is currently undergoing a major structural renovation which will cost $13,060,428.85.

Quote:

Once construction is complete, travelers will enjoy sidewalks measuring three feet wider on either side of the thoroughfare making walking safe and easy. The bridge design will also provide architectural attributes and lighting in keeping with the historical significance of the Market Street Bridge. The renovated bridge will look much like the original – only stronger, safer, and ready to be put into use for another 90 years!

http://www.marketstbridge.com/facts.html

…As does Mystic, Connecticut:

Mystic, Connecticut:

Quote:

River Road – Running beside the Mystic River, this scenic road offers terrific water views of the ships of Mystic Seaport and Mystic’s famous Bascule Bridge.

http://www.mystic.org/landmark-trail.asp

Quote:

Not to be confused with Olde Mystic Village, this is the “real” downtown of Mystic – it includes the Mystic River Bascule Bridge, one of few operational bascule bridges in the country. For those of us who are unfamiliar with bascule bridges, this is a fancy drawbridge. Feel free to gawk either at the bridge itself or at the tourists gawking at the bridge.

http://www.starrmurphy.com/shopping.php

Quote:

Historic 1922 marvel delights bridge fans — its mechanical parts are all out in the open.

http://www.mystic.org/p/highlights-tour.asp

Mystic River Bascule Bridge (1922)

Meanwhile, Rob Randall, Chair of the Downtown Residents Association, added this comment:

I want to mention the importance of the bridge in relation to the time in which it was built–the 1920s–and the fact that this time coincided with the dawn of what some call “the Precisionist Movement” in American painting.

Some of America’s most famous artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Charles Sheeler tackled the subject of the industrial landscape, painting stunningly detailed pictures of factories, skyscrapers and yes, bridges–even ones designed by none other than JSB designer Joseph Strauss.

It would be fair to say they have influenced modern artists as well.

Our bridge is a real link to this vanishing historical age of engineering and artistic genius.

Elsie Driggs (1898 – 1992) Queensborough Bridge, 1927
Oil on Canvas, 401/2 x 30 ¼ inches
MAM Purchase: Lang Acquisition Fund 1969.4

So there you go, city leaders. But are they listening? According to forumer CharlieFoxtrot, they’re not and it’s already too late:

Word on the street is that various contracts have been awarded within the past few days – the replacement moves forward. Expect grunts in high-vis vests to be hanging around the JSB and starting the preliminary work soon, most likely ASAP.

Sadly, looming federal infrastructure funding dependant on fixed deadlines for completion (and these other things called “fish windows” with regards to construction) are Serious Things that wait for no one, or (apparently) little or no opposition…

I could go on to disparage Ken Kelly of the Downtown Victoria Business Association (DVBA), which apparently supports replacing the bridge because replacement will be less disruptive to traffic. Yes, you read that right. But I won’t right now, because this post is already too long and it’s getting quite lugubrious.

Just one last thing: if you’re a heritage/ history/ bridge/ industrial design buff, consider writing a letter to The Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6. There are Federal funds to preserve heritage like this bridge – the city should have applied for this, and applied for infrastructure grants to replace the Bay Street Bridge, not the Johnson Street Bridge.

Better gold through green

It seems everyone is going green, or will be. Today I went to Victoria’s UDI (Urban Development Institute) luncheon to hear Terasen Energy Services‘ Gareth Jones present “All About Geo-Thermal: Learning from Local Projects.”

Some basic take-away points: unless I severely misheard, British Columbia prices for energy (or electricity) will rise 80% in the next 10 years; the best place to make inroads in meeting the very ambitious greenhouse gas reductions (which are nearly as ambitious as Europe’s) set by the BC Liberal Party is in communities/ municipalities; and the best places to get the best bang for the buck in alternative energy is in dense settlements, whether multi-family complexes (including highrises and townhouse developments) or densely settled neighborhoods.

Other points: we in BC often think that we get most of our energy/ electricity “from hydro” (i.e., from hydroelectric power projects, therefore from “clean” water-driven sources), but we actually import 15% of our electricity from out-of-province, and those imports are “dirty” (typically derived from coal-fired plants). In addition to that little wrinkle, only 21% of our total energy needs in BC are met by electricity in the first place (and of that 21%, remember that 15% aren’t “clean”). The remaining 79% are met by natural gas (another 21%), other fossil fuels (can’t remember the exact number – I think it was around 20%?), wood (another 16%), and other sources. Alternate sources are at present but a small, very small piece of the pie.

There was more, and it all deserves a longer blog post or article, for which I’ll have to dig out my notes and do some research. What struck me today was the sense of urgency that came across in Jones’s presentation: that we really don’t have a lot of time to sit on our hands in pursuing alternative energy – not least because an 80% rise in costs will really do a number on the economy. It would probably make the current recession look like a walk in the park.

Jones encouraged all the developers, builders, and planners and politicians at the luncheon to explore the myriad ways that the provincial government and Terasen Energy Services are trying to make alternative energy production (and consumption) more commonplace.

Meanwhile, there’s more to research and think about: Living buildings and how they’re cost-effective, for example.

Next week, there are two events scheduled in Victoria – first, at the University of Victoria on June 3, Jason McLennan, CEO, Cascadia Region Green Building Council will speak on The True Costs of Living Buildings, and the next evening (June 4), a less formal event showcasing some examples will take place at the Burnside-Gorge Community Centre. (I have to admit that after hearing Gareth Jones explain the benefits of density when it comes to installing alternative energy both for new and retrofitted buildings, Jason McLennan’s homepage photo disturbs me. It’s of an isolated single home – a converted church even? – in the middle of nowhere, which is probably the most large-footprint lifestyle, in environmental terms, that privileged westerners can choose. Perhaps his home is environmentally sustainable, but it’s still not a great model in the sense that it’s not anything we should strive for. Ok, end of sour aside.)  (Update, 5/27: If readers click through to the comments on this post, they’ll see Eden’s comment, which corrects my assumption about the photo. It’s actually not a private home, but the barn of a sheep farm. That’s really good to know, because the myth of the self-sufficient yet large single-family family home on a large property – a “green” variant of the suburban lifestyle – exerts a strong and unsustainable pull, which I prefer not to see strengthened. Thanks, Eden, for the additional info!)

And since it pours when it rains, there’s an out-of-town event I’d love to be able to go to: The Seattle Architecture Foundation will lead a tour through South Lake Union, called LEED: It’s Not Just for Buildings Anymore:

SLU’s close proximity to donwtown’s and existing transportation lines are the foundation for a successful sustainable neighborhood. Community design focusing on adaptive building re-use, alternative transportation, storm water management and other sustainability techniques is revitalizing the neighborhood adjacent to Seattle’s urban core.

SLU was accepted into the USGBC’s LEED-ND Pilot (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Neighborhood Development) program, and is one of the first existing neighborhoods anticipated to receive LEED certification.

Catherine Benotto and Ginger Garff from Weber Thompson and Katherine Cornwell and Jim Holmes from the City of Seattle will explain how great neighborhoods are created. Highlights of the tour include the Terry Thomas Building, the redesign of Cascade Park, the street car maintenance facility and an exploration of the master plan for Terry Avenue.

Seems to me that the South Lake Union walking tour would be a perfect complement to Gareth Jones’s presentation, but then again, Jason McLennan’s presentation is a lot closer to home…

Front-line/Downtown – Community Solutions

On Monday March 30, the Downtown Residents Association (DRA) hosted a public meeting, On The Front Lines: Community Solutions for Homelessness and Social Issues, at City Hall. Moderated by DRA chair Rob Randall, we heard from Victoria City Councilor Charlayne Thornton-Joe, the Coalition to End Homelessness’s Jill Clements, the Downtown Victoria Business Association’s Ken Kelley, and Victoria Police Department Chief Jamie Graham.

Rob wrote a follow-up report on his blog – go check it out (especially the comments). Davin Greenwell also posted a great summary, and included photo documentation, so do take a look at it here.

I haven’t commented on Rob’s post, but just left a long comment on Davin’s entry. Click through to read my (partial) response to the session.

One of the categories I’m filing my post under is “leadership,” a quality that Jill Clements of the Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness seems to have, and it’s something we expect from Jamie Graham. We also see it in Charlayne Thornton-Joe.

As I was checking off categories, I also checked “justice,” as I was reminded of Graham’s discussion of implementing Restorative Justice (see Saanich’s program), which we hope to see used more frequently in Victoria. Incidentally, Restorative Justice is modeled on First Nations approaches to crime and social disorder, and reminded me that the American Congress (and Senate?) is modeled on a New World/ First Nations approach (vs. the British Parliamentarianism we still practice in Canada, where everyone shouts at the same time and heckles the opposition). Sorry, can’t provide a link right now, but just think of the concept of the talking stick. Works for me – bring it on.

Low voter turnout

Last Saturday, British Columbia held municipal elections.  Here in Victoria and the other 12 surrounding municipalities that together comprise the CRD (Capital Regional District), we too voted.

There’s a problem, though: the turnout is low, low, low.

The City of Victoria managed to get just under 22% of eligible voters to cast a ballot; Saanich: 21%; Oak Bay (slightly higher): just under 36%; Esquimalt: just under 27%.  Those are the four “core” municipalities; I won’t go into the slightly more distant suburbs/ municipalities (tricky to define, anyway: the Western Communities are a hub of their own, with Langford as their center).

I tried getting people engaged, and thought in particular about younger voters.  It’s a cliche that in Victoria, you have to get the seniors vote, because they’re the ones who actually bother.  (I wonder if Oak Bay’s much higher turnout had something to do with its demographics: many people retire to that community, although I have to add it’s also home to many younger families — if they can afford to get into Oak Bay’s housing market.)  Younger people, so goes the cliche (which looks to be true), don’t vote.

And yet there were a couple of outstanding young campaigners in Victoria’s election (who didn’t get that many votes, though).  What’s going on?  By a wide margin, the incumbents got back in, and the newbies that were elected are the folks endorsed by the (in my opinion pro-status quo) labour union (long story on that, see my entry from Nov.11).

How do we get progressive people to vote, and how do we move beyond the binary partisanship of “left” and “right” (the status quo)?

Well, according to this letter to the editor in today’s Times-Colonist, we really don’t need to worry or bother:

Low turnout no problem
Times Colonist
Published: Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The concern about poor voter turnout is unnecessary.

For many different reasons, not all of the population is always able to vote responsibly.

It seems best to leave these important decisions to the percentage of the population that does have the time, the interest and the ability to keep informed about the candidates and the issues.

Democracy works well if those who can vote responsibly do so, and those who know that they are not sufficiently informed to vote responsibly (for whatever reason) leave the decisions to others.
Mary Douthwaite
Victoria

This letter really pissed me off.

I wish it would piss off all the younger disengaged puppies who didn’t bother to vote.  The letter writer is basically telling you that you’re too stupid to vote, which is why you don’t, and that we who do vote shouldn’t worry that you don’t vote.  Why?  Because we are informed and we know what’s right, and you don’t.

Wow, with a defense of democracy like that, who needs detractors?

Ok, young people of Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt, and Oak Bay (and beyond): are you too stupid to be informed?  Do you need us (who vote) to do it for you?

Or do we just not have your attention?

What gives?  Let’s devise a campaign that gets your attention, then.  Make some suggestions, for god’s sake.

I propose viral campaigning, at least one full year before the election takes place.  Like, the kids love pizza, right?  How about re-branding pizza boxes in a stealth “raise-awareness-campaign,” like The Economist did in the Philadelphia area?

As part of their “Get a World View” campaign, The Economist distributed branded pizza boxes through 20 pizzerias in the Greater Philadelphia area. Each box displays one of a handful of pie charts that show a statistic related to world food distribution, with an emphasis on those used in pizza production. They list things like global wheat consumption, world cheese imports and arable crop land. (SOURCE)

How about getting people to notice — at whatever level of consciousness, whether pizza boxes or pub coasters — that municipal governance is a huge issue?

Maybe get them to notice cool innovative stuff that mobilizes their interest in social media?  How about a wiki where users can go in and tweak government?  (It would have to have constraints that tell users when they’re in contravention of the BC Municipal Act and other provincial legislation, but basically it would allow some “blue sky” thinking while showing what the actual constraints are).

Those are just a couple of ideas.  There are many more.  Even lying in bed with sinusitis (again!) I can come up with better ideas than the worn-out old paternalism expressed in that letter.

DV2020 nails candidate questions

In my October 25 post, What’s wrong with Victoria’s business community?, I blew up at the business community here, particularly the Chamber, for charging terribly high admission prices to the mayoral candidates meetings they’re sponsoring, and for not doing enough to use their networks, their ecosystems, to engage the community at large in a dialogue on Victoria’s economy.

(And I blew up at the Chamber in particular for being locked down by Microsoft: you can’t register for their events online if you use either Firefox or a Mac — that’s just retarded, as far as I can tell.)

I also castigated additional groups that I usually strongly support, Downtown Victoria 2020 (DV2020) and UDI Victoria, because their upcoming event (11/3) has a $30 price tag, too.  It’s another loss of the Commons, as far as I can tell, when you have to shell out that kind of money to listen to your city’s mayoral candidates explain what they would do to govern the city.

However, to DV2020’s huge credit, they’ve come up with the most complex and challenging set of questions to candidates.  The set is called 2008 Election Questions for a Better Downtown Victoria, and if DV2020 posts the answers that candidates submit, we’ll be better able to make informed voting decisions.

The questions are organized as statements-cum-questions under four headings:

• Working with the Province
• The Social Health of Downtown
• Making Plans into Realities
• Stewardship of Downtown

These are super-smart, intelligent categories fleshed out by appropriate and probing questions.  There’s not a hint of bullshit about them: straight, clear, urgent, and necessary.  No matter if you’re a candidate or a voter, take a look at DV2020’s 2008 Election Questions for a Better Downtown Victoria and inform yourself.

And next time you’re at a free all-candidates meeting, go up to the mic and ask these questions.

What’s wrong with Victoria’s business community?

I take it as a given that cities need healthy economies if they are to thrive as vibrant, creative places. And I wonder what’s wrong with the established business interests in Victoria, whether in traditional commerce, or in our growing high tech sector, or even in tourism.

Here’s the problem: we have a municipal election coming up on November 15.  With the sh*tstorm of issues facing us (homelessness on a big scale, drug abuse and addiction, financial turmoil,  credit crunches, possible stagnation, crumbling infrastructure, and provincially mandated sewage treatment to the tune of $1.2b), you’d think that everyone must have their eyes on the candidates — because whoever gets in for this next round is going to have a hard row to hoe, and we want to make sure we don’t elect NOOPs.

And guess what?  Many people are paying attention.  Witness the all-candidates meetings held around the city at various venues.

But here’s the rub: these events are almost all hosted by various community associations and community groups, and none of these have the broader economic health of the whole city on their agenda.  Instead, these are issue-driven venues with issue-driven agendas that cater to important, but nonetheless specialized, interests: whether it’s a community association (often with a NIMBY agenda) that wants to grill candidates on their stance around development and affordable housing, or poverty activists that want to grill candidates on what they propose to do about the growing problem of homelessness, none of these sponsors of all-candidates meetings have a balanced, holistic view of the entire city or its economic well-being.

Let’s face it: if you get enough people together in a room and agitate them with issues that are already in their faces, it won’t take much to have normally intelligent people reduce issues of great complexity to black-and-white caricature, and you’ll find that people readily sort themselves into rigid interest groups that brook little dialogue.  One of first complexities to go by the board is economics.  Whether or not our government is doing anything (beyond raising or lowering our property or business tax rates) to facilitate a climate of economic health is uninteresting in those contexts, because their focus is on what’s perceived as the immediate crisis to hand.

The typically agenda-driven community-organized meeting is about focusing on all the problems that bedevil us, and often on demanding our “rights” to better services.  Take affordable housing, a truly complex issue.  At your typical community association-sponsored all-candidates meeting, the issue invariably devolves to this: someone from the audience asks the candidates whether they will “stand up to” the developers of new buildings and “make them” include “affordable” housing.  And if they’re not able to “stand up to” those evil rich bloodsuckers, will they shut down development so that “our” city won’t be “given over” to the rich and the poor won’t be squeezed out?  That’s how easy many people think it should be. If we can’t get what we want, shut the whole damn thing down.  Stop everything.

Complexity?  Com-schmexity.  Rhetoric and posturing is all that matters.  The candidates are forced to respond and react within this framework, and the result is ridiculous.

Further, we have 7 people running for mayor, of which at most 2 are actually qualified in any real sense of the word.  And we have 35 people running for 8 council seats, and here again there’s a majority that’s simply unelectable because they have a single agenda or fringe idee fixe that speaks volumes about their inability to govern anything as complex as a city.

Yet the community-sponsored all-candidates meetings bring out the “best” (i.e., the worst) in these candidates, because inevitably the more fringe-y ones can turn things into a circus with help from the audience.  Of the 3 meetings so far, 2 degenerated quickly into out-and-out gong shows.  The venue and the audience / question period encourages this: insofar as audiences here typically already feel aggrieved, rational candidates cannot, in the 2 minutes allotted to them, convey a nuanced sense of what their platform is, and instead the decidedly more manic candidates act out and use the stage to perform what can only be described as a spectacle of narcissistic self-display that serves to whip up audience fervor.

Gong show.  Truly.

I am not suggesting that we get rid of the community association or community agenda-sponsored meetings.  But here’s my question: why are they the only ones who host open, free-to-all meetings?

Where, for example, is the business community and why isn’t it sponsoring all-candidates meetings?  In a private exchange I asked:

Where is the “business community,” anyway? UDI Victoria is hosting a mayoral candidates event at the Ambrosia Centre on 11/3 (which will probably involve charging admission), but where are the all-candidates meetings that aren’t being driven by the agendas of the poverty-industry advocates and/ or community associations?

Those groups look only at the negative stuff — they don’t talk about what’s positive, what’s worth continuing.

Where are the groups that could and should host meetings that don’t devolve down to 150% negativity? The business groups? VIATEC/ the technology community? Higher learning?

They seem to be allowing Victoria to flounder, flail, and drown.

Giant fail.

Well, it turns out the Chamber of Commerce is hosting a mayoral candidates meeting (albeit not an all-candidates meeting), but what a dog’s-breakfast they’ve made of it.

In a nutshell, it exemplifies what’s wrong with our municipal democracy: on the one hand, community-agenda driven meetings that seem blind to business issues, and on the other a Chamber of Commerce, which, by hosting a meeting that for all intents and purposes may as well take place in a different galaxy for all the relevance it’ll have, thumbs its nose at the larger community.

Here’s the format for the Chamber’s meeting:

City of Victoria Mayoral Candidate Forum

Join the Chamber and hear what your candidates have to say about issues that affect your business.
The Mayoral Candidate Forum will be moderated by Bruce Carter and questions will be encouraged from the audience.

Candidates participating in this forum are:

Dean Fortin
Rob Reid
Steve Filipovic

November 12th, 2008

Delta Victoria – Ocean Pointe Resort & Spa
7:15 a.m. – Registration
7:30 a.m. – Event Start
Continental Buffet Breakfast Provided

The page continues, but a note first.  There are 7 mayoral candidates, and by excluding 4, the Chamber is engaging in some heavy-duty editing.  But most interesting is that they chose to include Steve Filipovic, who doesn’t stand a chance to be elected.  He’s the token candidate; the Chamber would have been better off to directly state that Dean Fortin and Rob Reid are the only two viable candidates, with Fortin an incumbent councilor with lots of experience, and Reid the newcomer who wants to shake things up a bit.  (Although I’m not impressed by Reid’s strategy of aligning himself with several NIMBYist community association leaders, who will surely bring the city to a halt if elected.  My impression now is that Reid doesn’t know what he’s doing.)

Ok, here’s my point as to why the Chamber’s efforts are a dog’s breakfast.  First, the venue is the Ocean Pointe, which just screams “exclusive” and “riff-raff keep out.”  Second, here’s the price of admission:

Nov 12, 2008
07:30 am – 09:00 am
Members: $30.00 +GST
Future Members: $45.00 +GST

The cute “Future Members” notwithstanding, I found that $45 price tag maddening.

So we have a “no riff-raff” venue and an admission price that seals the deal that this meeting is for the “let them eat cake” crowd.

But these are stupid cake eaters, to boot.  For here’s the final straw.  After exhorting us (in bold) to Register Today!, we read:

Note: Our online registration system is not compatible with Mozilla Firefox or Mac computers and only accepts Visa & MasterCard. [emphasis added]

That really takes the cake — alas, it doesn’t take the cake away, but it takes it.

If that’s our representative business chamber, obviously reliant on proprietary Microsoft software and unable to deal with either Macs or Firefox (because they use Internet Exploder), then how can we expect any innovation or creative thinking from this sector?

And how can the voters in this city expect innovation or creativity from potential leaders who are forced to flail about between the horrible Scylla and Charybdis of crisis-focused community groups on the one hand and fossilized business thinking on the other?

What a mess.

(Additional blog post on this topic from 10/26 here.)

Canadian cities: stuck in the past?

Christopher Hume takes aim at sclerotic Toronto, but his critique could apply to quite a few Canadian cities, including (much-smaller) Victoria.  See his Aug. 1 Toronto Star article, The future out of reach for city fearful of change. Toward the end, he writes:

City hall’s resistance to change has been noticed by many observers who point out that few of the new powers made available in the provincial City of Toronto Act two years ago have actually been applied.

Former chief planner Paul Bedford, for instance, wonders why a city intent on intensification hasn’t implemented minimum height requirements for new buildings. This is obvious and necessary; even the mayor has talked about it.

The key thing in that passage is the Canadian subtext: that Canadian cities “are but creatures of the Provinces,” a fact that goes back to the British North America Act of the last half of the 19th century, where Federalists convinced Provinces to join Confederation by promising that they (the Provinces) would retain complete control over “their” municipalities and cities.

At the time, no one in the wonderland of resource-extraction that was Canada thought that one day cities would figure prominently as independent engines and hubs for the country’s economy.

What’s interesting with regard to Hume’s passage is that provinces are apparently making moves to empower cities so they can act as independent actors on the political and economic stage — Hume’s reference to the City of  Toronto Act (granted by the province of Ontario) alludes to this.

A very recent parallel in BC would be this province’s Bill 27, which empowers cities to create Development Permit Areas and to initiate “green” development by giving municipalities heretofore unheard of power.

But as Hume also indicates, the cities — whether from force of habit or entropy — don’t seem to act with any sort of alacrity to wield their new powers.  And that really does speak to a failure of leadership at the municipal level.

PS: Vancouver is really very fortunate in having a City Charter (late 19th century).  It’s the only city in BC to have one, probably one of only a very few in all of Canada.  Perhaps the Charter has helped to create a climate of assertive independent-mindedness, which can’t have been unhelpful in facilitating Vancouver’s transition to the 21st century.

Connect the dots: two articles by Miro Cernetig and Bob Ransford that should be read together

The Vancouver Sun published two articles, nearly back-to-back, which make a lot of sense when read in conjunction: on March 22, we read Bob Ransford’s As cities become more complex, our taxes keep rising and on March 24 we read Milo Cernetig’s Approach to social woes a moral failure by all three main B.C. parties.

These two articles have to be comprehended together. One (Ransford’s) wants people to understand the economics of taxation that underlie municipal finance, while the other (Cernetig’s) wants people to understand how a certain kind of underfunding has produced the horrible social problems we see in our (BC) cities today. Cernetig references Vancouver, but Victoria has similar problems.

I have for some months now picked up on the criticisms of municipal infrastructure funding in Canada — even going so far as to publish a short piece on Vibrant Victoria on Dec.3/07, Victoria’s Choice: to be or not to be …is not the question. The gist of Ransford’s article elaborates on the theme I also addressed in my piece: cities (in my opinion, Canadian cities especially, although Ransford argues that it’s a Western/ First World global problem) are too dependent on single sources of income, primarily property taxes, while so-called senior levels of government (state or provincial, and federal) receive funding from many diverse sources of income: consumption taxes, income taxes, and so on. At the same time, cities are in the front line of having to provide services on every level.

This is lunacy, especially when you take into account the fact that cities generate most of a nation’s economic activity and wealth, and that they also will typically attract the largest populations of people dependent on what is collectively referred to as “services”: supported housing, addiction treatment, food banks, welfare, etc. Poor people come to cities because this is where the services are. Very often, they are in a city’s downtown, which is why you’ll find neighbourhoods in downtowns that become magnets for the visibly needy.

The problem is that these services are underfunded or even non-existent, some having once been funded by one of the two senior levels of government, but now having been off- or downloaded to municipalities.

And there we are, connecting the dots.

The Feds “downloaded” to the Provinces those services that used to be Federally-funded. The Provinces in turn have downloaded Provincially-funded services to the municipalities.

And, …well, the municipalities have no one to download to …except us. And that, in a nutshell, is my argument: citizens — people who live in cities — are shouldering the downloaded costs of all the stuff that all the other levels of government, including the municipalities, used to handle. Beggars on the streets; addicts shooting up in broad daylight; mentally ill people freaking out on corners; homeless people in every nook and cranny of public and private spaces; human feces on the sidewalks and in doorways; used needles in parks and on sidewalks; drug deals transacted openly on downtown streets… The list goes on.

The police refer to the mentally ill who openly use illegal drugs and defecate on the street and sleep in doorways as their “clients.” It seems to have gone by the board that the police shouldn’t be dealing with people on that end of the spectrum of social disorder in the first place — the police should be dealing with criminals and with law enforcement. When the people on that end of the spectrum engage in criminal activity — and they do, because they steal to stay alive and to feed their addictions — the police act like social workers …because that’s the role that has been downloaded to them, too.

Criminals exploit this.

My neighbours, who came home at 11pm on a recent weekend night to find that their basement door had been kicked in by thieves while they were away, thieves who robbed them of various items and who apparently fled just as the family returned home, had to wait for over 12 hours before the police could come over. And why was that? Perhaps they were too busy taking care of “clients”…

We — citizens — are the bottom of the food chain in this story. We — citizens — are the last link to off- or download to. We — citizens — are supposed to feel guilty if we don’t express or display the appropriate level of compassion toward the marginalized. But the citizen might ask herself, “Whatever happened to the idea that I pay my taxes, and that they pay for services intended to ameliorate these conditions?” The citizen still pays her taxes — and pays and pays and pays, if she lives in Canada — and the senior levels of government boast of surpluses. The municipalities, meanwhile, relying almost solely on the property taxes she and the many other citizens in the urban area pay, find themselves shouldering the cost of upgrading ancient infrastructure (sewage, roads, parks, recreation centres, etc.), plus the cost of “helping” the growing pool of service seekers.

But there are no provincial mental hospitals anymore, there is no affordable housing or supportive housing being built by the province or the feds, and all the damage that accrues from this out-casting has been downloaded to Joe and Jane Schmuck, i.e., you and me Citizen Jim and Citizen Jill.

That’s the dot.

Let me just present a couple of extract from the above-mentioned articles. Here’s Ransford:

Am I getting value for dollar for the property taxes I pay to local government? Politicians and bureaucrats at city hall would argue that I am getting more for my dollar than I ever have. Despite the fact that the number of employees at my city hall has grown faster than the rate of local population growth, the people that work there will tell you they are doing much more with fewer resources.

The fact is that cities across the country have become much more complex organizations than they were in the past and they have taken on more and more responsibilities. The federal and provincial governments have downloaded a long list of responsibilities on municipal governments. They have also stopped doing things that they once did as governments and the municipalities have stepped in and taken over where a need had to be met.

Social or non-market housing is a good example. Providing housing for the truly needy used to be almost the sole responsibility of the federal government. They started backing out of this area in the late 1980s and have next to no involvement today in funding what most are identifying is a desperate social need in our urban centres
(…)

The role of municipal governments has evolved. No longer do you look to your municipality merely to fix the potholes in the road in front of your house or to build and maintain the pipes that dispose of the sewage when you flush your toilet..

As Ransford points out (on page 2 of the article), a key problem here is aging populations:

The concept of a tax tied to the value of your home is beginning to make less practical sense with an aging urban population that will soon be dominated by retirees on fixed retirement incomes with all of their equity tied up in relatively expensive homes.

There’s only one kind of civic taxpayer and one source of civic revenue. There is a looming danger that taxpayer will soon no longer be able to fund the full cost of what it takes to run a city.

I would further add to Ransford’s excellent summing-up that Victoria’s troubles are uniquely compounded by our balkanized political system, which splits Victoria into many separate un-amalgamated municipalities (the Capital Regional District, which is all of Victoria, is 13 municipalities, each with its own mayor and council, fire chief, police department, and so on). At the same time, the City of Victoria holds the region’s downtown, the place where everyone comes for services — social services that range from food banks, charities, needle “exchanges,” and plain old week-end partying — many of which require policing and various levels of clean-up. Who pays? The City of Victoria, not the surrounding municipalities, which merely take advantage of what the City offers.

Let’s look at Milo Cernetig’s article now. He gets a gold star (in my book) for slamming all the BC provincial parties — too often and for too long, the problems we’re facing have been presented in partisan terms: it’s the BC Liberals’ fault (note to non-BC readers: the BC Liberals are sort of neo-conservative, and have little in common with the Federal Liberals); or it’s the NDP’s fault, and so on. Yadda yadda yadda. Blah blah blah.

Forget about it. That partisan shit has to stop, because it’s obvious that none of the parties have covered themselves in glory here, and that whole partisan shtick is old beyond words.

Here are some excerpts from Cernetig’s piece:

…here’s the fast-rewind of the amazing arc of policy blunders — given to us by a melange of Social Credit, New Democratic and Liberal governments — that I tried to explain.

First, imagine progressively shrinking the province’s major psychiatric hospital, Riverview, to save money. Then, in a cruel twist, offer no safe harbour for many of those psychiatric patients, who politicians told us would benefit from being “deinstitutionalized” and put back into society.

Instead, let large numbers of these truly desperate souls fend for themselves on our streets. Let them line up for a room in those bedbug-infested flophouses our health inspectors, for reasons that mystify, somehow allow to stay open. While we’re at it, we’ll also slow down the construction of new social housing, too, since it’s too expensive.

(…)
So now we’ve got all these lost souls begging and wandering the city’s downtown, often in a schizophrenic or crystal meth haze.

But we really haven’t done much about it. We’re not good at the tough job of distinguishing between vagrants (who should be moved on by the cops), or chronic criminals (who should be put in jail by judges) and the truly sick (who should be taken to shelters or hospitals by good beat cops, if we had enough of them).

Nope. We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks and inside the doorways of the world’s “most livable” city.

There it is: another dot: We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks and inside the doorways of the world’s “most livable” city.

The “somehow” in that sentence is “downloading.” We have been worn down by senior levels of government absenting themselves from the business of governing (a big piece of which includes providing services in exchange for all the money we fork over), and in the British tradition (within which we exist here), we have taken it uncomplainingly up the rear end, “muddling through” and accepting it all as if it were an inevitability.

That’s why we put up with the sight of what Cernetig describes, put up with open drug use, criminal transactions in plain daylight, and lunatics on our streets. In the British tradition, we are, after all, but subjects of these governments, not its master. Just as every level has downloaded — until there’s no one left to download to except to you and me, so every level absolves itself of accountability, because of course there’s always a higher level to defer to. In the last instance, the senior levels can defer to “the Crown,” a cruel joke referencing Canadian impotence.

The emancipation of Canadian cities is a project so inextricably tied to emancipation from old ways of tutelage and subjugation that it will amount to a revolution if it is ever to happen.

Unfortunately, since there has never been a Canadian revolution, I don’t hold out much hope for the emancipation / empowerment of Canadian cities. Perhaps — counter to my current pessimism — we’ll eventually strike some sort of paternalistic bargain with the “higher” levels of government after all. Since they hold the power already, they might grok the problem and step up, if only to maintain their hold.

At this point, I almost don’t care as long as the downloading stops.

Photograph by Ian Lindsay, from Milo Cernetig’s article.

The caption reads “A homeless person sleeps on a Cordova Street sidewalk in February. Figures show that investing in social housing would save B.C. $211 million annually.”

“Victoria’s choice”: my foray into critiquing municipal infrastructure funding

It’s up — my second article is up on the Vibrant Victoria website.

It’s called Victoria’s Choice: to be or not to be …is not the question. While it’s about the problem of municipal infrastructure funding in Canada generally, I try to address specifically the situation in Victoria. That is, Victoria’s choice not “to be or not to be” a city, because we obviously are a city, irrespective of those who’d prefer a Potemkin Village of tourist or retirement fantasy. Our choice is more serious: whether to be a failing or a successful city.

Read the article here; feedback (if any) could appear on Vibrant Victoria’s forum page, on this thread.