I apologize that it’s taken me so long to put this up, but here, at last, are the campaign finance disclosures that mayoral candidates Raymond Louie and Allan DeGenova filed with Vision Vancouver. (My late-night struggles with blog technology are finally paying off.) They aren’t available at the city clerk’s office because the city clerk [...]

[Read more →]

Vancouver has spent we don’t know how much money to get lawyer Richard Peck to come up with recommendations for how the city can avoid future leaks of embarrassing documents. One of his main recommendations was that Vancouver hire a full- or part-time integrity commissioner. But it didn’t sound to me yesterday as though Vision [...]

[Read more →]

Okay, he put it in more lawyerly language than that, but essentially that’s what Richard Peck said about Vancouver’s “code of conduct,” its definition of “confidentiality” and its whole process for reporting on misconduct at the city. It’s in his eight-page report due out tomorrow on what to do about the city’s in-camera meetings, in [...]

[Read more →]

Mike Howell, the hardest-working reporter on the civic beat and someone who makes me feel tired whenever I look at the volume of stuff he produces on a weekly basis, has been keeping on top of the city hall investigation into the leaked document on the village’s finances last fall. His story is here.

[Read more →]

Here’s the latest from city hall, from those of you not already in the loop from the twitterings, blogs, news flashes and what all emanating from the media horde there. More later on some of the interesting Q and A at the council meeting, but I’m at work on other projects right now.
STATEMENT FROM MAYOR [...]

[Read more →]

That’s the latest fun news from city hall, as per this report that just got put up on the city’s website.
The cost of the 250 housing units has soared from the original estimate of $65 million to $110 million. Now the city is facing the question of what to do — put in millions more [...]

[Read more →]

It was one year to the Olympics yesterday, but for the city and the Olympic village developers, the deadline is much closer: Oct. 31 to be exact, except for a couple of buildings that are going to be delivered Nov. 30.
The city is still working on finalizing its financing, and it’s also taking extreme precautions [...]

[Read more →]

I see my former Sun buddy Jeff Lee was the first to get this story in print about Jim Green being hired by Millennium Developments to help out with the Olympic village and possibly other projects of theirs.
Of course, the sub-text is that this must be about Jim, who helped started the Vision Vancouver party, using [...]

[Read more →]

Well, we always wanted to be a world-class city. And now we are, as you can see from this article in the Guardian, documenting London’s troubles in financing its Olympic athletes’ village.
And what’s the deal with Whistler? Why aren’t they having the same troubles? They seem to be doing just fine, as Bruce Constantineau’s story [...]

[Read more →]

You can read news stories with complete paragraphs in other media if you want. (My pal Rod Mickleburgh was covering for the Globe today, and pretty much everyone else was there in force.)
Here’s my take on what was new and interesting, beyond the basic news that the city is gearing up to go and borrow [...]

[Read more →]