Get ready for it. By the time everyone gets back to work in September in Vancouver and Whistler city halls, it’s essentially going to be all Olympics all the time.
As part of that, those two cities, along with others that have venues, like Richmond, have also been identifying who among their staff is going to [...]

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In another ring of the Vancouver city hall circus these days, the city’s proposed bylaw changes to noise, graffiti and other bylaws is generating all kinds of heat and light.
Here’s just one small sample of the exchanges going on.
—–Original Message—–
From: Michael Healey
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 10:39 AM
To: Anton, Suzanne; Cadman, David; Chow, George; Deal, [...]

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The city has just posted four reports related to past decisions on Southeast False Creek and the Olympic village. I wasn’t able to spot much new that hasn’t already been reported at some length. Two of the reports were on Jeff Lee’s blog last fall.
But I welcome comments from those who have a finer eye [...]

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A big report on the city’s homelessness efforts is on the agenda for next week. Most of it states a lot of what we’ve heard throughout the last few months in terms of the state of affairs here in Vancouver re homelessness and where the city would like to go.
A new squib that was interesting [...]

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There had been many rumours that the head of Vancouver’s cultural planning department, Sue Harvey, might be ousted by the new council when it came in. Those rumours went to sleep for a while, leading many to wonder what was happening.
Latest news in is that Sue is decamping from cultural planning — but only temporarily. [...]

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Here’s my latest column in Vancouver magazine, where I got to spend some time with Peter and Shahram Malek of Millennium Developments — the developers at ground zero in the current financial/housing/Olympics twister. Everyone in town has been playing backseat driver to these two and speculation continues to be rampant about the end cost of [...]

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This month’s Vanity Fair takes a look at the guys who run hedge funds, with those at Fortress featured in this story. As you’ll recall, Fortress is no longer involved in the Olympic village, after having agreed to have their $750-million loan bought out by the city.
But the fund still owns the Whistler ski resort, [...]

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The second-in-command at engineering, Peter Judd, has been tapped, it appears, to replace Dave Rudberg as general manager for Olympics preparation. The news came as a surprise to him. There was no posting or even internal application. He was simply asked by city manager Penny Ballem to do it.
Peter, engineering’s very energetic and relatively young [...]

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Get used to it. Everyone is going to be writing about us ad nauseam for the next year. Here’s just one sample of how we look to the outside world, from today’s Financial Times: homelessness, drug addiction, gang violence all chipping away at our beautiful image.

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My story a couple of days ago referred to the other site Vancouver would be running as part of the Olympics, in addition to the two “live sites” on Georgia and at David Lam Park.
Here’s the city report on the details of what’s going to be at that site, which will be “a venue to [...]

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