Vancouver’s Non-Partisan Association sent out a notice late last week saying it plans to lower its membership fee from $20 to $10 a year, in an apparent move to compete with Vision Vancouver’s successful membership drive that brought in 17,000 new members last year at as low as $5 apiece.

This seems to be part of [...]

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Well, all I can say is Yikes. One more city manager bails, Kevin Ramsay, the recently hired head of HR. He’d replaced Mike Zora, who had become the object of union unhappiness, and from what I had heard, was doing a good job and managing to calm things down a little. But not any more.
Here’s [...]

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Sean Holman has a doozy of a story in today’s Globe.
Sean has a copy of an e-mail from former board member Mike Bruce, announcing he is quitting the party and urging others to do the same, because of the mayor’s silence on explaining to party members why he made comments during the campaign appearing to [...]

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In their first step towards taking away car space for bikes, Vision councillors opted this afternoon for the compromise solution of taking away only one lane on the Burrard Bridge instead of two lanes.
The bike trial, which will start in four to six weeks, will go like this: All pedestrians confined to the west sidewalk [...]

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This went out at 10:11 today (while the civics panel was on at CKNW with Bill Good — how handy) and has quickly spread all over town. CKNW’s Janet Brown is reporting that Ridge is leaving because of “politicization” at city hall, though no word that Ridge is talking directly to anyone.
Not a total surprise [...]

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If you’d like to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon at the cemetery listening to people talk about how to create affordable housing in Vancouver, you can.
The Vision Vancouver council’s latest task force/brainstorming/collective put in place to hone in on an issue — in this case, how to create affordable and rental housing — is going [...]

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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 [...]

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Alvin Singh, the young and articulate school board candidate who didn’t quite get elected last November, is the new external co-chair for the Coalition of Progressive Electors and he’s joined by a largely 20/30-something executive. Ivan Bulic has a good blog post on this in the Georgia Straight.
That’s quite a sign of renewal for the [...]

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Everyone who FOI’d Judy Rogers’ severance package got their letter this morning on the amount, though not the full severance agreement. It was $571,788 — not the $700,000 that some people had been chattering about.
Still a whack of money, though. You can read my web file here from the Globe and I’ll have more tomorrow [...]

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Not all the financial disclosures are in yet — still waiting for many of the Non-Partisan Association candidates — but there’s now enough in to show that the spending reached unbelievable new levels.
Vision Vancouver spent almost $2 million, as I report in the Globe this morning. (The documents will be filed with the city later [...]

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