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Big battle of political campaigns set for Surrey as Hepner, Rasode and maybe McCallum? teams gear up

June 27th, 2014 · 1 Comment

It is going to be a crazy election fight this year in Surrey if Barinder Rasode keeps going with her bid for mayor. She has got some heavyweights with her, including Mark Marissen (very experienced hand at rounding up the Indo vote for the federal Liberals), Jatinder Rai and, I hear, a veteran Conservative campaigner who worked on Christy Clark’s campaign.

Then, as we saw this week, Linda Hepner and Surrey First came out with a new team, plus their own set of heavy-hitting campaigners: Stew Braddick and Mike Witherly. Also, as I tweeted out on the day of the announcement, Patrick Kinsella is in the mix. Observers pointed out to me that my picture of Patrick also included Prem Vinning.

Needless to say, Mayor Dianne Watts made a point of boosting the Linda Hepner/Surrey First campaign with an unequivocal endorsement.

I’ve also just heard that former mayor Doug McCallum is planning to announce a run sometime in early July.

My Globe story on Hepner’s announcement is here. Kelly Sinoski at the Vancouver Sun was also present and, if you can get past the paywall to read it, her story with details I didn’t have is here.

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  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Three weeks late, let me post a few points on the challenges facing top municipalities in our region outside Vancouver city limits using Surrey as the straw horse.

    I can see no concrete signs that either Surrey, New Westminster or Burnaby will successfully unseat the regional supremacy of the CPRs chosen Terminal City—Vancouver. Every time I drive in any of these other municipalities—of course, you’d have to be a fool to try to walk in them—the impression is burned that much deeper into my psyche.

    In Surrey there are a number of questions that have not been addressed to my satisfaction.

    (1) The King George Boulevard upgrades of the past 5 years failed to address the all important question: public transit.

    Surrey planners proceeded to build a highway for cars in the era of public transportation. Then, they doubled down on their mistakes by failing to realte community growth to the [unplanned, unbuilt] 21-st century transportation system. It can take communities decades to recover from these mistakes.

    (2) ‘Tower City’ being planned around the Simon Fraser Univeristy campus. SFU has a garage that makes all the same mistakes of the Bentall towers downtown. However, there is a 40-yeaer gap between the two projects. Where did the Surrey planners go wrong? And what other mistakes will be discovered as their plans are built??

    A tower neighbourhood as Surrey’s new image? Really—How retro can we go? Surrey’s bid for regional supremacy seems to be built on the unsustainable visons of tall towers. Give your head a shake!

    (3) To walk to the new City Hall is an impossibility. If forced to do so, one wonders how all the negative experiences are ever to be resolved. When there is no difference between a shopping mall and a Civic Centre then we know the wrong paradigm is in place. In the case of Surrey, where the old City Hall resembled a college campus, the errors in urban design are more than 2 generatiosn old!

    (4) One worries that in the vacuum of the suburban expanasions—Surrey, Burnaby and Coquitlam revelled in that era—a horrible lack of capacitiy has ensued opening the doors for the worst kind of ad-hoc city building. One worries that greedy large-scale developers will rape and pillage the likes of Surrey and White Rock leaving nothing but a kind of “Scorched Earth Landscape” in their wake.

    (5) Last insult: Skytrain. Really? Trains in the Sky??? Is THAT our collective vision of ‘good’ urbanism??