Bicycle Lane Obstacle Course #2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

As I said in edition #1 of this series, my bike commute is pretty good. For a decent amount of the trip, where I am parallel to a significant but narrow rural road where speeding is endemic, there is a two-way separated bike path. The path is not perfect (the white bollards are virtually invisible during winter rains when oncoming car lights are present, and the driveways provide lots of blind opportunities to get nailed), but it is a pretty progressive piece of infrastructure, and the risks it presents can be managed by most riders.

Unless, or course, someone chooses to park in the middle of it. Makes me want to call the cops, except:

I should note, the officer was not (evidence suggests) responding to an urgent request, had no emergency lights on, and was not doing a speed trap (based on the normal 80km/h flow on the 50km/h Westminster Highway). He was just doing normal parked-on-the-side-of-the road-cop-stuff (idling and poking away at his computer). Something he could easily do in a legal parking spot 100m up the road, one presumes, or 500m up the road where there is a proper shoulder that isn’t a separated bike path, or at least not right next to a no parking sign.

Agendas and Mandates

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

I’ve been thinking a lot about representative democracy lately.

It is easy to feel, to quote Kent Brockman, “Democracy just doesn’t work”, when you are an Environmental Scientist and you watch Stephen Harper systematically destroy Science and the Environment.

Ms. NWimby, once again, is the voice of reason, and is only incredulous at my incredulity about how far the Harper Government has gone, and how fast. “What did you expect?” she says, “He’s doing what he was elected to do.”

Is this what he was elected to do? In theory, we elect a government to lead by setting policy that is well informed, balances needs, and achieves the goals that the people want to see achieved. (Idealist, yes, but stick with me here). The alternatives are to run a populist party (give the people what they want, whether it is good for the nation or not) or an ideological party (one based on a set of rigid principles that cannot be bent for any reason regardless if the results are what was intended, damn the facts ).

If you listen to Reform Party Strategist Stephen Harper, he was all about people wanting open, accountable government, and all he wanted to do was make Ottawa follow the will of the “the people”. Reform were the ultimate populists when he was drawing up policy in the 80s.

But he isn’t a populist now, and it is pretty clear that his decisions are not made out of a desire to develop good effective policy based on the best science or analysis of the situation. You cannot do that and at the same time cut yourself off from information.

That leaves ideology, and he has, at least since taking power in 2006, worn his ideology on his sleeve: business good, taxes bad. “European-style socialism” the worst. He hates all forms of communism except the profitable Chinese style. He is an open admirer of the United States, and sees the current slow disassembly of their civil society as path Canada would be well served to follow. (<—opinion)

So we shouldn’t be surprised, nor should we expect him to change course even if all of the doctors in the country protest his position on health care for refugees, if all the scientists in the country gather at the gates crying about the death of evidence, when a group of former Conservatvie minsters line up decry the decimation of environmental laws. He wasn’t elected to represent health care professionals, scientists, former Ministers, evidence, or even public opinion. He was elected to support his openly expressed ideology.

Everyone was so worried about Harpers “hidden agenda” that the weren’t paying attention to his declared agenda. And here we are.

So although I disagree with almost every position Harper has taken, and lament the loss of science and data the future leaders could have used to guide good policy, I cannot blame him for doing it. It is his job in representative democracy, and he was elected by us, knowing that was what we were getting. Shame on us.

What I can criticize him for is showing no respect for the electoral system through which he receives his mandate. It is clear there was, at the very least, a systematic dirty tricks campaign during the last election. It was probably not enough to change the overall result, but enough to demonstrate a profound institutional disrespect for the ballot box within the Conservative party.

Again, we should perhaps not have been surprised, as when it was clear the electorate was ready to turf the conservatives from office a few years ago, he prorogued parliament over the Christmas break when it would create the least fuss. Technically, this was not illegal according to parliamentary law, but it was a serious violation of the spirit of parliament, the spirit of representative democracy, and a shitty thing to do.

But I’m getting pretty tired of pulling my hair over the Federal Conservatives. They are a bunch of jerks. Time to move past and make best. However, there have been a couple of recent events in New Westminster that may better relate to this tension between popularity and ideology, and the spirit of representative democracy.

I haven’t said much about the Elizabeth Fry development in Sapperton. I think Will Tomkinson covered the topic very well for 10th to the Fraser, and outlined effectively the political quagmire that it became.

I think this is a situation where there was lots of blame to go around for it becoming such a difficult situation.
The Lower Sapperton neighbourhood took a strong position against EFry, but didn’t seem to have time for any compromise. Nothing wrong with having a strong opinion, and they ran quite a campaign, but they really had a hard time defining exactly what their main issue was. Yes, they sounded “NIMBY”, but their message was confused by using a whack-a-mole technique or issue raising. They were apparently concerned about crime, parking, shadowing, commercialization, the integrity of the OCP, parking, Kelly Ellard, noise, parking…

EFry, on their own account, did not make a strong public case to directly address the concerns raised by the neighbourhood. Whether they felt the concerns were legitimate or not, an OCP amendment is a BIG DEAL, and they needed to go the extra mile to try to get a number of neighbours on board. No doubt EFry does good work, and area vital part of the social fabric of a community, but there is also no doubt the programs they offer have less favourable impacts, and their decision to develop in a way that challenged the OCP should fitfully come with responsibilities to meet the spirit of the OCP in neighbourhood impacts, even if you don’t meet the letter of the OCP. Hopefully, EFry will take this opportunity to prove their detractors wrong and become the best neighbours that Lower Sapperton could have.

That is all past now, the only question left is: what is Council’s responsibility here? There is little double the majority of lower Sapperton residents opposed the EFry application. There is also little doubt that the vast majority of delegates at the marathon council meetings (at least those who do not work at EFry or use their services) were opposed to the project. If you are the type who thinks Council’s role is to represent the whim of the majority on every topic, then clearly they made the wrong choice.

There are at least two other sources of information that Councillors can use in deciding how to vote: information and ideology.

As I said, I was only a passive observer of the events around EFry, but it is possible that council were convinced by evidence that the programs are so needed, that the overall good of the community will be so well served by having them, and the impacts on lower Sapperton can be so mitigated, that they were compelled by the evidence to approve the project in spite of public outcry. That is an important part of representative democracy – electing someone with the foresight and leadership skills to do what is best for the “Greater Community”, even against hyper-local, short-term, or uninformed opposition.

I don’t know if this was the case in the EFry situation, I’d like to think so. However, I think it is safe to say that the other “i” did have a role in how council made the decision.

Without picking names, some of the members of New West Council have ideological positions that they wear on their sleeves as proudly as Stephen Harper wears his. You can call it socialist, or Marxist, or liberal (all terms that can complimentary or pejorative), and you either like them or dislike them for this very positions. Simplified, it is the idea that Government has a role in improving the lives of people, especially those on the margins of society. Like it or not, council candidates that espouse this opinion do very well in local elections. They do not hide this ideology, and they get elected, suggesting that representing that ideology is part of their mandate in Council. When called on to demonstrate leadership against possible public backlash, that is the mandate they have to fall back upon. Really, that is the “representative” part of democracy.

Was The EFry decision based on information or ideology? I don’t know, as I didn’t follow the case that closely. I suspect it was a little of both.

There is another decision that may not have (yet) received the vocal public backlash of EFry, but speaks to mandates and democracy: the MUCF funding and James Crosty’s burgeoning campaign to force a referendum on the issue.

I should say, I am generally in favour of the MUCF. As much as I would have liked the office tower to have been built with private money, I understand the position Council was in when the development deal fell through. I share their opinion that the building is too important to the ongoing renaissance of Downtown to let it fail. With the promise of Class-A office space on top of a SkyTrain line, a central location in the region, and the sweet terms the City can negotiate from the Municipal Finance Authority makes the business rick seem pretty minuscule.

However, the Community Charter creates some pretty specific rules about how Cities manage their finances. One rule is that any Municipal Council cannot borrow money for any term longer than 5 years without a specific mandate of the populace, unless for a prescribed purpose. This sensibly limits any one Council from forever indebting a City, before an election can come along and the teeming masses can toss them out.

So if your City needs to borrow, say $59million over 20 years, they are to seek a mandate from the populace, the most obvious way of doing that is through a referendum.

Cities are reluctant to hold referenda every time they have a long-term project, especially in the anti-tax anti-risk financial era in which we currently reside. Referenda are a hassle, expensive to run, and limit the ability of Councils with specific mandates (be they based on information, ideology, or both) from getting things done. So a City can take the opposite tack: assume everyone agrees unless they take effort to oppose it, kind of a “reverse-billing” referendum. And that is where we are at today in New Westminster, much to James Crosty’s chagrin.

This is not the first time the City has done this reverse-billing thing, and it is not even the first time I have raised an issue about it, but I clearly don’t have the issue-raising prowess of James Crosty.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: the current system of putting notice to the public and asking them to, essentially, fill out a ballot if they oppose the lending, is a legitimate one under the Community Charter, but (and I strongly agree with Crosty here), the City is going about this in a crappy way.

The City has put a couple of notices in the City page of the local newspapers, buried between local zoning variances, park events, and safety notices. There are a few thousand words of random legalese, which very few people are likely to read, followed by an invitation to come to City Hall during business hours, read a six-page legal form, then fill out a form, declaring your opposition. A mandate for opposition requires 4,500 individual electors to each come to City Hall during a one-month period in the middle of the summer (a usual dead zone for public consultation).

Demonstrating that this is not a true referendum, there is no funding for organized opposition to the initiative, nary is there time to get one organized in the middle of summer. In fact, according to Crosty, the City will not even provide and adequate number of the 8×11 sheets required to be filled out for any such group who wished to organize around it. If anyone wants to go to the Quayside or to Royal Centre and try to sign up electors, actually spread the word to the electorate who may oppose the long-term borrowing of $59 Million (almost $2000 per taxpaying household) they need to self-fund, and then print their own ballots!

Council only had one meeting between when these notices entered the local papers and when the “voting period” closes, and when Mr. Crosty attended that council meeting to raise these issues, he was (according to Crosty… and the streaming video evidence is not around to counter his claims) cut off after a short period of time, and was denied the opportunity to have his concerns addressed by Council or by Staff in a public forum –the only public forum available for a private citizen to raise concerns about this “referendum”.

You can be for or against the MUCF; with or against the current council: it really doesn’t matter what your ideology is on this one. This is a crappy run-around referendum that surely fits the letter of the Community Charter, but clearly violates the spirit of the Charter.

A Bit of Vacation

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

There are many things in New West I wish I was writing about right now, but instead I am busy enjoying life.

I just attended a High School Reunion (my own),

Amongst the things I am too old for, we can add my Grad Jacket and nightclubs.

…and spent some family time in the Kootenays.

I also got in a great bike ride and a short hike.

Somewhere off in the background, the ancestral Johnstone Family Home.
In the foreground, a suffering bastard feeling the Kootenay heat.

The hike also provided an opportunity to add to my long list of animal photography failures, as we ran into a rather large and surprisingly cinnamon-coloured Black Bear. Lucky he was too engaged in berry and shoot gorging to bother us too much as we wandered away nosily, but not before I was able to embarrass the makers of Canon cameras and lenses with this pathetic effort:

I am really not very good at this.
Back to regular blogging soon.

Plaza88: the Sandwich Maze

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

A few months ago, the Plaza88 retail development opened to some fanfare. The new pedestrian mall wrapped around an old SkyTrain station represented an exciting new phase in the renewal of downtown New Westminster.

I blogged my initial impressions at the time, with a post that got picked up by a long-forgotten regional blog portal, and received both positive and negative feedback, mostly because my post at the time was both positive and negative. My impression at the time was: so far OK, let’s see what happens when they open the rest, and bring on the Theatres!

Since then, I actually went to the Theatres on opening weekend, saw some Avengers beat people up, and I had a pretty good experience. Big comfy seats, decent sized screen, and they don’t turn the volume up to 11. You can’t buy a pint in the Theatre, but you can a few steps away at Hops Pub, so that’s good enough. Nothing but good stuff there.

There is also a smattering of new businesses filling the gaps on the mezzanine and concourse level. The public space in and around is getting more comfortable as it gradually becomes less of a construction site and more of a human space.

The biggest problem now, however, is the sandwich signs. Following a low-burning Twitterstorm led mostly by @matthewlaird, as the numbers of sandwich signs has been creeping up towards corn-maze density and the pedestrian experience has become more daunting.

The City, coincidentally, has been reviewing their Sign Bylaw, and a report to Council this week raised the issue of sandwich boards and their impact on pedestrian space. Problem being, the pedestrian space in Plaza88 is kind of a City street, and kind of private property, there seem to be competing opinions about who is responsible and if this or any future Sign Bylaw would even apply.

Really, I think the best approach here isn’t bylaw enforcement, it is for the potential customers to put pressure on the businesses at Plaza88 to make their pedestrian space more friendly. So this post is in that spirit, with a photo tour of the concourse to see what the problem is.

How bad are the sandwich signs? I dropped by Plaza88, entering from the Quayside Drive pedestrian entrance and walking to the 8th Street exit, and counted no less than 57 sandwich boards (not including the one in the middle of Quayside Drive). Fifty-seven in a ~150m-long concourse. That is close to three times the number of actual businesses open in Plaza88, although admittedly, at least 8 of the signs belong to Safeway alone.

Approaching from the west, the sandwich signs are not too obtrusive, as there are only
a few and there is lots of pedestrian room. 
Strangely, most are in front of the business, like they are trying to catch the eye of passing
drivers… as if walkers would not turn their heads 15 degrees to the side…
Like I said, right out front. But, hey, no real problem to walk around one sign. Still looks cheap, though.

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Moving towards the SkyTrain station, the signs are starting to get denser, some
advertising businesses I cannot see immediately behind them.

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Density going up, at least 8 in this view, three belonging to the Theatres. 

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West entrance of Safeway, almost blocked by a phalanx of sandwich boards…

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…but spin around the other direction, and the real maze begins. So from this point,
4 identical Safeway boards blocking your way to and escape route from the visible front doors.

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Glad to report a hardware store opening in Plaza88. Just kidding.
At the east end, the Corn Maze is complete. Note about 20 boards here, running right through the
pedestrian concourse, and no less than 4 identical Safeway boards blocking your view of,
and complicating your access to Safeway’s Front Door!

Sp please, Degelder Group, Plaza88, Safeway, whoever the hell is making the choices here, can you please do something about this ridiculous sandwich sign arms race? With the new businesses, the concorse is starting to look better and has a lot of offer. There is huge potential here to make it inviting in a more natural way than throwing and obstacle course of advertizing.

Then bring on the Indian Restaurant.

Bicycle Lane Obstacle Course #1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 4 Comments.

I’m starting a new theme here on NWimby, this will be the first edition of a (hopefully) very short series. It occurred to me a few days ago, for obvious reasons, during a ride to work.

I ride my bike to work occasionally-to-regularly, depending on various weather and life-management issues. This has me crossing half of New Westminster and half of Richmond. As far as bike facilities, I have absolutely nothing to complain about. I have a 21km ride each way where about 5km are on completely separated bike lanes, about 7km are on traffic-calmed Greenway with sharrows and very little traffic, about 8km are on busier roads with well-marked bike lanes, and pretty much all of the connections and traffic lights have some cycling infrastructure, or though of bicycle infrastructure. My work has a secure bike locker system, showers, most of what I need. Kudos to New West and Richmond for this.

I can ride this trip door-to-door faster than Transit can do the same job, so I am withholding any TransLink Kudos.

However, the bicycle commute is not without challenges, as I have written ranted about before. But something I have noticed with the increase in bikes lanes in our everyday lives: how well used they are by people not on bikes, and how little design or maintenance issues often turn a great investment in cycling infrastructure into an unacknowledged hazard for cyclists, often in a way no driver of a car would tolerate in a “real” road lane.

So this is my little reaction to that. I will be posting regular photos of things I see on my bike commutes, loosely collected under the title: Bike Lane Obstacle Course.

BLOC #1. I present for your consideration:

Where I been

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I’ve got excuses.

I haven’t written much in the last two weeks, but I have been on vacation, pulling Scotch Broom, digging a km of Mountain Bike trail, sawing down trees without a chainsaw, drinking beer to stave off the heat, and, most time-eating of all, I picked up the latest Neal Stephenson novel, REAMDE.

This was an impulse purchase the way off to vacation, but I knew what I was getting into. I still remember where I was (on a school bus in the Nevada Desert) the first time I read chapter 1 of Snow Crash and met The Deliverator.  I love the stuff Stephenson writes, and I had held off until the new one came out in Paperback, partly to reduce the size of the damn thing to less than a curling rock, and partly because I don’t have time for fiction right now.

Alas, it is pretty engrossing. It reads like an action movie (much like his break-out novel Snow Crash), and large swathsof it take part in my old neighbourhood – the Kootenays. So far, it is less intellectually satisfying than some of his other books. I think this is because it is Stephenson’s first book where he has fetishizes guns. Much like he fetishized nanotechnology in Diamond Age or Science-as-Religion in Anathem, this is a book not about guns, but where guns are the locus of most plot advancement from the opening scene of a family reunion shoot-off. And unlike other topics he has fetishized in the past (radical environmentalism in Zodiac, code-making and code-breaking in Cryptonomicon), I am just not all that interested in guns as a topic.

Still, the guy can write some compelling characters and his level of detail makes me want to have a copy of Google Earth open while I read, just so I can scan the streets he is describing in Xiamen, China or Georgetown, Washington. (he also has an early humourous tip-of-the-hat to the legend that the original idea for Google Earth itself was cribbed from his novel Snow Crash)

I’m only 700 pages in, so bug off, I’m reading. Its Summertime.

Canada Day Saturna Style

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.
As has become a tradition, Ms.NWimby and I spent Canada Day in a fireworks free zone: The Saturna Island Lamb BarBQ. 
This is a great small community event where a couple of thousand people descend on Saturna Island (population: about 300) to enjoy local lamb roasted over an open fire, music, entertainment, craft booths, a book exchange, kids games and sports, et al. 
We have been going often enough that we actually have an assigned task (a shift at the Ice Cream Booth), and a reserved spot on the grassy knoll in the beer garden, from where we can watch the bands.
Happy Canada Day, all.
  
Nothing saya Canada Day like a beer garden and a Mountie.
A small town festival so well estabished, it runs like a swiss watch.
The latest in Saturna Ice Cream Booth fashion.

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The team, from right to left: Sales, Heavy Lifting, Scoop Master, Scoop Apprentice.

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What we are all here for, 20+ locally raised sheep, roasted around the open fire.

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Ms. NWimby rocking the front row on the Grassy Knoll.
POV from the Front Row, after the Great Tent Install…
East Point on Saturna, where I think someone was filming a Rush album cover…
I was at the beer garden for a while, then had dreams of chasing a seal
while riding bareback on a sandstone sea lion…
It must have been a crazy dream, because I also ran into my current favourite Canadian.. on Canada Day!
and my head had turned into a van de Graaff generator!

Westminster Pier Park – Open at last

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

a very belated post on the Grand Opening of the Pier Park

Yep, we got rained on, but we still had a great time.

And really, it was apropos. No matter how much you plan, no matter how much contingency you build in to any project – be it a major brownfield remediation and construction project or a grand opening party – you cannot control all variables, sometimes you need to make your best plans, and be prepared to make lemonade if lemons arrive.
I have talked at length about the Pier Park, and have offered lots of semi-informed opinions about how the remediation for the project progressed; most, unfortunately, in response to even-less-informed discussion in the local media about what a brownfield remediation is.

Even I was surprised to learn about some of the challenges faced by the environmental engineers working on the site. Back in late April, I was able to tour the not-yet-completed site with some of those engineers as tour guides, as part of a tour organized by the Environmental Managers Association of BC.

Environmental Professionals at work. Don’t try this at home, kids.

We all know the New Westminster waterfront is historic, and has a rich industrial and commercial history, gong back further than pretty much anywhere else in BC. For heritage buffs or park programming planners, that is great. For engineers trying to clean up an abandoned contaminated site, that sounds like a whole pile of headaches, wrapped in pitfalls, and dipped in a deep pool of budget-straining hassles.

A couple of interesting stories about the New West waterfront especially stood out in my mind, and gave me headaches of empathy. Most have to do with the challenge of how people used to use the waterfront in the days when diesel was sold for five cents a gallon (think about it, how careful would you be spilling something that costs less than tap water?)

We all know the story of New Westminster’s great fire of 1898. Not many of us know that at the time of the great fire, the waterfront was somewhere just north of the current Front Street. The rest of the land between there and the river is mixed landfill material, and the first layer was the bulldozed debris of the great fire. Pushing twisted metal and scorched wood debris into the river seemed to make sense at the time.

Of course, society went through a pretty libertarian phase with the industrial revolution and the development of the colonies, and we never imagined we could cause harm to something as big as the environment. The river, although it was the source of much of our water and food, was also seen as a great place to let nature take away our trash. (“The ocean is the planet’s liver”, a good buddy of mine says, explaining why he won’t eat seafood). A good example of this is the piles of metal turnings found under the old pier.

Apparently, there was once a machine shop on the pier, and machine shops turn out a lot of metal shavings (back before it was cost-efficient to recycle them), most of them immersed in cutting fluids. At the time, it made perfect sense to cut a hole in the floor of the pier and let those shavings fall into the river. Until they accumulated up to the level of the pier. Then you cover the hole and cut another one a few meters over (well, back then, a few yards or furlongs or cubits over, I suppose), and start again.

In 2012, those piles of metals shavings immersed in hydrocarbons are called “contamination”, up to the point where they could be considered hazardous waste. Just removing them from the river sediments is a technical challenge, as you must first stabilize them or isolate them, so they do not spread around in the river sediments as you are cleaning them up, all the while working in water with a 3 knot current, and avoiding fisheries windows so your work does not impact migrating salmon.

The Cities where I have seen Wilco Play: Champaign, Illinois; Las Vegas, Nevada;
Vancouver, BC; and (this upcoming September) San Franciso, California.
Love me some Wilco.

Ten there is the infamous “Toxic Blob”. This is a small plume of chlorinated solvents (essentially drycleaning fluid and related compounds) that was discovered at depth along one edge of the property. The source of the contamination was not on the Park property, but some of it was migrating with groundwater under the property, and in order for the Park to receive a clean bill of environmental health (called a “certificate of compliance”) from the Ministry of Environment, that blob had to be stopped. Problem being it was 22m below the surface, and those cleaning up the park had no access to the source area, as it wasn’t on the Park land.

The only practical option available is to install a barrier wall to stop the flow, but how do you install a waterproof wall 22m below the surface while trains are rolling by a few meters over on one side, and piles are being driven for soil stabilization a few meters to the other side? Digging up the ground to that depth would require some serious shoring up the rails to hold laden trains up, stopping nearby soil stabilization work, and pumping out a whole lot of groundwater. The first creates a lot of risk, the second puts the rest of the pier park project off schedule and threatens the tight deadline required to get under the federal funding window, the third requires you do something with all that potentially-contaminated groundwater without violating the fisheries act or waste management act. Digging was not an option.

Sub-surface walls can be built without digging by driving sheet piles. this is just like driving regular piles, but with interlocking sheets of thick steel plate: Horribly expensive interlocking sheets of steel plate when they are 25m long. This is also a time-consuming process, and with all of that unknown fill material down below, not guaranteed to be feasible. Sheet pile is often like the unstoppable force vs. the impenetrable surface problem.

Sheet piles used for shoring in another location on the Fraser River

A better solution was found in an innovative approach involving jet grout. Essentially, they drilled a line of holes, and put a device down each hole that shot concrete grout out the sides of borehole. Given enough holes and a powerful enough jet to bridge the gap between holes, an entire impermeable concrete/grout wall can be injected. There were still some significant technical challenges with assuring the holes remained aligned all the way down (drill holes tend to deviate over 22m!) which were solved using an innovative down-hole GPS system. Inject the wall, install a couple of monitoring wells to make sure the groundwater (and chlorinated solvents) are not leaking through, and Bobs Yer Uncle. Best part was that it could be done while the rest of the work on the Park was being completed.

That is the most remarkable part of this project, actually. Besides the technical challenges, it was simply not possible to do it in the “normal” Brownfields way. That would be: investigate first, complete remediation, then plan and construct above the cleaned-up site. Because the Federal portion of the money came with a tight deadline to completion, there was simply no time to wait for the preliminary and remediation work to be done before the soil stabilization and deck refurbishment work had to start. So the remediation work was ongoing during pile driving and pier construction: Two or three teams working independently on the same site. To use a sports analogy, it would be like having a baseball game and a football game happening simultaneously on the same field, while someone is mowing the grass: An organizational nightmare.

And how much work? According the (publically available) remediation reports, 6,500 tonnes of contaminated soils and 3,000 tonnes of contaminated sediments were removed from the site. At least 100 tonnes of that was contaminated enough to be considered “hazardous waste”, requiring special handling and disposal measures.
I cannot count the number of times on the April tour when the tour group, comprised of professional peers of the project management team, cursed under their breath or shook their heads slowly side-to-side, expressing amazement about the complexity of this project.
Suited up and suitably impresssed Environmental Professionals.
There is a reason this project won awards from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Canadian Urban Institute. It is not the great amenities above the deck, it is more about the remediation challenges, the engineering efforts and the project management success story under the deck: the part you will never see, and the part that made what seems a simple park project cost $25 Million to construct. Of course, it was those challenges that made the $16 Million from senior governments available for the project, yet it was the tough conditions set by the senior government agencies and the tight deadline attached to that funding that made it so challenging. Tom Waits: The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.
That is a part many of the park critics failed to acknowledge when talking about the Park: this was a horribly contaminated site; an industrial wasteland abandoned many years ago by the (mostly) private enterprises who contaminated it. Money invested to build this amenity was contributed by all three levels of government, and was spent to clean it up, so the contamination would no longer pose a threat the human health or the environment. It wasn’t free, but it was a good idea, and worth doing. Where there was toxic groundwater, soil, and sediments, there is now a cleaned-up site, and a beautiful public amenity.
It was a bold project, and the results are spectacular. Judging by the crowds I have seen at the park over the last two weeks, I have to say a lot of people agree with the results, even if they will never know about all the work that took place below their feet to make it happen.

Even the Grand Opening was well attended and cheery – despite the pouring rain.

The Air Care Landmine

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I work in Richmond, but do most of my actual living in New Westminster, so I am reluctant to get too involved in the politics on the downstream end of Lulu Island.

However, when I read a recent Editorial Piece in the Richmond Review (sister paper to our own NewsLeader and the Peace Arch News, where there is a electronic version available), I had to react. I wrote a longer piece on AirCare way back when the current public relations campaign to get rid of it started up, as part of a longer rant about the myopic old-school viewpoint of one Harvey Enchin.

Long and short, AirCare is a successful program that is cost-effective and will be until at least 2020. The only argument against it is that it is inconvenient – in that once every two years, less than 50% of drivers have to take 15 minutes out of their day and pay $45 to demonstrate that their car has an operating emissions control system. Boo freaking hoo.

So here was my response letter to the Richmond Review Editor.

I recognize the Editorial section is where opinions are expressed, but isn’t journalistic opinion supposed to rest on a foundation of fact?

In your editorial, you make statements that sound like fact, such as “Air Care hasn’t really been necessary for some time” or “There simply aren’t enough older vehicles on the road to make the expensive and bureaucratic program necessary”, or “random enforcement is best”, but indicate what these opinions are based upon. As a multi-agency program review of AirCare completed less than two years ago concluded the system was effective, efficient, and would continue to provide measureable air-quality benefits to the region until at least 2020, it seems the facts available are the opposite of your assertions.

When you characterise AirCare as “nothing more than a cash-grab from the government”, it is at odds with the fact AirCare is self-supporting, uses no tax dollars to operate, and transfers no money to its lead agency (TransLink). Compare that to the “random enforcement” strategy you propose, which will require taxpayer-funded officers to issue tickets, enforceable through the taxpayer-funded courts, to collect fines that will go to General Revenue.

Cancelling AirCare is a bad decision based not on good policy, but election-time pandering, because protecting our airshed is “inconvenient” to a portion of the population. I am, of course, editorializing; but I would love to see some facts to change my mind.

The fact that AirCare will not be cancelled until 2014, and that the proposed commercial vehicle “replacement program” has not been described in any detail suggest to me this is, in fact, a landmine being dropped by the BC Liberals. It has a bit of curb appeal, might get them a few votes, but in reality, it just puts the winner of the next election in a difficult situation. They will need to dismantle the system (which will be costly, and result in worsening air quality) or try to keep it running against public outcry (because the current government has poisoned the well, despite AirCare being good policy). This is, in many ways, no different than the recently announced limit to BC Hydro rate increases that bypassed the Utilities Commission.

What other landmines lie in waiting before we get to May, 2013?