 How Vancouver could make its public spaces as fun as the Shipyards | | |  | | | Vancouver Coun. Mike Klassen has a modest proposal for the City of North Vancouver’s ultra popular Shipyards District.
“We should be charging them for the view of our beautiful downtown skyline,” he joked.
The success of the Shipyards as a public space, which Metro Matters covered earlier this week, is a testament to North Vancouver City’s work over many years to remediate, rezone, plan and program the space.
“I think the Shipyards definitely sets the bar … it's just an absolute gem, but I think Vancouver has an opportunity to meet that and raise the bar even higher,” said Klassen. But what would that look like? Metro Matters reached out to the Vancouver mayor’s office to talk about the Shipyards in part because Vancouver hasn’t had many recent high points when it comes to people gathering and public spaces.
From the cancellation of a Formula E event to no New Year's fireworks, from taking three years to approve park drinking to an 82-page document on the regulations for holding basic events, the city has had plenty of examples recently of reasons why the “No Fun City” epithet has stuck, unfairly or not, for decades.
Coun. Rebecca Bligh says that reputation requires effort to turn around.
“The city really needs to be seen as a partner to events the community is trying to do,” she said, adding Vancouver needed to look at its permit review process for events large and small.
“We have an opportunity to really be more creative, more entrepreneurial in how we look at enabling really positive environments and events for families.”
In the last splintered city hall, the city’s philosophy didn’t fundamentally change. But Ken Sim’s majority ABC council has signalled that “fun,” for lack of a better term, is a priority.
Klassen and Bligh said that beyond changing the culture around event approval, 2026 loomed as a big opportunity. With the World Cup in town and the Broadway Subway line opening, the mayor’s office is looking at what types of events could be feasible.
Meanwhile, the park board has already started down the path to permit legal drinking and lifted the moratorium on new events and festivals.
It won’t mean Vancouver will build its own Shipyards District in the next four years. But better utilizing the city’s many public spaces?
Consider it something to watch.
“I think there's going to be a huge emphasis on that fun, that vibrancy in making the city a place that attracts people from every neighbourhood,” said Klassen.
“Let's make sure that we can host celebrations, bring out the public, bring people out to the streets and make sure that it's safe for all people.” | | |  | | | 1. Pouce Coupe | | | Welcome back! We’re looking forward to an exciting 2023 of local political news, but there are still some events from 2022 that are being tied up. Among them, the saga of Pouce Coupe’s contentious mayoral election, where the losing candidate filed a legal challenge based largely around the question of whether offering cinnamon buns at a campaign event was an illegal enticement of voters. Spoiler alert: a judge said it wasn’t.
Read more | | |  | | | 2. Kamloops | A councillor in Kamloops certainly wanted to turn the page on 2022, showing a team-building exercise everyone was attending … but it turned out the mayor wasn’t there, didn’t agree with who was leading the meeting, didn’t agree with the cost of it, and then said it was up to him to lead council going forward. Which, given relations thus far, seems easier said than done.
Read more in Radio NL | | | |  | | | 3. Policing costs | The beginning of the year also brings new fiscal realities, particularly if communities have jumped up in population. The reason? Municipalities pay a different share of policing costs based on clearing different population targets rather than on a proportional per capita basis. It’s been a longstanding source of conflict and is now hitting Lake Country’s bottom line hard. Read more | | | | | |  | | | 4. Port vs. Prince | Speaking of communities and fiscal challenges! Prince Rupert has long maintained that the Port — the largest employer in the city — doesn’t pay its fair share of taxes, given the amount of land it controls. Now, the dispute has escalated due to the city challenging the amount of the Port land's assessment with tens of millions of dollars hanging in the balance.
Read more in the Northern View | | | |  | | | 5. Lytton | And while some things are new in 2022, some are still frustratingly the same: Lytton is still not able to issue building permits, and cleanup is still not finished from the disastrous 2021 fire that destroyed most of the town. The new mayor came to office after months of arguing higher levels of government were not moving fast enough — we’ll see if a new year brings different results. Read more in Castanet | | | | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
forwarded to you. | | | | That's it for this this week! In the meantime, check out the latest headlines at cbc.ca/bc and follow our municipal affairs reporter Justin McElroy on Twitter. And if you have any questions you might want answered in a future mailbag, drop Justin a line at metromatters@cbc.ca. | | | |
