The first meeting of Vancouver’s mostly new city council has already spanned three days and will continue into this week as the councillors jostle for ways to reach consensus on some of the city’s most difficult issues, especially housing.
Few of the 10 councillors, who represent four different parties, got exactly what they wanted as they ran into warnings from staff about costs or risks associated with their proposals, as well as reluctance from some of their fellow councillors to agree. The meetings sometimes stretched on for 12 hours.
OneCity Councillor Christine Boyle put forward a motion to prioritize housing low-income people during the city’s two-year process to develop a larger-scale housing plan, but she only got the support of Mayor Kennedy Stewart and COPE Councillor Jean Swanson.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Non-Partisan Association (NPA) Councillor Colleen Hardwick could not get any support for her proposal for council to rescind immediately, and without public consultation, the previous council’s move to allow duplexes anywhere in detached-house zones.
Green Party Councillor Adriane Carr – one of only two veterans – said this past week’s meetings are an illustration of what will be needed in the months and weeks ahead.
“It is the art of the compromise and trying to get the core elements through,” Ms. Carr said. “In a non-majority council, there will be more give and take with councillors not getting everything they want. But with a majority council, the majority got everything they want and other councillors get hardly anything.”
The council, whose mayor and nine out of 10 members are new to their positions, had a particularly heavy agenda for the first meeting, with 10 motions to vote on that embodied core initiatives of different council members’ platforms.
The council will reconvene Tuesday to hear from almost 100 speakers on a motion by Ms. Swanson to protect tenants from “renovictions and aggressive buy-outs.”
Ms. Boyle, who at one point in the week sent out a tweet noting that she was in her 12th hour of council that day, said that she is “insistently hopeful” after the first round of discussions, in spite of some disappointments.
But she added: “As issues get thornier, it’s going to be harder.”
The duplex issue was a case in point.
When the previous council approved a plan to allow duplexes to be built in any single-family zone of the city, it was a hugely divisive decision at public hearings in September.
Younger speakers saw the move as a small step toward housing diversity in the city’s big swathes of single-family zoning, while older homeowners, many from the West Side, worried that allowing duplexes would lead to wholesale demolition of historic houses. The NPA made its opposition to the move a central part of its campaign in last month’s election, which returned five members of the party to council.
But the city’s head planner, Gil Kelley, warned council that reversing the motion without going to public hearing, as Ms. Hardwick proposed, could leave councillors open to the very criticism that many of them had of the previous move – that there wasn’t enough consultation.
He also noted that it might take $200,000 to $300,000 to run a proper consultation process, but that would drain money and time from other planning efforts, such as a city-wide housing plan.
Green Party Councillor Michael Wiebe suggested deferring discussion of duplexes until the city-wide plan was finished.
Ultimately, all of the councillors except Ms. Hardwick voted in favour of Ms. Boyle’s motion to ask staff to report back on the cost of a public consultation, something Ms. Hardwick called just another delay strategy.
Ms. Boyle said she hopes that councillors will ultimately decide to leave that fight for another day.
“Rehashing what was a divisive fight isn’t getting us off on the right foot … and it would slow down starting the city plan,” she said. And, she added, voting to rescind the motion without consultation would seem to fly in the face of what opponents always said they were worried about, which was lack of public input.
Frances Bula