If you were still wondering what Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson chose to publicly apologize for in the last few days of the municipal election campaign, go no further than Justice Mark McEwan’s Supreme Court ruling handed out last week.
That’s the decision that smacked city hall for its shenanigans surrounding a controversial and complex land swap in Yaletown and the public hearing into the deal.
Specifically, the justice said the public hearing process “the city adopted was unfairly restrictive, in presenting the public with a package of technical material that was opaque.”
The city attempted to limit the public’s engagement by limiting the public hearing to only one of the two pieces of land involved in the swap, (one owned by the developer, the other owned by the city).
McEwan criticized the city for “limiting the comment on the integrated nature of the project, and in failing to provide an intelligible (i.e. where do the numbers come from?) financial justification for it.”
In fact, comparing the values assigned to the two pieces of land in the January 2013 land exchange contract between the city and the developer, Brenhill Development Ltd., and the values estimated by B.C. Assessment, there appears to be a difference of at least $50 million in the developer’s favour.
Part of the deal was a commitment by the developer to construct a building on its property at 1099 Richards St. that would replace an 87-unit social housing development on the city land at 508 Helmcken (across the street and adjacent to a public park) that the developer was about to acquire.
Brenhill would also add an additional 75 units of “low market rental” (300- to 350-square-foot units to be rented out at $1,100 a month) which would significantly increase the density allowed on the Richards Street site.
That additional density should have been approved by council before the development permit was issued. It seems it wasn’t.
To cover this apparent error, city staff subsequently slipped in a bylaw (number 10870) in an appendix to a West End Development plan series of amendments (an area to the west of Yaletown) that removed the requirement for council to approve the density increase.
McEwan said it was asking too much of residents to expect them to pick up on that bylaw manoeuvre.
In the end, the court quashed the bylaw 10870 and the development permit on the building under construction at 1099 Richards. Construction was stopped.
By doing that, McEwan sent shock waves through the development community and the city and threw the future of more than a dozen major projects now in the works into question.
In response, the city planning department, under its director Brian Jackson, quickly produced a report on Friday to try to make changes to at least deal with the bylaw that was quashed and give more certainty to projects and decisions brought into question by the Supreme Court ruling. He wanted that approved following a new public hearing.
Between the staff report being written and it finally turning up at council on Wednesday, it had to be withdrawn and re-written at least twice.
Meanwhile, councillors were being inundated with emails expressing concern about the confusion raised by the seemingly impenetrable technical language in the document and the consequences of those proposals in the light of the court ruling.
Jackson’s defence of the report and recommendation it should go directly to public hearing were stopped dead.
A council motion wanted the report sent back to staff to, among other things as Coun. Kerry Jang said, “change the language to be more a little more accessible.” It would then come back to council.
There were also several demands to include more detail — the kind that was sadly lacking during the public hearing around the land swap — so that people could actually figure out what was at stake for them and their neighbourhoods in any future public hearing.
The kind of sloppy indifference to the public’s right to know and be effectively consulted is not unique to this land-swap case. It has been a pattern of behaviour typical of the Vision administration.
Only time will tell, as they say, whether that behaviour will change as a result of Justice McEwan’s ruling and whether Robertson will hold true to his promise.
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