Oak Bay is looking for a few good people

…to serve on various boards and committees. The terms run for one or two years and start in December. So which committees need people?

Advisory Design Committee

This group works with developers and builders looking to construct new buildings in the municipality from a design perspective. However, all applicants must be registered architects with the Architectural Institute of BC, which has a fairly stringent application process.

Oak Bay Parks and Recreation Commission

They oversee the running of the various facilities and programs that Recreation Oak Bay runs. Interest in parks and recreation recommended.

Recognition of Renovation and Building Achievement Awards Panel

This little known group hands out awards for new developments and renos.

Heritage Committee

The Heritage Commitee is responsible for the historical archives, researches various historical mattesr and maintains inventories of historical properties, including those on the Heritage Register as well as a whole host of other responsibilities. This is not the Heritage Advisory Panel, which deals more directly with the Heritage Register and other regulatory matters. The full division of labour between them and the Heritage Foundation is clearly explained on this Heritage Oak Bay page.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, November 3rd. and needs to go to Lorraine Hilton, the municipal secretary. Full details here (PDF).

http://www.aibc.ca/fta/application-process/default.php

Followup on the ethical purchasing workshop

Greening the Inner-City has picked up on my blog post on the ethical purchasing workshop. He correctly takes me to task for not mentioning the Community Benefits Agreement that was put in place as part of the Olympic Village construction. It had some truly amazing results, training more people than originally planned with a great retention rate. It is a good example of where a city can leverage a large amount of money into large benefits for not only the local community but also the businesses, as they are getting more trained construction workers which are always needed in this part of the world, bust or no bust.

So in my defense, I was there at the tail end of about 12 hours straight of volunteering, having started at 6am and there was just so much interesting information in the workshop, it is really hard to capture it all in around 750 words.

Gaining Ground Summit Day One

Yesterday was the first day of the summit and after more than 12 hours of volunteering, I am glad the day is finally over, even if it was information-packed and fun. This morning brought the first of eight plenaries, all of which I managed to miss because of my volunteer work, but I will hunt to see if I can find any videos online. The whole program can be seen online.

After an excellent lunch in one of the Pan Pacific’s dining rooms and much kibbitzing amongst us volunteers, mostly students, about the real reason we volunteer was for the free food. As a workshop support volunteer, I ended up in the Sustainable Green workshop, something I never would have chosen myself but ended up quite enjoying. The focus was building sustainability into all procurement and purchasing policies. The moderator and one of the speakers was Tim Reeve of Reeve Consulting, who were working with the City of Vancouver on their new procurement policies.

But first up was Bob Purdy of the Buy Smart project, a project of the Fraser Basin Council. Around since 2005, they are a gathering place for the various governments and other groups to talk about sustainable purchasing policies and new ideas. His talk was high level, speaking about the trends, such as corporations starting to take social responsibility, or at least the veneer of it, seriously. General awareness is growing and their are success stories, such as he showed Walmart’s “sustainability” work. I am not exactly sold on Walmart being a green retailers, but they do control a good chunk of the Canadian market, so what they has a huge impact, regardless of what people think of them. He also emphasized that the of the major problems was the lack for concrete action, as many companies fail to do anything about their sustainability policies.

Next up was David Graham, Manager of Supply Management of the City of Vancouver. He spoke about, in his own words, “where the rubber met the road”. Vancouver is centralizing much of it’s procurement and at the same time, embedding sustainability principles into the new policies. These also build on Vancouver’s existing Ethical Purchasing Policy, which only covers agricultural products and clothing. While still in draft, the new policies are expected to go before council in November.

One of the questions raised was about compliance. Like bylaws, the City is going to take a complaint-based approach, due to lack of resources to carry out a lot of auditing, something the last speaker, from Transfair also touched on. I think that while I can understand why they are taking a complaint-based approach, I suspect the city is going to take a lot of heat when problems come up as people and organizations dig deeper into certain suppliers. This is especially true given that the city’s stated goal is not to cut off any supplier right away, rather work with them to raise their them up to the standard.

Last up was Michael Zelmer of Transfair, the Canadian labelling partner of the international Fair Trade Labelling Organization. His major point is that certification is actually about a relationship of trust. The purchaser must trust that the product actually meets the standards it claims to follow. As it impossible for a consumer to have a relationship with every single supplier, this is where the certification body comes in. It creates the single trusted source for the consumer, one that can be independently audited and determined.

Another key point he made was about what the fair trade label means, “that the product meets the certification”, and what it doesn’t, “that the company is ‘good'”. I think this is a key point, especially as Cadbury’s has recently announced that all Dairymilk bars are going to be made with fair trade cocoa and sugar. As the price of Dairymilk bars won’t rise brought us back to Vancouver, where the Vancouver Parks Board had decided to start selling fair trade coffee and chocolate bars, they chose to completely replace their coffee but had kept mainstream candy such as Dairymilk for fear of losing revenue.

All in all, it was a good little workshop. The four presenters worked well together,as they had all worked together at various points and were able to play off each other. The crowd was small, but that was apparently true for most of the workshops. Discussion amongst the volunteers led us to suspect that a lot of people either left for lunch and didn’t come back or headed out after lunch. Why this is we couldn’t come to a consensus, but is probably something the organizers, who have been doing a great job, might want to look into. Apparently this year is almost twice as big as last year’s at Royal Roads. On the topic of posting, I will try and post something about each day, but I refuse to pay $15/day for wifi at the conference centre and lack it where I am staying. Actually, being away from my email has been quite liberating.

Weekly news roundup

The Times Colonist is running a series of articles called Outlook 2010, covering a vast variety of issues around Victoria. Two today caught my eye:

In other news, everybody’s favourite forestry company property developer Western Forest Products is off selling land again (Times Colonist), this time in the north Island area. This as the CRD has now drafting a new bylaw governing the Juan de Fuca lands that include those WFP is trying to develop.

What really gets me about these removals from the Tree Farm Licenses is that are an explicit violation of the social contract that timber companies signed up to when they took on the TFLs. In return for access to Crown lands for forestry, the companies had to operate local sawmills and manage their private lands “sustainably”. Guess the second two parts of that agreement have kind of been forgotten, as the Times Colonist article says,

Cash-strapped WFP wants to concentrate its forestry operations on Crown land and needs capital to renovate its mills.

This kind of bait and switch isn’t exactly new, as the Dogwood Initiative points when looking at the Dunsmuir land grant for the E&N.

In a slightly better note, they have discovered a use for broom: biomass fuel (Goldstream News Gazette). While that broom is going to other places, I wonder if enough broom could be pulled out of some of the other parks in the region to feed Dockside Green’s biomass plant. As far as I know, they are still looking for biomass to burn, a task made harder by the lack of sawdust and wood chips from the shutdown of many of the mills on Vancouver Island.

Ford saves GM bus

The GM bus in question Photo Credit: The Ford Foundation
The GM bus in question Photo Credit: The Ford Foundation

The Henry Ford Foundation is working hard to preserve a General Motors bus. This bus carries the serial number of #1132 and used to be part of the Capital City Street Railway Company or The Lightning Route, established in 1886, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama.

So why is Ford money being used to save this GM bus? Because one day in 1955 a woman decided that she didn’t need to get up just because of her colour. The rest, they say, is history.

Interestingly, the same year that the Lightning Route was being built, another street railway got it’s start up north. That was the Scranton Suburban Electric Railway in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Why Scranton? Jane Jacobs was born in there in 1916; who was later made famous by her opposition to Robert Moses in New York.

World Blog Action Day on Climate Change

Despite what a lot of people seem to believe, climate change is real. Thankfully, there are solutions to the problem. One of those is Blog Action Day, where blogs can unironically use electricity to talk about how to save the planet.The list of blogs from Canada is quite large, and there even a few from around our neck of the woods.

In a more concrete move, I will be at the Gaining Ground: Resilient Cities Summit in Vancouver next week. Thanks to the organizers for letting us poor students volunteer to save the cost of entry.

Speaking of Vancouver, the city of about to embark on a massive traffic calming scheme known as the Olympics (Globe & Mail). The first road closures start next month, with more as Olympics gets closer. While I expect a day or so of traffic chass, Vancouverites are about to discover that traffic demand is elastic, not fixed. Too bad it is unlikely that the Olympic closures will stick, as there is a real chance of real change being offered here.

A giant pile of web fail

Yesterday, while I was researching the story on the BC Transit Victoria Regional “Rapid” Transit study (VRRT), I came across a whole pile of web fail:

  1. As of this morning, the BC Transit press release which must have gone out wasn’t listed on their main page listing all press releases or the VRRT project’s website News page.
  2. The new open houses did not appear on the VRRT’s website.
  3. As I realized I didn’t know where the Colwood Municipal Hall was, I did a quick search. A Google search for “Colwood Municipal Hall” yielded no results. The map showed Oak Bay’s muni hall.
  4. Searching the Colwood website, colwood.ca for “hall” got a link to a city hall page. Sadly it only said this on it:
  5. Microsoft VBScript runtime error ‘800a0007’Out of memory: ‘Server.CreateObject’

    /siteengine/includes/PageFunctions.asp, line 19

  6. Similiarly, the top press release, which is about expanded rail service, on the ICF site gets you this error:
  7. msxml3.dll error ‘80004005’

    Error while parsing “http://www.islandcorridorfoundation.ca/sites/icf/templates/article/dataSources/summary.xml.asp?sid=39”. End tag ‘title’ does not match the start tag ‘body’.

    D:\SITES\ICF\SITES\ICF\../../core/publish_3_2.inc, line 218

What a giant pile of web fail, and here I though the Oak Bay Muncipality’s site was bad.

Say goodbye to rapid transit in Victoria

So the new alignment study is out and it (Times Colonist, BC Local News), as I predicted, takes Douglas St to the Highway and then the E&N route. All is good except for one little detail: they ditched the centre running lanes for curb lanes. What a lovely disaster.

So lets count the ways they have set themselves up for disaster:

  1. Curb lanes will be slower running than centre ones, because there is simply more chance for cars to stop or slow the transit vehicle, be it bus or train. Centre lanes have a major challenge with stops, as they mentioned in the article by the BC Transit CEO and was the public reason that the Chamber of Commerce opposed it last time. However, many cities have solved this problem successfully, something the Human Transit blog points out.
  2. Where is the bike lane going to go? Sandwiched between the transit lane and the parking? Spacing Toronto has a good post about what they do in Copenhagen.
  3. Which brings us to parking. Are they going to remove the parking or take away a travel lane?
  4. Given BCTransit is likely to be choosing buses for this, how are they going to convince the ICF to let them pave part of the E&N?

That is a lot of fail. There are two open houses, one this Thursday between 4 and 8pm at the Colwood Muni Hall and another between 1 and 7pm on the 20th at the Victoria City Hall. I will be out of town on the 20th at the Gaining Ground Summit, but I hope I can come away with some answers after this Thursday.

My Great-Uncle’s memorial bike rack

Last spring, my great-uncle (my maternal grandmother’s younger brother) died. As part of his legacy, he requested a bike rack be installed in his home town of Port Alberni. At his memorial service a few months back, the rack had been installed in front of the Cup & Saucer Eatery but the memorial plaque wasn’t. Today it has been:

Memorial Bike Rack
Memorial Bike Rack
Close-up of memorial plaque
Close-up of memorial plaque

If you want to visit it, the rack is right in front of the green roofed building:


View Larger Map

Daily news roundup

  • The sewage issue continues to barrel along, with a decision expected by Wednesday. The latest twist is that a proposed plant may straddle the border between the new CRD land and the existing Saanich land. Both the Times Colonist and the News Group aka Oak Bay News have stories on this and if you want to
  • Although both View Royal and Oak Bay continued their composting trial, there is no sign of it spreading to other parts of the region. However, there are plenty of other options, as the Times Colonist pointed out today.
  • Due to a power failure, one of the keynotes at the just-finished Canadian Institute of Planners AGM in Niagara was done by candle-light. Unexpected irony as the theme was coping with climate change.

Transit & Rail

The ridership risk of introducing the 12 Kenmore is not that performance targets for community bus could not be met, but rather than at key school oriented times, community bus capacity would be exceeded requiring the introduction of conventional transit vehicles on this route.

  • Come January there will be a whole pile of new services, including the new Dogwood Line, late night buses and more service hours. See the Transit Commission report (PDF) for more. The Dogwood Line is the first attempt at a B-Line style bus route in Victoria, which is a good thing, especially given just how busy the bus routes to UVic from Downtown are.