While Vision Vancouver and a possibly chastened Mayor Gregor Robertson may continue with their plans at city hall, for the park board and school board it will not be business as usual.
In last weekend’s election Vision all but got wiped out at the park board while the NPA won the majority of the seats.
So for the first time in living memory, the party controlling the park board’s agenda is different from the folks who run city hall.
At school board, Vision lost the majority there too. The power is split with four seats each for them and the NPA. That leaves Janet Fraser, the sole Green Party school trustee, holding the balance of power and the most popular person at that particular dance.
Let’s start with the park board: the issues that drove away voters from Vision included their rough handling of volunteer boards at Vancouver’s two dozen community centres.
The strategy was orchestrated by the unrelenting micro-managing hand of city manager Penny Ballem with the approval of the mayor’s office. Elected park commissioners simply did as they were told, like it or not.
It was a remarkable assault on the political autonomy of elected officials, which had been aggressively defended for more than a century.
And here’s the latest move in the war with the most reluctant and litigious “gang of six” community centres being forced into a Joint Operating Agreement. A few days before Vancouverites headed to the polls, under cover of a media blackout while a mediator did his work, lawyers representing the park board were granted a postponement of a court case that was to begin yesterday (Thursday, Nov. 20.) If successful it would have seen the boards of directors of those six community centres driven out to the street.
The balance of the community centre boards have been involved in an endless process to arrive at an operating agreement also overseen by Ballem.
Don’t be surprised if they hold back now and wait to see what the impact will be of a more sympathetic board — one that presumably is prepared to recapture their authority and stand up to the city manager.
You can also expect a change in direction regarding the controversial whales in captivity issue. The Vision park commissioners who sponsored a motion to stop the aquarium from allowing hanky panky in the whale pools left before they could be defeated.
It would take a two-thirds majority of the new board to reverse that decision, a majority that the NPA does not quite have.
But staff was dispatched to write a bylaw to enforce that Vision decision. The NPA can kill the proposal by simply refusing to enact that bylaw.
You will also likely see no more support for paving over the last bit of wild beach in the city to extend the sea wall along Point Grey Road out to Jericho even though the mayor waves an anonymously donated $10 million under the board’s nose.
Now for the school board: Vision’s loss of a majority had less to do with any particular issue like the transgendered policy than it had to do with the vagaries of at-large voting.
By most accounts Vision’s Patti Bacchus has done a superb job as board chair these past six years. But, so concerned about losing in the big game at city hall, the Vision brain trust seems to have taken its eye off the school board ball.
While NPA voters were focused almost exclusively on NPA candidates, Vision supporters watered down the impact of their votes by choosing to support some COPE candidates and candidates running under the Public Education Project banner.
Vision didn’t just lose the majority, they lost First Nations trustee Ken Clement. During Clement’s two terms on the board he was at the heart of improving graduation results among First Nation’s students by 14 per cent. For the first time many family members were invited to engage in their kids’ educational experience.
The first matter that will cause Janet Fraser to break a tie will be the selection of board chair. That will happen on Dec. 8. The second will be a reconsideration of the half million dollars being offered by Chevron through an “arms-length” charity to purchase school supplies, an offer Vision had already rejected.
Stay tuned.
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