City Manager well within rights regarding Park Board

September 23rd, 2009

This memo from Frances J. Connell, Vancouver Director of Legal Services, to City Council and the City Manager confirms the place of the Park Board within the city’s hierarchy as laid out by the Vancouver Charter.

The document is very telling in terms of roles and responsibilities, as well as a chain of command, but the most pertinent paragraph is the following:

This interpretation from the Director of Legal Services confirms that City Manager Penny Ballem has been quite accomodating and cooperative with the Park Board.

This interpretation from the Director of Legal Services confirms that City Manager Penny Ballem has been quite accommodating and cooperative with the Park Board.

The Park Board has now been granted the right to make a final decision on hiring a General Manager, which as this above-linked legal interpretation indicates, should be an sign of the health of the relationship between the Park Board and City Council/City Manager.

Once again, where exactly is the controversy?

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Sat Mar 20, 2010

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FACT OF THE DAY

An article titled Vancouver Politics by Paul Tennant in The Vancouver Book (1976), describes the entry of TEAM onto the civic political scene in 1968. TEAM, wrote Tennant, “sought to be a moderate reform group appealing to persons of all political ideologies.”

On their left was COPE (the Committee of Progressive Electors), also formed in 1968, and on their right was the NPA (the Non-Partisan Association), which had been a power in city politics for nearly four decades, and which “held that the affairs of the city should be run by those with the necessary knowledge and experience, i.e., those with a professional-managerial background, in order to run the city in a business-like way.”

The reformers, on the other hand, “felt that civic decision-making should be open to the public, with leadership coming from a cross-section of the population, and rule going to the working class majority. This group was concerned about land use, they advocated city control, and preferred to structure politics around the neighborhood concept.”

Quote OF THE DAY

“It was very diverse, and we got together by word of mouth. There were professors, business people, labor, lawyers and from all across the city. It was a coalescing of people around the idea we should do something.” – former City Councillor Setty Pendakur on the formation Vancouver’s reform movement and its political manifestation – TEAM – came into being in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

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