chiding then hiding the homeless

$500,000 to be spent to shelter homeless during Games

The Vancouver Province

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

By Clare Ogilvie

Organizers of the 2010 Winter Games say they'll spend $500,000 to get homeless people off the street during the two-week event.

Mary Fraser, a spokeswoman for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympics, said it has made a commitment that there will be "nobody on the streets at Games time."

Advocates for the homeless in the Downtown Eastside are outraged.

"They want to cleanse the streets of poor people and house them in shelters," said David Cunningham, an organizer with the Anti Poverty Committee.

The only way to tackle homelessness, he said, is to build more homes for the poor and displaced.

Kim Kerr, executive-director of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, said: "By the time of the Games we are going to have an awful lot of people on the street and we are certainly not going to sit by while Vanoc sweeps them under the carpet by allowing them to stay in a shelter for a few extra days so they are not seen by the international media.

"We are not interested in more shelters. We are interested in housing and if Vanoc thinks they are going to increase the shelter beds so they can hide the homeless during the Games . . . well, that is disgusting."

Kerr said he plans to meet Vanoc officials in early December to discuss homelessness.

Fraser said the plan is to funnel the $500,000 to existing organizations that help the homeless.

"The intention is to work with agencies and organizations that already have existing shelter programs in the inner city," she said.

"[That way] Vanoc can best ensure the delivery of that commitment, which is to ensure that nobody is on the street during Games time. It is one of three major commitments [Vanoc] has made to sustainability on this issue.

"The . . . commitments are a legacy of low-income housing, which is the 250 units in the Athletes Village, the second one is affordable housing and the third is nobody on the streets at Games time."

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Citizens appalled by street disorder

Mayor Sullivan gets an e-mailful on drug users, panhandlers, binners

The Province

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

By John Bermingham, With a File From Frank Luba, The Province

Vancouver citizens are appalled by the swelling number of drug users, panhandlers and binners on their streets -- and they want something done about it.

Some 2,500 people gave Mayor Sam Sullivan an e-mail earful, saying they feel under siege because of growing public disorder.

In Sullivan's website survey, started last September and released yesterday, 84 per cent felt the public blight has increased over the past five years. Four out of every five people said Vancouver is losing its reputation as the world's most livable city. And two-thirds want immediate action.

The top three concerns were panhandling, open drug use and sleeping in public places. People complained about:

- Being hassled by aggressive beggars;
- Seeing open drug use;
- Stepping over people sleeping in doorways or in public parks;
- Dodging garbage and litter;
- Smelling urine or feces in public places.

People said they don't feel safe, and are concerned about the lack of pride in the city, but they also want a caring solution.

"People are very passionate about this issue," Sullivan told The Province. "They're frustrated. They believe we've been going in the wrong direction, and they want results.

"Generally, people think things are getting worse, not better."

Sullivan said he wants to put more police on street patrol. And he said he supports a "broken-window" approach to fighting public disorder like littering, jaywalking and nuisance behaviour. The idea is to fix things -- such as broken windows -- when they occur, which in theory, leads to more civic pride and fewer social problems.

Sullivan said he will use the 2010 Olympics to get senior government support for his plan, which he hopes to unveil in the near future.

But some of his political opponents have criticized the survey as being unscientific. Vision Vancouver Coun. Heather Deal hopes the survey won't affect city policy.

"I think it's an interesting exercise in public opinion but it's not scientific," she said last night. "I hope the mayor doesn't use this as a reason to divert resources that could be used for housing and other social services into enforcement of jaywalking, for instance."

Simon Fraser University criminologist Neil Boyd said throwing the book at panhandlers won't solve the problem.

"Some of these are actually big-ticket problems," said Boyd. "The little things cost a lot of money, and are quite complex. The homeless problem began in the '70s, because of [the] deinstitutionalization" of mental hospitals.

Homeless and mentally ill people need supportive housing, not prosecution, he said, adding that the growing gap between the rich and poor is worsening the problem.

"If you think Vancouver's going downhill, you don't get that opinion if you drive in Kerrisdale," said Boyd.

A report on crime in B.C. published last week blames drug use, mental disorder, childhood problems and poverty lifestyles.

"We've ranked ninth out of 10 provinces for the incidence of personal property crime," said Tim McEwan, executive director of the B.C. Progress Board, which monitors B.C. trends.

The report called for a criminal- justice task force to change the criminal justice system.

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Three APC protesters arrested after attempt to stop meeting

The Vancouver Province

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

By Frank Luba

Three protesters were arrested last night after an attempt to stop a city budget discussion at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library, said a member of the protest group behind it.

Mary Clermont said that Anti-Poverty Committee members David Cunningham, Katie Dyck and Peter Haywood were arrested.

The APC has been behind two "squats" or occupations of vacant buildings in Vancouver. The action last night was staged in support of an occupation of the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre that began Sunday night.

The APC trio were arrested, according to Clermont, after they tried to get medical attention because they had been pepper-sprayed by Vancouver police.

Police spokesman Const. Tim Fanning confirmed there were three arrests, one of which was for allegedly assaulting a police officer. There will also be a warrant requested for another protester who was released at the scene.

"Five minutes before the meeting was supposed to start, the APC started trying to get into the meeting," said Clermont.

"The police tried to prevent us and we pushed the police line," she continued. "That's when they pulled out the pepper spray."

Fanning described it differently.

"They tried to kick in the doors of the meeting room," he said. "During that time, one of the protesters grabbed one of the police officers' duty belts, wouldn't let go, was actually grabbing the officer's gun."

Fanning said the female officer pushed the man back, he wouldn't let go and she pepper-sprayed him.

Cynthia Low, administrative co-ordinator for the embattled women-only drop-in centre, said its doors remained open again last night despite the fact it was supposed to be closing at 5 p.m.

She said 42 women spent Sunday night there and more were expected last night because of the cooler temperatures.

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bridge tolls for thee

Put tolls on all local bridges and tunnels, engineers say

The Vancouver Sun

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

By William Boei

The best way to manage traffic in Greater Vancouver is by tolling every major bridge and tunnel in the region, say the engineers who design transportation systems.

The Consulting Engineers of B.C., an industry group whose members are the province's largest engineering companies, say they are reluctant to meddle in politics, but they think the provincial government's plan to toll only a newly twinned Port Mann Bridge will not work.

The engineers support the province's Gateway Program, including twinning the Port Mann and widening the Trans-Canada Highway, said the group's president, Arnold Badke.

"However, you cannot toll one bridge at a time," Badke said. "In the long term that cannot work because it will drive traffic to other routes and they will get overloaded."

The tolls would not only help pay for the new roads and bridges, but also for improved transit service throughout the region.

CEBC director Chris Newcomb said the engineering group has not done its own traffic studies, but is drawing on the collective knowledge of its members, many of them transportation specialists.

"What we're saying is that bridges are the most expensive parts of the system, and also the most congested," Newcomb said.

"So if you're going to pay for bridges, you should charge people who use bridges.

"If you want to manage the traffic flow, those are the points at which you can most easily manage it, because people can't take side roads around the bridge. You either cross that bridge, or you cross a different bridge which is also tolled, or you rearrange your life so as not to cross the bridge.

"It's a perfect win-win in terms of being able to control and manage the traffic flows."

But it clashes with the provincial government's policy of tolling only new facilities, and only when there is a free alternative available.

Regional government officials have been expressing concern that for the Port Mann, the government is designating the Pattullo Bridge as the free alternative, even though it is old, narrow, dangerous and already seriously congested.

Many regional politicians have been calling for a region-wide transportation demand management plan to control traffic, including tolls.

So far, the government hasn't budged from its position.

The engineers have told the province what they think, Newcomb said, but "the response is that there is a government policy that there must be a free alternative."

Now they are hoping to generate public support for system-wide tolling "so that if the government could see it didn't have a lot of negative connotations in terms of public support, then perhaps they would be willing to adopt that alternative."

Badke said it's not possible to keep up with demand for road space by building more capacity without tolls. "You just increase demand, and in five to 10 years you will be back to the position where you are now."

The engineers don't agree either with critics who say region-wide tolls can adequately reduce congestion without the Port Mann and Highway 1 expansion.

"You have to bring everything up to current demand," he said. "Then, if you combine that with tolling later to control demand, there is an effective tool right there."

Newcomb added: "It's not rocket science to understand that if you have a system which is tolled throughout, it enables you to manage and control the traffic flows throughout the region.

"You have a much better result than if you toll only certain parts of the system for no other reason than they happen to be the newest part of the system. There's no logic behind that."

The engineers say tolls on 10 or 11 crossings of the Fraser River, including the Massey Tunnel, would serve to manage traffic throughout Greater Vancouver.

Bridges into downtown Vancouver could also be tolled, Newcomb said, but those tolls might be lower because the traffic on them is less congested.

System-wide tolls could be significantly lower than the $2-to-$4 range being considered for a twinned Port Mann and for TransLink's new Golden Ears Bridge, the only other bridge in the region planned to be tolled.

"You can distribute a relatively low toll rate over a wide area," Newcomb said.

"Everybody is treated equally, nobody can claim they are being discriminated against, and you can still raise substantial volume of revenue, which can go towards paying for Gateway, but which can also pay for transit and rail and buses and bicycle paths and all those other good things that we know are needed in order to have a good transportation system in place."

The tolls could be varied, the engineers say. Possibilities include reducing tolls during off-peak hours, removing them completely overnight and making HOV lanes a free alternative.

"You would start out with a nominal toll on every bridge, and then you would adjust it as time went by to rebalance the system," Newcomb said.

"Balancing the system means you get smooth flow. And when you get smooth flow you have faster travel times and you have less idling in traffic that causes pollution. You accomplish numerous different objectives with that one thing."

Newcomb said the hardest argument to counter is that the people who can least afford it are hit hardest by tolls. For example, a single mother might not be able to afford to live close to her job, need a car to get to work and drop off her children and have no choice but to travel during peak hours.

However, he said, she might be helped by improved transit services, and there could a transportation subsidy for people who need it.

The engineers counselled not waiting for all transit alternatives to be in place before imposing tolls.

"If you wait until the perfect public transportation system is in place before you put on tolls, you'll never put on tolls," Badke said.

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severe weather's here to stay

Severe weather's here to stay, scientists say

The Vancouver Sun

Wednesday, November 8, 2006

By Randy Shore

Short sharp bursts of rain are increasing in both frequency and intensity and will lead to even more massive mudslides and floods of the kind seen across southern B.C. Monday, according to researchers at the University of B.C.

Their analysis projects plenty more severe weather to come and that could mean trouble as engineers design storm drains, road beds and hillside communities without taking into account recent changes in weather patterns attributed by most scientists to global warming.

The controversial research, originally done for a 2001 master's thesis, was published last summer in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, said Robert Millar, a professor of civil engineering at UBC.

The model is based on measurements taken at the District of North Vancouver municipal hall rain gauge and studies of rainfall and runoff patterns from around the world.

"If we are experiencing climate change ... and we are getting increasing rainfall intensities, then [engineers] are using old data to design for future conditions that may not be valid," Millar said.

When the thesis results came to the attention of drainage engineers at the Greater Vancouver Regional District, a study was commissioned into the impacts of global warming on the region, according to GVRD engineer Robert Hicks.

"The research, led by Matthias Jakob of BGC Engineering, was at odds with what UBC was saying," Hicks said.

The study, published in the Canadian Water Resources Journal, says that a weather pattern similar to El Nino with a 50- to 70-year temperature and precipitation cycle could account for the short-term changes attributed to the greenhouse effect in the UBC research.

Jakob's study analysed data from rain gauges throughout the Lower Mainland operated by the GVRD and the Meteorological Service of Canada dating back to the late '50s and early '60s.

Published in 2003, the journal article predicts lower-than-normal rainfall intensity as the cycle enters a cooler phase.

It also notes: "A long-term rise in the magnitude of high intensity rainfall events could . . . necessitate the replacement of the storm water and sewerage drainage, which would be associated with very high costs."

Hicks said the records used for UBC's analysis are simply too short to be meaningful. "Depending on how one treats the records statistically, one can get different results."

Millar disagrees on two counts. Firstly, because the region's municipalities replace pipe and drains regularly, it would be cheap and easy to increase capacity gradually. Secondly, he says the UBC projections have been re-run using several mathematical techniques and come out the same.

"We stand by these results," he said.

The severe weather trend is easy to miss using standard analysis, which assumes that past conditions are a good indicator of future conditions, Millar says.

Total annual rainfall figures from Vancouver International Airport show a 15- to 20-per-cent increase over the past 40 years. But five-minute bursts of rainfall have doubled in intensity to a rate of over 60 millimetres an hour in 2001, up from about 25 millimetres an hour in the mid-60s.

"In North Vancouver, over the past 30 years, we observe an increase in intensity of 40 per cent in two-hour high intensity rain bursts," he said. "That's a huge difference for someone designing infrastructure."

Storm sewers are designed to last about 50 years, "so we argue that it would be prudent to begin to accommodate these increases," Millar said.

(City of Surrey engineers estimate the cost of replacing one block of storm sewers at about $200,000.)

Most municipal sewers installed over the past 30 years would be designed for flows that would overwhelm the system about once in 10 years and cause "nuisance flooding."

Millar and his associates, Catherine Denault and Barbara Lence, believe those one-in-10-year events could soon be happening every year.

Short periods of intense rain tend to destabilize hillsides and result in mudslides of the type that have plagued the area around Hope and that caused the death of a woman in North Vancouver last year. On Monday, Highway 3 was buried by 50 metres of mud three metres deep.

"We know that landslides tend to be triggered by high intensity short duration rainfall and if the frequency and intensity of rainfall is increasing, then we are likely to see more landslides," Millar explained.

The projections cited in the UBC article were first completed in 2001 for Denault's master's thesis, but the trio reworked the data last year to account for the most recent weather trends and their conclusions remain the same.

"What I see happening in recent years, flooding in the Squamish River, flooding in the Chilliwack River, very significant landslides, these are all consistent with our analysis," Millar said.

On Saturday, engineers from the District of North Vancouver conducted a visual inspection at the site of last year's fatal mudslide, just above the banks of the fast-rushing Seymour River.

District spokeswoman Jeanine Bratina said all the homes in the area of the slide have been put on the district's storm sewer system, the slope has been reshaped and a drainage basin added, and piezometers installed in the embankment to measure ground water levels.

"The engineers were very encouraged by what they saw Saturday," Bratina said.

The hillside at the top of Chapman Way is still scarred by the slide that on Jan. 19, 2005, killed Eliza Kuttner and resulted in four homes being razed in North Vancouver District's Riverside neighbourhood.

Neighbours in the houses that remain on the hillside watched warily this week as heavy rain fed the creeks and rivulets that cut into the soil beside their lots and wash across their driveways.

The home of Nancy Van Insberghe, the closest neighbour to the Kuttner house that slid down the hillside, is deserted. Yellow warning tape and orange cones block the driveway, one side of which falls abruptly into a steep gravelly slope that washes into two vacant lots where homes once stood.

Many of the area's residents admit to checking the district's website for reports on the stability of the hillside, but express satisfaction with the district's remediation and monitoring program.

"I hope it doesn't come down again like it did before, but I don't think so," said Flori Haynes, who helped her husband Erwin Hofstetter dig Michael Kuttner from the wreckage of his home almost two years ago. "I think it's safe now."

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