Sean Orr: Upcoming Motions on October 8th

Sean Orr here. Here’s a summary of this week’s big motions on October 8th.

First up, we have a motion from Ken Sim to lock in a 1% property tax increase. He’s calling it 0% but it’s actually 1%. In order to have an increase that small instead of the regular 5%, he’s going to need to find over 100 million dollars in cuts, which he hasn’t actually costed out at all. This could be disastrous for the city.

There’s sort of weak language there saying that they will “prioritize” core services, and “maintain” grants, but honestly the language is so weak it doesn’t actually protect against cuts to anything. ABC is going to play innocent here, but there’s no way to achieve cuts that deep without affecting services.

Next for Motion 2, Montague and Zhou are introducing a motion to try to bring this police tracking program called “CompStat” from New York to Vancouver, but also seemingly to use it for both for crime tracking and city performance tracking purposes? It’s a really weird motion. CompStat in New York didn’t help improve outcomes on crime, police officers actually complained that it was making them report to superiors dishonestly to meet arbitrary quotas. 

There’s two “Reply All” podcast episodes about this program in New York called “The Crime Machine” and I’m going to quote the description here... 

“New York City cops are in a fight against their own police department. They say it’s under the control of a broken computer system that punishes cops who refuse to engage in racist, corrupt policing.”

And this motion also says that this new “VanStat” system, based on this broken computer system that pushed racist corrupt policing, is going to be used to have the mayor, city manager, and a new hired guy sit down with the heads of a bunch of departments to track their performance? 

It seems like some weird dystopian nightmare to me, but that’s motion number two.

Motion number three is from Pete Fry, he’s bringing forward a motion to protect forest trails in Champlain Heights. It asks city staff to report back with considerations on protecting land to public parks. I know this is something we’ve been hearing about from community members there, it’s a beautiful area down there, lots of co-ops. I think this is a great motion.

Motion four is my motion, “Prioritizing Accessibility and Public Participation at City Council”. This is a really important motion, it’s a bit procedural, but I think it’s important. I’ve been hearing from so many people that it’s hard to keep up with city council, or that participating isn’t accessible to them.

The main thing this motion does is increase transparency and encourage the public to participate. Reports and upcoming agendas are usually posted about 5-6 days in advance right now, and these reports are sometimes hundreds of pages long. It’s a lot of reading for me, with a team of volunteers, and it’s just not really feasible that members of the public can read it all. So I’m asking to bump that up to a hard minimum of 8 days. 

There’s also an issue with reports with public interest being finished, but not presented publicly for weeks and months. A lot of these reports are complex and can use scrutiny and feedback from regular people, and we can actually release these reports earlier.

The other thing is just lowering barriers to council participation. A lot of workers have really strict schedules and can’t hop on the phone at a random time to give public comments. I want to make it so people can record a message to be played at council instead of speaking live at an unpredictable time. There’s also some other suggestions here to improve accessibility and clear information for people, especially those who need translation or accessibility measures.

I’m hoping this will be uncontroversial, but ABC has unfortunately been somewhat hostile to public feedback. As my colleague Suzie Mah has repeatedly criticized, on School board, they got rid of public comment altogether. So we’ll see.

After that, Lucy Maloney and I are co-introducing a motion to push for more senior funding for the UBC skytrain extension. Motion five. This one is basically getting council to agree to a position of support for the urgency of building the UBCx skytrain, and to write to the province to express that support and urgency. This is one that we’re really hoping we can get council unanimous on.

Finally, for motion six, Pete Fry has another really important motion, on strengthening the integrity commissioner. This is something we need to absolutely pass. The genesis of this motion was actually a criticism of the integrity commissioner from Councillor Montague, who asked “what does the integrity commissioner actually do?” Because they couldn’t enforce their rulings. ABC has had a few rulings against them by the Integrity commissioner. So this motion is going to increase the enforcement powers of the Integrity Commissioner, and it’s going to ask the province to pass legislation that makes ethics guidelines legally binding.

The deadline to speak to these motions before council is at 5PM today. You can sign up here.

Past 5PM, you can still send letters. You can write to City Council here.

On Ken Sim’s Cuts, COPE has set up a letter-writing tool. It takes just a minute, and we’re past 1700 letters now in 24 hours. Add your name to help.

We got this,

Sean Orr