Global calls for defunding the police have made their way to New Westminster.
At a budget workshop on Monday afternoon, council considered draft capital and operating budgets, which proposed a 4.9% property tax increase in 2021. But instead of directing the finance department to prepare a financial plan that incorporated that increase, council voted four to three in support of Coun. Nadine Nakagawa’s motion to send the police budget back to the police board and ask it to submit a budget with a 0% increase for 2021.
The buildings were neglected for years. The city had been trying to expropriate them, and records show it’s now the owner.
The City of Vancouver now owns the Regent and Balmoral hotels, Downtown Eastside buildings the city had been trying to expropriate after years of neglect and decay, The Tyee has learned.
Land title records list the city as the current owner of 159 E. Hastings — the Balmoral — and 160 E. Hastings — the Regent.
Grocery clerk Rechev Browne is a pandemic hero, an essential worker who can’t afford to live in the city he serves.
He earns about $44,000 a year at an Etobicoke store.
Last December, Browne, 34, decided he could no longer afford to pay $1,150 a month to share a house with three other people. So he has moved back in with his mom in a two-bedroom apartment near Keele St. and Wilson Ave.
On Tuesday, Vancouver City Council passed an amended version of the recommendations of the October 22 report on the Climate Emergency Action Plan. Against the opposition of a number of NPA councillors on most points, the 370-page CEAP report was passed item by item at a vote late Tuesday evening.
In Europe, cycling caught on in a big way this year as COVID-19 discouraged cars and crowded public transit. Some cities' leaders hope to make the habit permanent and make congestion a thing of the past.
One of my heroes is a minor socialist politician you’ve never heard of – Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores.
He’s the mayor of Pontevedra, Spain, and he has a spiritual loathing for cars. He ended his city’s status as a “car warehouse” – his words – more than 20 years ago, and the results were spectacular. Pontevedra is cleaner, safer and thriving like never before.
