Richmond’s Garden City Lands

The City, through spokesperson Ted Townsend, is suddenly singing a different tune about how the Garden City lands will eventually be divided if the agreements aren’t terminated. He is quoted in a Jan. 19 Richmond Review article, “Feds should take land back: Cummins,” with this comment on MP John Cummins’ recent letter about the Lands:

“There’s never been a vision to just draw a line down the middle of the land.”

Oh?! Council and the newspapers certainly seem to have been given that impression, and it would have been helpful if whoever didn’t have that vision had shared their non-vision months ago, when nonsense was being spouted ad nauseam even after the public pointed out what the two Garden City lands agreements actually say.

Furthermore, the City continues to give false impressions about how much land the City would get, which in all likelihood would be far less than half, and about who would draw the lines, which would be Canada Lands Company in the puppeteer role and the City in the puppet role.

In the Review article, Ted Townsend goes on with this critical comment:

“But to suggest [any land the City gets] may be scattered is misleading.”

Oh?! Both Garden City lands agreements (the Memorandum of Understanding and the Agreement of Purchase and Sale) say that the “Public Lands,” the possible City land, will be scattered throughout the property. How can John Cummins be judged as “misleading” for suggesting that the agreements mean what they say?

Even more revealingly, Review reporter Matt Hoekstra adds this:

Ted Townsend said he expects the development will mirror [a future project that] will incorporate public greenways and view corridors throughout their site.

In other words, Barbara Huisman got it right in her “To be or not to be contiguous” letter in in the Jan. 10 Richmond Review:

. . . the Richmond portion of the land would not be contiguous unless there were many strips of it crossing each other. Even in a grid, our city portion of the land would in fact be spread throughout the high-density development. We would in effect get to pay for the green space for the development so that it can be sold for more money.

Actually, Ms. Huisman got it doubly right, because we would first pay to buy that green space from Canada Lands Company and then pay city employees to keep it up. In contrast, if the green space were officially part of the development, then Canada Lands would receive no payment from the City. Moreover, the eventual owners would pay taxes on that land to the City, along with paying their own maintenance costs.

But let’s get back to Ted Townsend. His quotes in the article end like this:

“We’re not envisioning building gated communities where there’s a little green pocket that’s isolated in the middle of it.”

What a patently silly concept! No one else had envisioned it either. When the City is reduced to using a straw man argument like that, the rhetorical ploy speaks volumes.

And so does the newly unveiled City vision of the City parts of the future Garden City lands as public greenways and view corridors in the development lands.

The Jan. 18 Richmond News and Jan. 19 Richmond Review include a Garden City lands letter from MP John Cummins.  It’s great that the Richmond community has made known its Garden City City lands views to Mr. Cummins and that he has acted. Mr. Cummins is correct in the main points, including these ones:

·        The Musqueam do not have any right to the entire Lands.

·        If the Lands are returned to the federal government, the Musqueam will not have a claim on the Lands as long as the federal government does not designate them as ”surplus.”

A few related points:

·        The land available for the “Richmond uses” that Richmond council approved on Dec. 17 would be far less than half the acreage. As the “68-58-48” post explains, it would be either 58 or 48 acres if the entire property is 136 acres.

·        There are termination provisions in the current legal agreements, and the lands can go back to the federal government after termination. The first necessary step is for the Agricultural Land Commission to again refuse to exclude the Garden City lands from the ALR when the re-application comes up in a few months.

·        Canada Lands Company CLC, which is leading the ALR-exclusion project (even though the City of Richmond is the figurehead applicant), is doing thorough project management. Overcoming that factor will be a huge challenge for those who are committed to conserving the Lands in the ALR.

At first, one sentence in MP John Cummins’ letter seemed too sweeping:

Yet there is nothing in that agreement that will benefit the people of Richmond and plenty that runs counter to the notion of sustainable, environmentally friendly development.

When I thought more about it, I came to this conclusion: that sentence is right on the mark.

Barbara Huisman’s excellent letter to the editor  in the Jan. 10 Richmond Review corrects some false impressions and at the same time shows how other falsehoods have been repeated so often that even an astute and knowledgeable reader like Ms. Huisman can assume them to be true. An example is the falsehood that the Garden City lands agreements would result in the City getting 68 acres for the “Richmond uses” in the resolution that council unnanimously approved on Dec. 17, 2008.

The “68 acres” figure is false because of the “TEC Lands” factor, which I brought to council’s attention at the Dec. 17 meeting. The TEC, the proposed Trade and Exhibition Centre, is not one of the three “Richmond uses,” so it will not be built on the Garden City lands under any circumstances. At least it presumably won’t unless the city is hoping to lie to the residents and the Agricultural Land Commission and then change the Richmond use after the property is removed from the ALR. Or possibly unless council votes to make the TEC a preferred use before making its presentation to the commission.

If the TEC will not be built, that triggers provisions in the agreements that cause half the approximately 20.4 acres allowed for the TEC to instead go to the developers, the Limited Partnership of Canada Lands Company CLC and the Musqueam, who will use it for what the purchase agreement calls “commercial or residential development.” That would result in CLC and the Musqueam getting over 78 acres, with the city getting less than 58 acres.

Furthermore, if there’s a change of heart about the TEC, there would be even less land available for the three “Richmond uses.” Those uses, by the way, seem essentially derived from the Richmond Sustainable Food Systems Park proposal:

• Community wellness and enabling healthy lifestyles
• Urban agriculture
• Showcasing environmental sustainability

With a 20.4 acre TEC, the land remaining for those purposes would be less than 48 acres. There are factors that would significantly reduce even that figure for practical purposes, but the point is that the highest figure the city can honestly dream about for the Richmond purposes is not 68 acres. Instead, it would be either 58 or 48 acres.

Recent editions of the Richmond Review and Richmond News included a letter over the name of a Chamber of Commerce representative, though seemingly written by the would-be developers of the Garden City lands. People have been asking about the use of the word contiguous to describe the Public Lands (almost the same as “City lands”), as the developers have not used that term before. No doubt the shift is a calculated one, not a haphazard one.

The background is that the City has been acting for a long time as though all its land would be together, and there have been suggestions that the city should make sure it gets one half or another (although the City would almost certainly get far less than half). The answer has been that the City won’t get half, or even its three-sevenths, in one large parcel. Canada Lands Company CLC and the Musqueam Indian Band have a position of great strength in the agreements, and they phrased the agreements so that the City land would be available throughout their mega-density developments.

In that context, contiguous may be deceptive, not meaning what the ordinary reader would expect. The City’s land could technically be contiguous, for example, if the many parcels would just generally touch at some point such as a corner, perhaps with a road in between.

Here are the precise quotes in the two relevant agreements, which the developers will be able to enforce at will if the “development” goes ahead:

Memorandum of Understanding, 1(10) of March 2005, final sentence: “The Public Lands will be scattered throughout the entire Garden City Property.”

Agreement of Purchase and Sale, 4.5, Subdivision Approval Condition, final paragraph: “The parties hereto acknowledge and agree that as expressly stated in Section 1(10) of the MOU, and unless otherwise agreed in connection with the approval of any Comprehensive Development Plan, the Public Lands will be scattered throughout the entirety of the Lands.”

Notes:
1. The emphasis in those quotations has been added.
2. The Agreement of Purchase and Sale of November 2005 has never been made available to the public, even on the Richmond.ca website, even though it clearly should have been.