Unfortunate staff report series

This post provided the foundation for the four-part “Unfortunate staff report” series of posts. I have now added a new page in the Digging Deep series, “14. Plot Thickens,” to serve the purpose better.
I encourage you to read how the plot thickens. It includes a recap of the Garden City Lands story and builds into representative examples of [...]

Unfortunate staff report – response 4

This post is the fourth in a series of responses to a November 2008 Richmond staff report on the Garden City Lands. If you are new to the topic, you may wish to begin by scrolling down to earlier posts in the series for background information.
Most of the staff report is devoted to “measures the [...]

Unfortunate staff report – response 3

Background
This post is the third in a series of responses to the staff report that Richmond’s mayor sprang on Richmond Council the evening before the Nov. 15 council elections. With that timing, any public outrage about it would be too late to affect the elections. However, even if the elections resulted in a new council [...]

Unfortunate staff report—response 2

Background
This is the second post in response to an unfortunate City of Richmond “staff report” dated Nov. 12, 2008, that will be the subject of future City of Richmond council meetings. (Response 1 in a series of at least four responses appears a couple of posts further down on this page.)
Note: While the report to guide [...]

Unfortunate staff report – response 1

Previous posts in this blog (available below) mention the unsavoury events leading up to Nov. 17, 2008, when Richmond councillors including Cynthia Chen and Derek Dang thwarted an attempt to slip through a resolution giving new life to the City of Richmond’s almost-terminated Garden City Lands purchase agreement. The attempt was not stamped out, but it was postponed until [...]

“Consolidated area” questions

This post addresses readers’ emailed questions prompted by yesterday’s “Contiguous, continuous, consolidated claptrap” post analyzing a letter from Randy Fasan (offering a “consolidated area” of 40 acres) that was received by senior city staff before an important Richmond council committee meeting related to the Garden City Lands. The Richmond Review has published a brief version, and [...]

“Smart Growth” vs. urban sprawl

In the application to get the Garden City Lands excluded from the Agricultural Land Reserve, the City of Richmond is still trumpeting its Smart Growth in the City Centre. However, the City is still proposing to develop the Garden City Lands as part of the City Centre growth. They continue to ignore the letter from [...]

Learning from Charlottetown Success

Save-Garden-City supporters and similar groups everywhere can learn from the success of a grassroots group in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. It merits a blog page, “Enabling Canada Lands’ Green Values.”
After reading that page (or beforehand, if you prefer), you may wish to do some follow-up listening and reading. Here are some links:

Help Save Old Uptown [...]

The 14,650 Coincidence

Note: This post is related to the Digging Deep page titled “Our Stanley Park.” If you haven’t read it yet, you may wish to read it first.
A reader recently clued me in that the population of the proposed development on the Garden City Lands development can be estimated with much simpler calculations than we’ve previously [...]

Analysis of “The Development”

In this blog, there’s a page that looks ahead to the proposed mega-density development of Richmond’s Garden City lands. In the blog menu, it appears as “3. The Development.” This post addresses the need to fill out the picture with some of the thinking behind the projected figures about population, cars, schools, etc., if the [...]

Hopeless? Or one last chance?

Opinions elicited by Richmond staff from a City-hired lawyer and by Canada Lands from a federal Treasury Board bureaucrat illustrate how the Garden City lands issue is in a mega-mess.
Disappearing contingency rights
If you have time to download 2 MB of PDF file, have a look at the agenda for the Sept. 17, 2007, 4 p.m. special [...]

The risk of lost opportunity

Choosing the best path
First, a few background points: 

It may be unconscionable to remove the Garden City lands from the Agricultural Land Reserve.
There is a community need to free Richmond from the mega-density and traffic congestion that would flow from the develoment plan.
Helping a bad agreement drag on would have a 100% chance of a bad outcome – a loss in [...]

Acting in good faith re ALR-removal process

January 1, 2008, note: This post is outdated in some ways but still provides relevant background information. 
Richmond Council evidently intends to consider:

extending the deadline for removal of the Garden City lands from the Agricultural Land Reserve
once again recommending to the Agricultural Land Commission that the lands be removed

What would be the best course of action [...]