THE TALK OF THE TOWN

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What Do We Have For You This Month?

Welcome to “The Talk of The Town” for June, 2024. Click on the following links to find:

  • Our Lead Story: The public fountains are back on, for now at least, after two years of pressure from local residents.

  • West End News & Notes: The West End Community Centre Association’s Summer Guide will be available onsite on June 4, and online now, there’s a volunteer opportunity that might be just right for you, and we’d like to help you promote your next yard sale.

  • Developing Stories: Three owners later, two different proposals, and almost five years of negotiations, someone may finally be ready to break ground at 1055 Harwood Street.

Our Lead Story

THE FOUNTAINS ARE FLOWING AGAIN
Until Further Notice…

by Nate Lewis
(click images to enlarge / see links to referenced articles and reports at the end of this article)

In April, the water feature in the Haro and Bute mini-park – which you may remember has been the titular talk of the town for a couple of summers now – was turned on, in anticipation of hot spring and summer weather.

West Ender Charlotte Tarver delivering a petition to have the fountains turned back on to City Hall in October, 2022.

The good news is that this West End fountain is turned on, and others are even being repaired. However, the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation faces a huge challenge in managing the city’s stock of aging decorative fountains, spray parks, wading pools, ponds, and waterfalls. That’s because nearly three-quarters of the city’s water features are derelict, and in need of expensive repairs and maintenance to operate as originally intended.

City-wide, over 70 percent of Vancouver’s water features are rated to be in poor or very poor condition, according to a long-awaited asset report from the park board. Thirteen of these are inoperable.  

Fixing the 30 run-down fountains, ponds, and waterfalls would cost roughly $13 million, the report estimates (while upgrades to the city’s 34 spray parks and wading pools could be funded through over budget streams).

The park board budget, which is set by city councillors and staff, currently includes $2.6 million over the next two years for repairs and maintenance on decorative water features.

Therefore, the park board has decided to fix 10 features that had lower repair costs and higher priority rankings, including the Cardero and Nelson Park fountains.  

Charlotte enjoying the refreshing spray from the now functioning water feature at Bute and Haro. (James Oakes Photos)

Other options presented to commissioners included maximizing water savings, fixing features that scored highest in assessment report priority rankings, and upgrading certain non-recirculating features that were selected for a bylaw exemption in Councillor Peter Meiszner’s motion at city council in spring 2023.

Meiszner’s motion, which included the Haro and Bute feature, came about in part as a response to West End community organizing around the issue.

In the park board’s water feature asset report, the Haro and Bute fountain was rated to be in ‘fair’ condition and given a middling priority status for repair. Comparatively, the Cardero and Nelson fountains were rated as ‘poor,’ with Cardero being given slightly higher priority and Nelson a much lower one.  

The fountain in Barclay Heritage Square, rated as ‘very poor,’ will seemingly not be rehabilitated in this budget cycle. It was scored similarly to the Cardero fountain in terms of park board priority but would cost $300,000 more to repair.  

Fixed or not, whether fountains will remain on depends on the water restrictions level set by Metro Vancouver. They’ll all be shut off if Level 2 restrictions or higher come into effect this year, which happened last year in early August.

While it’s the filling or topping up of aesthetic water features that’s prohibited under Level 2 to 4  water restrictions, “even recirculating water features must be turned off,” according to a city report. The recirculating aspect is important because a city bylaw on water wastage prohibits once-through, or non-recirculating features. Meizner’s motion last year made an exception to that bylaw for select fountains.

Non-recirculating fountains use about 6 million litres of water per year, according to city staff.

While most of the 10 features chosen for repair already recirculate water – making them cheaper to repair, given the costly and spatially cumbersome nature of installing a new recirculating system –  the Haro and Bute mini-park feature was not included for repair during this budget cycle.

the revived water feature provides a comfortable gathering place for neighbours and passers-by.

The Haro and Bute fountain was turned off in fall 2021 despite having the proper infrastructure, but not the needed maintenance, to comply with city water waste bylaws.

The fountain still has not been repaired to recirculate water, despite a park board directive a year ago to ask the city for money to fix the fountain. Fixing it would cost approximately $400,000.

The park board certainly doesn’t have that kind of extra cash for repairs floating around in their budget. That means they have to make choices about which repairs to prioritize, given the general state of disrepair afflicting this sort of city infrastructure.

Not only is the total cost to fix all the water features five times less than budgeted, the maintenance costs would also balloon if they were all operational. Staff estimated that, after repairs and retrofits, operating and maintaining all of the city’s water features would cost nearly $3 million annually. The park board currently spends around $350,000 on this each year.

And that isn’t even factoring in the cost of water.

Until now, the city has covered all of the park board’s water costs. However, by the end of 2025, the city plans to transition to “a full civic user-pay billing system,” whereby each city department would pay for the water they use.

“This change will result in significant new expenses for the Park Board because, up until this point, the Engineering budget has been covering most of Park Board’s water consumption costs,” park board staff wrote in their Water Priority Action Plan report.

The city will off-set nearly $2 million of these water costs for the park board as bridge funding to facilitate the payment change.

The park board prioritized six projects in their 2017-2020 Water Conservation Action Plan. None of the six have been completed as of the end of 2023. 

All these considerations raise the question of whether it’s worthwhile to keep these features as part of our cityscape. As the reports note, many were built between 1950 and 1970, when water conservation, higher water demands due to population growth, and drought exacerbated by climate change, were “not well-understood” by planners working in a naturally rainy region.  

A future report will identify existing water features that should be repurposed or removed, the park board said.

RELATED LINKS:

West End News & Notes

COMMUNITY CENTRES’ SUMMER GUIDE
Available Online Now

The West End Community Centre Association, which operates the centre on Denman, the Coal Harbour Community Centre on Broughton, and Barclay Manor, finalized its official Summer 2024 Recreation Guide, which is available online now and will arrive at all three venues and other community gathering places on June 4.

As always, the three venues offer a wide variety of programs for all ages. From hip hop and ballet for the five and under set, to language, martial arts, and gardening classes and workshops, to dance, yoga, and other activities for seniors, there is literally something for everyone.

Find the Summer Recreation Guide online here.

IT’S YARD SALE SEASON!
Send Us Your Announcements

It’s too late to attend this colourfully and widely advertised yard sale (it appeared on lamp posts all over the neighbourhood) but it made us think that maybe The West End Journal should help promoting these busy and popular events through the season — not that the season ever really stops.

If you are planning a yard sale sometime in the coming months, let us know and we’ll be include yours in a monthly plug. We will also include your event in our weekly “The Week Ahead In Your West End” listings, promoted on our Facebook page.

So email us at editor@thewestendjournal.ca with the details — the date, the hours, the location, and a summary of the kinds of items you’ll have on offer. Notifications should be sent before the second to last business day of each month for the following month’s issue — but if you miss that deadline send it along anyway so we can plug it on Facebook

Volunteers at the West End - coal Harbour Policing Centre.

𝗔 𝗩𝗢𝗟𝗨𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗘𝗥 𝗢𝗣𝗣𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗧𝗬 ...

The West End-Coal Harbour Policing Centre, busy keeping us all safe in our great neighbourhood, would love to hear from you. Here's their message ...

We're NOT a police station; we're a nonprofit society of volunteers working with residents, businesses, community partners, and the VPD to help create a safer and more inclusive community. We do this by providing education, referrals, and resources to folks living, working, or visiting the West End and Coal Harbour.

Do you want to make a difference where you live, work, and play? Consider becoming part of our volunteer team! Email info@wechcpc.com to get started!

Visit their website here to learn more about their programs and volunteer opportunities.

Developing Stories

1055 HARWOOD
Harcrest Apartmnts

By Jake McGrail
(click images to enlarge)

1055 Harwood Street is currently home to Harcrest Apartments, a three-storey, 28-unit co-op apartment building. There have been plans to rezone the site and replace the almost 80-year-old building for over half a decade, and they might finally be close to breaking some ground.

The future of 1055 Harwood.

The lot was sold to the duo of Intracorp Homes and Strand Development for just over $40 million back in 2016, and plans soon emerged to build a new, much larger condo tower. This was the first big rezoning application undertaken in the Burrard Corridor following the West End Community Plan, which allowed for a tower up to 300 feet tall as long as the building contained some social housing units.

A plan was approved in 2018 for a 32-storey tower made up of 125 strata units, 43 of them designated as social housing, along with a four-level underground parking lot. However, the project stalled out and never proceeded, and the property was sold to a new ownership group, GWL Realty Advisors, in 2022.

Later that year a new plan was submitted for a massive condo tower at the site, but with a few modifications. The GWL plan had the same number of storeys but was wider, and all of the units were rentals. Instead of 125 strata units, 1055 Harwood would now be home to 269 rental units, 52 of them below-market rentals. The number of parking levels increased to five.

This new plan was approved in February of this year, and is an example of the pivot that some developers have made in the last few years – moving away from strata housing and towards rental housing. This is due to a change made by the Vancouver City Council that allows developers to build all-rental buildings in certain parts of the West End with slightly different rules than strata buildings.

The biggest difference is that the strata projects need to pay Community Amenity Contributions (CACs), money which goes into affordable housing, parks, community centres, and more. The rental projects, however, don’t need to pay any CACs. That can make a big difference for some of these projects – the original Intracorp and Strand project at 1055 Harwood had a CACs bill of around $28 million, for example.

This policy change was put in on an interim basis in 2020, due to a number of projects stalling out in the years leading up to the pandemic owing to financial issues. The policy was made permanent last year in a bid to revitalize construction in the West End. So, this pivot at the Harwood site will likely not be the last such change of plans.

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Thank you!
Kevin Dale McKeown
Editor & Publisher
editor@thewestendjournal.ca