Despite my predictions to the contrary, UVic Grounds moved in last night, went to town with their heavy machinery before putting up a beautiful fence. Ball’s in the guerrilla gardeners court now.
So much for that garden
Author: corey.burger
Guerrilla gardeners ask for the moon
The lawn diggers of UVic finally released a set of demands (PDF). Do these things or the lawn gets it. Oh, wait…
What exactly do they want? The first and most logical demand is for new community garden space, preferably smack in the middle of campus. They also want a giant educational farm, 15 acres be exact. Their suggested location: Cedar Hill X Rd. lands. Given the lands were once a farm and still have fruit trees, these ideas seem fairly reasonable so far.
Still in the reasonable category is the idea of more fruit trees on campus, to take advantage of Victoria’s Mediterranean-like climate. It is their time-frame and scale I quibble with: 500 trees in five years. Trees take a decade or more to mature. Simpler would be to change (or subvert, depending on your worldview) UVic’s natural tree replacement and addition programs. The only work needed now revising whatever plan already exists.
And now we get to the insane. A department of agriculture? With 6 full time faculty? Aside from the small matter that UVic seriously lacks office and classroom space for its existing courses — let alone a brand new department — where is the money going to come from? What are they going to teach? And more cynically, what kind of monetization is possible? So I say: get thyself to UBC. They are BC’s agriculture specialists. Have been for a long time. No need to duplicate that.
The rest are a wash. Ten acres of ethnobotanical gardens? A LEED certified building? A food harvest festival? Interesting and not impossible.
Surprisingly, the garden in question is still in existence as of today. Like the rabbit problem, I suspect the university will wait for the summer to deal with it. Less students to chain themselves to bulldozers/live-traps that way.
If all this digging has prompted one good thing, it is that students are talking about community gardens, most of them for the first time. Whether or not that is a good thing is a matter of debate, like I had with a fellow student yesterday. Maybe something will come of this. After all, the reasonable community gardens group can play good cop: “Well, you could be dealing with them…”
CRD Parks under threat
Between ATVs and the Colwood Council, CRD has found its parks under a great deal of strain recently. The local ATV groups have started a drive to allow ATV access to the regions parks. Then Turner Lane Development Corp., the developer of the mostly-dead Colwood CornersCity Centre Colwood, has managed to get the Colwood Council to sign off on a hare-brained scheme to re-route the Galloping Goose and use its right of way for a road.
First, the ATVs. Loud, polluting, and ecologically destructive, these little beasts have their supporters. So much so that the local advocates have managed to get access into the local consciousness. The mere idea that ATVs could get access to local parks seemed completely off the radar until very recently — even CRD Parks own FAQ doesn’t even mention motorized access — and the ATVers have run a very slick campaign, catching most of the environmental groups and like-minded people off-guard.
However, I seriously doubt that ATV access, even if granted, will last for very long. If they are lucky, they will get agreements like South Island Mountain Bike Society (SIMBS) have with CRD over mountain-bike access to Hartland. Those agreements have some pretty strict termination clauses (see this access approval over a technical training area) and I know SIMBS has run into issues in the past. The major problem that the ATVers have is that the damage a mountain-bike can do to sensitive terrain is nothing compared to what even a single ATV can accomplish (an object example of this). So even one or two yahoos will quickly bring the ATV crowd into conflict with the CRD.
The other lunacy running around is the idea to re-route the Galloping Goose alongside the Old Island Highway and use the Goose’s right of way for a north-bound road. This one also appeared from nowhere and even managed to get the Colwood Council to sign on to the idea, unanimously no less. I can confidently predict this will fail. The last time a developer attempted to get the Goose turned into a road, an extension of Harbour Road for the Railyards in 2002, it was killed. Eight years down the road, there are only more bicyclists, walkers and other users of the Galloping Goose so getting people out to oppose this should be easy.
Thankfully both of these ideas require CRD Board approval. The next board meeting is April 21st at 9:30am in the CRD Boardroom at 625 Fisgard. If you want to speak, you will need to get prior approval. I will be Hawaii running up my carbon debt so I won’t see you there!
UVic guerrilla garden reappears
The guerrilla gardeners at UVic have — technically still are — struck again, replanting the garden in front of the McPherson Library. With the current community gardens under threat of being turned into a warehouse, students decided to take direct action and plant a garden in the middle of UVic. That work was subsequently ripped out by UVic in the middle of night, spawning this second effort.
While the UVic Student’s Society, perhaps not surprisingly, lacks an official position on the ad-hoc community garden, one of the senior UVSS people I spoke to said the UVSS lacks even a more generic statement of support for community gardens at UVic and that it ” might be a good idea”.
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Several people I spoke to seemed to think that the university will likely wait until the summer to rip out this garden 2.0, mostly to avoid further confrontation. Bunnies might not be the only things getting culled this summer.
*Youth Protecting Youth is a pro-life group that was denied club funding by the UVSS due to their use of shock tactics with images of aborted fetuses.
Times Colonist: Gary Lunn joins the Progressive Conservatives
I saw it in the news, therefor it must be correct. In an article about the excellent news of $1 million for the E&N Rail Trail was this line (emphasis mine):
The funding was announced by Gary Lunn, PC — Saanich-Gulf Islands.
Oops.
Community Initiatives Committee for the win
Active transportation and a new plan for Oak Bay Ave. Formerly homeless, these ideas are now part of the expanded role of the Community Initiatives Committee. To fit the expanded role, council added Councilor Nils Jensen and put out a call for interested members of the general public. As of today, that includes me. No date yet for the next meeting.
That Oak Bay Lodge resolution
As has been reported elsewhere, Oak Bay Council passed a resolution on Monday night that essentially tells private developers that they aren’t going to get that land rezoned. Unfortunately, the Times Colonist didn’t see fit to include any of the resolution, so here it is:
That the Minister of Health and VIHA be advised that Oak Bay Council supports:
(1) the retention in public ownership of land, such as the Oak Bay Lodge site, which is currently zoned and used for the provision of long term complex care under the auspices of the provincial government;
(2) the upgrading, expanding, enhancing or renewal of the community of care facility on the publicly owned Oak Bay lodge site to serve seniors in the Municipality and surrounding areas, maintaining or increasing the number of complex care beds and incorporating additional subsidized units, with an appropriate transition plan for existing residents.
The whole council was pretty clear in their discussion that they don’t see why VIHA is selling the land and that any such sales would be “short-sighted”, as Pam Copley said. The RFP has already closed but the winner bidder hasn’t been announced and it is doubtful that VIHA fully reviewed all of them anyway, so this resolution comes at the perfect time. Now that both Saanich and Oak Bay councils have spoken so clearly, what happens next should be interesting, to say the least.
Reimagining the Light: Luminara in the future
With Luminara 2010 not happening in July, Luminara host organization the Inter-Cultural Association, have organized a series visioning sessions to gather ideas for the future, of which the first was held a few Saturday’s ago. Attended by about twenty people, there was a good mix of volunteers, staff and representatives of various community groups and organizations such a the City of Victoria, the Downtown Victoria Business Association and the James Bay Community Project. Many other organization sent their regrets as they were unable to attend.
Why is the ICA re-imagining Luminara? It simply grew too big, much like the 2008 Illuminares festival in Vancouver or the formerly ICA-run Folk Fest here in Victoria. With the 2009 budget around $160,000 plus five months of time by five staff paid through the federal government’s Job Creation Partnerships program, Luminara was not inexpensive. What prompted the crisis this year was the funding needed either outright disappeared or was pushed back into the fall, making it hard to run a summer festival.
The idea of the day’s activities was to drill down to the core of what makes Luminara and it quickly became clear that creativity and community pervaded nearly every single suggestion or idea that people came up with. Many organizations were suggested as potential partners, from the municipal governments to local community associations to schools to service clubs, some of whom have already expressed interest in being involved.
As Karin Scarth, the Festival Director noted at the beginning, this is merely the first of many sessions and there were a lot of interested parties who couldn’t be there. You can follow the Luminara 2010 visioning page, the conversation on Facebook or email Karin directly to get on the update list. It should be an exciting few months.
An Olympic experience
Courtesy of a good friend, a bunch of us went over on the weekend to see Canada’s Women Hockey Team play Slovakia. It was the game where the poor Slovakians lost 18-0 and were outshot 67-9.
To start off, I have to give massive credit to the Slovakian goalie, who really did try. She made some amazing saves but in the end it just wasn’t enough. At one point they had literally just finished announcing who had scored the last goal when the next one went in. The Slovakians also had some good chances, mostly because the Canadians were incredibly sloppy while passing in their own end. The crowd was pretty amazing, applauding the Slovakian goalie every time she made a great save (she made a lot of those) and at the end of the game giving the entire Slovakian team a standing ovation. The Canadian team was also gracious enough to simply skate off at the end, without receiving the same.
But before we even sat down for the game, we already had a bit of fun with venues. The website listed both Thunderbird Stadium at UBC and Canada Hockey Place (ex-GM Place) as the venue, so when we arrived at Thunderbird Stadium for the game we were rather rudely surprised to learn we had gone to the wrong place. Amazingly, there is no direct bus connection between the UBC and Hockey Place. So off on a quest we went, one bus and two Skytrain rides later, arriving shortly before the 5pm start. Or was it the 4:30pm start. The website and our tickets disagreed on that too.
Which brings us to security. The reason we were two hours early in getting to UBC was for the expected security, a saving grace and it turned out. Processing 18,000 fans into a stadium in a short period of time is hard but it ran fairly smoothly, even if it took the better part of 45 minutes standing in the concrete jungle that is the Georgia/Dunsmuir Viaducts and Skytrain line. After the game we set off to see the Olympic torch, which was by that point very neatly blocked off with an elegantly-designed barrier of 10′ of chain-link fence and concrete. Gulag chic was definitely in.
Transit was one of the bright spots of the whole day. The bus was busy, but not overly so. Of the many Skytrain trips we took, on all three lines, there were usually seats. I shudder to think what it would have been like without trains running on 90 sec headways and all those new cars that Translink purchased recently for the Expo/Millenium Lines. However, I really wonder just how much VANOC paid Translink for all the extra service. Too bad VANOC is beyond FOI reach. They claim they are going to release their budget after the games, so we will know eventually.
Aside from seeing the game, I also wanted a chance to ride the Brussels- and Bombardier-supplied streetcar running on the new track between the Olympic Village Canada Line station and Granville Island. Thanks to the good transit connections, I managed it. It was smooth, clean, and quite busy even at nearly 9pm when we rode it. Apparently earlier in the day it had been packed. The car also had a pleasant odour of brand-new leather, coming from the hanging straps. Made a nice difference from the usual smells you can run into on older transit buses and trains.
We were fortunate enough to have a relative of one of my friends to stay with in Vancouver, so we didn’t have to find some of the very scarce hotel space available. They also lived in a decent place for transit, so we could get to and from their place without too much difficultly. Attempting to drive down would have been insane and impossible and there are few park-and-rides anywhere on the Skytrain system.
I am glad I had a chance to go and see the Olympics and all the effects it has had on Vancouver. I really hope that the City of Vancouver finds some way to keep the Olympic Line running, although they will need to find new vehicles. Not reopening the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts would also go a long way to making the downtown a better place. As for the rest of the legacy of the games, that remains to be seen.
CRD plans next Regional Pedestrian & Bicycle Master Plan event
The CRD Regional Pedestrian & Bicycle Master Plan (PCMP) is having its next public event on March 11. The event will cover the completed first phase of the plan, including the unveiling of the Bikeway Inventory Map. The plan, which launched last year, has already gone through some initial collection of public input. As has been the case with previous events, project consultants Alta Planning + Design and CRD staff will be on hand to discuss the next steps. I strongly encourage you to come, for which you need to register on the CRD PCMP page.