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Vancouver City Council appoints five puppets to Board of Variance  

Hours after BC Supreme court finds in favour of the City of Vancouver, a new board is hired 

by Kevin Potvin  

July 25, 2006, Vancouver—

The big question after Vancouver City Council fired the Board of Variance last month was, Who in the world would apply for the position to replace them? Today we got our answer. City Council appointed five new members to the Board of Variance mere hours after receiving a judgment in their favour at BC Surpreme Court upholding their right to fire the old board members indiscriminately and without cause.

The new Board of Variance will go out tomorrow morning at 9 AM to visit development sites, and then sit at 1:30 in a small City Hall office to decide the fate of many backlogged appeal cases.

The new members are Marguerite Ford, a former TEAM city councilor, a prominent member of NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan’s anti-wards coalition during the referendum on wards in 2004, and chair of the communications committee for the Vancouver Board of Trade; Alex Lam, a BC Hydro engineer who finished his first three-year stint as a member of the Board of Variance only last year (and incidentally is therefore a big part of the reason for current cost overruns at the Board of Variance, the stated reason the present board was fired); Jagdev Dhillon, a planning professional in Abbotsford; Francesco Zumpano, a former

chair of planning in Burnaby; and Parveen Adrakar, a south Vancouver realtor who finished a six year term as a member of the Board of Variance in 1999.

Clearly, the new board, comprised of past members of the board and planning professionals, plus an NPA confidante, is expected to arrive at decisions more in favour of the Vancouver City Planning department and the big developers and investors it favours. The fired board was let go one day after overturning the planning department’s passing of a marina proposal put forward by Concord Pacific, on False Creek.

It will be difficult for these new board members to consider the merit of appeals of decisions of the City planning department that come before them without fear of being taken to court, and thereafter fired, since rising legal costs were cited by Councilor Ladner as a big reason the previous board was fired. The old Board of Variance never initiated any court challenges, but only ever defended its decisions in court.

The new Board of Variance, to avoid being fired by City Council, might well make decisions regarding appeals based on whether appellants might have the wealth and

inclination to take the Board to court. It will also be difficult for the new Board members to shirk the label “City Council Puppets,” if for no other reason than that they applied to City Council for, and accepted positions to, a board whose job—to fairly decide appeals against the planning department—is, under these present circumstances, probably impossible.

Given the circumstances surrounding the firing of the last Board, the new Board may well find that, no matter which way they go, either side will have legitimate grounds to take the

Board to court, since it will be fairly easy now for either side to argue the Board was cowed into a decision either by City Council, which fired the last Board en masse, the City Planning department, which advised Council to fire the Board, or by rich developers or neighbours that could reasonably threaten legal action, thereby running up the Board’s legal costs.

Like Stan Laurel would say to Oliver Hardy, “It's a fine mess you've gotten us into this time, Ollie.”