“Located in Vancouver’s transit hub, close to thousands of businesses, residents and in the heart of the tourism district, the stadium will reconnect Gastown to the waterfront.”

Bob Lenarduzzi
Province

In 2003, the City of Vancouver approached us with a vision — a midsized outdoor venue capable of hosting a myriad of events from soccer and rugby to concerts, multicultural festivals and more.

We embraced the opportunity. One of the main goals of the Whitecaps is to be a community asset, and a stadium that all of Vancouver can use and enjoy would certainly be that.

After three and a half years of working with city staff, which saw other potential locations exhausted, it was determined that this site — north of Gastown, over the rail yard — is the best site. Located in Vancouver’s transit hub, close to thousands of businesses, residents and in the heart of the tourism district, the stadium will reconnect Gastown to the waterfront. It will be a showcase venue, and this has not been lost on the public.

Since we announced our vision last October we have received overwhelming support through letters, community consultation and surveys, ranging from 67 to 71 per cent approval.

A new Mustel survey reveals that 72 per cent of businesses in the immediate vicinity support the stadium.

And recently, former Vancouver mayors Larry Campbell and Philip Owen have come forward to speak out in favour of the stadium in this location and to urge city council make it a priority.

Naturally the proposed stadium faces some hurdles.

Following the city-led, high-level review, five primary requirements have been identified: provision of adequate street network; resolution of risks and liability from dangerous goods in the rail lands; fit with Gastown; impact on nearby residences and future port land development.

These are significant; however, the Whitecaps, the city and the other stakeholders all agree they can be addressed and are resolvable.

The current timeline put forth by Vancouver city staff has the proposed 15,000-seat, multi-use venue breaking ground in early 2009.

On June 27th, the Whitecaps are asking council to make the project a priority so Vancouverites can begin to receive the numerous benefits that will come from this stadium as soon as possible.

Bob Lenarduzzi is the director of soccer operations for the Vancouver Whitecaps.

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

Citizens’ group wants to see an overall plan before proposal is considered

David Carrigg
Province

Two former Vancouver mayors, the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee, an international police and firefighters’ organization and the Canadian Soccer Association have added their weight to a waterfront stadium proposal in Gastown.

“During my tenure as mayor it became abundantly clear that we lack a midsize outdoor stadium venue in the heart of Vancouver,” said former mayor and current senator Larry Campbell.

Campbell first approached Vancouver Whitecaps owner Greg Kerfoot in 2003 asking if he’d like to build a stadium on city-owned land.

That deal fell through. However, Kerfoot now wants to built a 15,000-seat stadium on land he owns on the Vancouver waterfront alongside Gastown.

The City of Vancouver hired consultants to review the plan and next Tuesday council will vote on whether to support the project.

Former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen also backs the plan, stating that with good planning any challenges the stadium faces can be overcome.

Dave Cobb, executive vice-president of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, has sent a letter to the Whitecaps stating VANOC would like to use the proposed facility. And the Canadian Soccer Association is hoping it will be built in time for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2011, which Canada wants to host.

Organizers of the 2009 World Police and Fire Games being held in B.C. also want to use the stadium.

A Mustel survey showed that 71 per cent of residents support the project.

However, Gastown property owner Jon Stovell, who is campaigning against the stadium, yesterday released a 400-person poll stating nearly 70 per cent of Vancouver residents want an overall waterfront plan completed before the stadium proposal is considered.

“The poll’s results clearly show that Vancouver residents support a careful planning process for this last piece of undeveloped waterfront,” said Stovell, spokesman for the Gastown Neighbourhood Coalition.

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

170 planners oppose expansion of bridge and highway

Frank Luba
Province

Award-winning scientist and broadcaster David Suzuki used the backdrop of the World Urban Forum yesterday to voice his opposition to the provincial government’s plan to twin Port Mann Bridge and expand Highway 1 from Langley to Vancouver.

Suzuki added his signature to those of 170 planners opposed to the bridge and highway expansion. The petition was sent from the 2006 World Planners Congress to B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and Finance Minister Carole Taylor.

The Port Mann twinning and the Highway 1 expansion are a $1.5-billion chunk of the $3-billion Gateway Program being pushed by Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon to address congestion and the movement of goods and services.

Suzuki isn’t buying Falcon’s plan.

“There is not a single case in the world in which expansion of highway systems leads to reduction of congestion,” said Suzuki.

“[The expansion] opens up that whole valley for greater development and bigger sprawl, more sprawl, more single-family dwellings with two to three cars. You’re just going to increase the amount of congestion. It’s not a solution.”

Falcon said he wouldn’t be supportive of the plan if it only entailed twinning the bridge and expanding the highway.

The Gateway plan, explained Falcon, also includes more high-occupancy vehicle lanes, the ability to put public transit on the bridge, expanded cycling capability and tolls “that would get people thinking about options” to driving.

“We know it’s going to get dramatically worse,” said Falcon of the congestion.

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

Arena to be built privately, but if public money’s available, soccer club will ask for it

John Bermingham
Province

The group behind the proposed waterfront soccer stadium intends to seek government funding if it gets the thumbs-up from

Vancouver City Council later this month.

Bob Lenarduzzi, the Vancouver Whitecaps’ director of soccer operations, said the Whitecaps own the site for the 15,000-seat arena but would ask for government help in building it — if there’s help to be had.

“If there’s government funding available, we would want to explore that,” Lenarduzzi said yesterday.

“We’re moving forward on the basis it’s a private initiative, but if there’s funding available, we would explore that.”

The Whitecaps have not made any requests for government funding so far, he said.

“If we’re going to be the community asset, the provincial asset, the nation’s asset we think we can be, there may be opportunities for funding.”

Lenarduzzi said it’s too early to guess the stadium’s final cost, but a similar soccer

arena in Toronto has a price tag of $65 million. About $44 million of that came from all three levels of government, including

$28 million from Ottawa.

When the Toronto stadium was in jeopardy, Lenarduzzi said, the Whitecaps offered their stadium to the Canadian Soccer Association as a national soccer arena and inquired if federal funding would transfer to its project.

“It never went beyond that,” he said.

Jon Stovell, who heads a Gastown group opposing the stadium, said the Whitecaps should disclose plans for government money prior to the June 27 council hearing on moving the project forward.

“Seeking public funding in itself is not a problem,” said Stovell.

“The problem is they’ve consistently promoted the stadium based on the fact that it was privately funded and a community asset with no cost to the public.

“If public money is going into the project, there should be a higher level of public involvement in the design of the stadium and the development of an overall plan for the waterfront.”

Stadium supporters recently sent 600

written postcards to city councillors and have collected 2,500 signatures supporting the plan.

Bill Currie of the Friends of Soccer group said 70 per cent of city residents support the stadium.

John Kostiuk, who heads a group of Gastown businesses and residents called Stadium Now, said opponents have been spreading disinformation about the project.

He said drawings of the stadium circulating in Gastown wrongly show the stadium blocking Cambie Street, which is false. The platform the stadium will rest on is seven metres high, not 8.5, he added.

Gastown is split on the stadium, he said, but “we’re finding more and more people are coming out and being supportive.”

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

City planner leaves, confident Vancouver will continue as a livable city

Ward
Sun

The planner considered most responsible for the transformation of Vancouver’s inner city says well-designed urban landscaping was crucial to convincing suburbanites to move downtown.

“Everything in the culture told them that the inner city was unsafe, dangerous, dirty. You know, Da Vinci’s Inquest,” Larry Beasley told a gathering of Canadian landscape architects on Wednesday.

Beasley said the population of downtown Vancouver doubled to about 85,000 people in little over a decade because the city adopted the theme of “quality of life” as the driving force of its planning process.

Vancouver’s planning director said livability is increasingly crucial to cities – and is no longer just an esthetic issue – because people and capital have become increasing fluid.

“The world has become footloose, with people and capital moving at will: Business can be done anywhere, other aspects of life are more important than one’s livelihood, and where people choose to settle is not tied down the way it [once was].”

Beasley said the traditional urban economy of manufacturing, government or business administration is being replaced or reinforced by the “service city.”

These cities are becoming powerful metropoles drawing on “people with wealth, talent and energy” and surrounding them with clusters of support people.

One theory, said Beasley, is that cities will “either become one of these metropoles, enjoying all the fruits and advantages of the modern world and connected in an international network with other such ‘alpha’ places, or will be relegated to ‘drone’ status that services others but limits what can be provided for your citizens.”

Beasley said this future scenario is a gross generalization, but shows how cities can no longer be “exploited as a commodity or happening by accident.”

They must be shaped by good design, said Beasley, noting that famous Brazilian urbanist Jaime Lerner has said, “a city without a design doesn’t know where it’s going; doesn’t know how to grow.”

Beasley told the landscape architects their profession must play a more influential role in the development process because it brings a holistic design approach that can “sustainably reconcile settlement and nature.”

He said the Vancouver experience shows architectural and landscape solutions allow density to work and that high density generates enough value to prompt developers to spend on quality construction and amenities.

“And the supportive neighbourhood draws all kinds of people back from the suburbs, offering the competitive advantage of a truly urban lifestyle.”

Beasley, who leaves his job at the end of August, said the Vancouver approach to urban design will continue after his departure.

“I go out of my job at city hall with the utmost confidence that the trajectory of Vancouver is not going to change.

“But with the utmost anxiety that we not stop where we are but that we continue to move forward.”

SUSTAINABLE CITIES VITAL

“You know this struggle for a fulfilling, sustainable city must be one of the most urgent causes of contemporary western culture. It’s urgent in reaching the hearts of our citizens, who are becoming more and more discerning and more and more critical and who have higher and higher expectations; and it’s urgent in securing the future of our species, since cities right now are despoiling our world even though, next year, we will cross the line where over 50 per cent of humanity lives in urban settlements.

“Quality of life is no longer an esthetic matter, a luxury.”

– Larry Beasley, Vancouver planning director

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

WENDY MCLELLAN
Province

It looks like any other construction site in this city of cranes, but at the bottom of the huge hole next to the Cambie Street Bridge, a team of tunnel rats is preparing to dig.
   The 50 workers, all specialists in mechanized tunnel boring, are from Italy, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, Greece, Portugal and the Philippines and they travel the world together digging tunnels for the Italy-based company SELI.
   Beginning this week and continuing until February 2008, the workers will drive an $11-million tunnel-boring machine deep under the ground from the south end of the Cambie bridge, under False Creek and below downtown buildings to create a pair of 2.5-kilometre tunnels for the new Canada Line rapid transit system.
   “It’s quite different than other construction jobs,” said Andrea Ciamei, an Italian who is the project manager. “You are always underground and you have to be aware all the time. But after a while, you become addicted and you can’t do without it.”
   The workers communicate mostly in Spanish or English. As well as their experience with tunnel projects, they have training as electricians, engineers, mechanics and surveyors. They are part of a global network of specialized workers who travel with SELI and other companies on tunnels for transit systems, roadways and hydro projects.
   Once digging starts for the Canada Line tunnels, Ciamei said, three crews of workers will operate the machine around the clock, pushing through about 10 metres of sandstone and glacial muck a day.
   The machine will dive below ground from the hole at the Cambie bridge to a depth of about 32 metres as it heads downtown.
   Roberto Casagrande started as a tunnel rat in Italy 25 years ago, following in the footsteps of his father, who worked as a miner. But unlike his father, Casagrande has worked on more than 20 tunnels in countries all over the world.
   “You meet a lot of people, see different countries and have so many different opportunities,” said Casagrande, who is responsible for co-ordinating the excavation and the work crews. “And you leave something important behind.”
   Casagrande set up a small shrine for Saint Barbara, the Catholic patron saint of miners, at the start of the tunnel. He takes the shrine to his projects all over the world, and before excavation begins, a local priest comes to the site to bless the project. He said tunnel rats are highly specialized and difficult to find. “You need skills, but you also need experience. You never know what you will find underground.”

$84 million goes to work at former Expo 86 location, B.C. remediation report says

Neal Hall
Sun

The provincial government is spending $187 million to clean up contaminated sites on Crown land, with most of the funding allocated to the Britannia Mine site and the former Expo lands in Vancouver’s False Creek, according to a report released Friday.

B.C. Agriculture and Lands Minister Pat Bell said he thought the release of the first government report on contaminated sites on Crown land was particularly timely during Environment Week.

The work undertaken by the Crown Contaminated Sites Program “exemplifies the premier’s goal to lead the world in sustainable environmental management,” the minister said.

About 94 per cent of B.C. is Crown land, owned by the province, which is responsible for managing and protecting the land and cleaning up the environmental damage mainly caused by industrial use dating back to the 1800s.

Brian Clarke, director of the Crown contaminated sites branch, said in an interview Friday that the government’s 29-page report details the current sites being cleaned up and future sites being identified for cleanup. It is the first time the government has issued a progress report on what is being done, he said.

“It’s a step that we’ve taken to respond to a report by the auditor-general in 2002,” Clarke explained.

He said there are at least 2,000 potentially contaminated sites around the province — mainly old mines — and the branch tries to identify its top-10 sites each year that are worth investigating to see if cleanup is needed.

Clarke said an estimated $99 million will be spent on the old Britannia Mine, 50 kilometres north of Vancouver, and $84 million on the former Expo site, now called Pacific Place.

Before the 82-hectare site hosted the Expo 86 World’s Fair, it had been an industrial site for more than 100 years that included two coal gasification plants and the CPR Railyards.

After the fair, it was sold to Concord Pacific Development Ltd., which built hundreds of condominiums in the last two decades.

Earlier this week, the government celebrated the opening of the Britannia Mine water treatment plant, which removes heavy metals from water draining through the old mine, then discharges the treated water into Howe Sound. The mine closed in 1974. At its peak in 1929, it was the largest copper-producing mine in the British Commonwealth.

Other urban industrial contaminated sites under remediation are Meadow Avenue in Burnaby, on the Fraser River, and the foot of Oak Street in Vancouver.

Other sites under remediation are:

– The Yankee Girl Mine in the Kootenays near Ymir, south of Nelson. Mining for gold, silver, lead, iron, zinc and cadmium began in the 1800s and continued until the 1950s. The Salmo River was cutting away at the tailings (the rock left behind after the valuable minerals are extracted), but the province built an erosion barrier and further work is being done this year to determine what to do with the tailings.

– Malakwa. A former landfill near Sicamous was being exposed by erosion of the Eagle River. Waste material was removed and the riverbank is being replanted with shrubs and undergrowth to stop erosion.

– The former Ocean Falls pulp mill sites on the central coast.

Remediated sites include:

– Goose Bay, an abandoned fishing camp and rundown cannery on the coast 483 kilometres north of Vancouver, underwent a cleanup last year. It was contaminated by a toxic stew of old heating oil, asbestos, PCBs, lead acid batteries and drums containing hazardous materials littering the site.

– The Pitt River, about 72 kilometres outside of Vancouver. An old landfill beside the river was spilling debris in the river. The upper part of the Pitt River is considered a significant salmon spawning stream. Tonnes of debris were removed by barges, and vegetation will be planted this year to stabilize the riverbank.

One of the future projects under investigation is the Gasworks located at 12th Street and Third Avenue in New Westminster, the site of a coal gasification plant in 1897 and later used for bulk coal storage, a metal foundry, paint factory, wood treatment and automobile repair shop.

Merchants opposed to the soccer stadium proposal urge a master plan for the area

William Boei
Sun

VANCOUVER – The Vancouver waterfront between Granville and Main streets should be developed according to a master plan, not with one-off developments like the elevated stadium proposed by the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer club, Gastown merchants said Wednesday.

But the club is sticking to its guns, saying the city should let it build the stadium and worry about developing the rest of the waterfront later.

The Gastown Business Improvement Society put forward several scenarios, the most ambitious of which shows Granville, Cambie and Carrall streets extended to the harbour. They now end either at Cordova Street or at the CP Rail tracks north of Gastown.

It would see dozens of new buildings, including several highrises, built on CP’s railway land south of Waterfront Road, and on Vancouver Port Authority land from the road to the shoreline.

The Main Street overpass could be removed and a pier with a fish market, perhaps along the lines of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, extended into the harbour, urban planner Lance Berelowitz suggested.

Berelowitz and architect Jennifer Marshall were hired by the Gastown business group to sketch out development possibilities.

Only one of their three scenarios includes a soccer stadium, and it would be at ground level east of Waterfront Station and a new transit hub.

Portside Park would remain as it is or be expanded, but would become more accessible.

However, the railway tracks are expected to stay put for several decades or longer, and another development scenario would see a platform built over the tracks and buildings put on top and to the north of the platform.

Berelowitz said the scenarios were not meant as concrete proposals, but to illustrate that the area — Vancouver’s last stretch of developable downtown waterfront — has potential for major coordinated development on the scale of the north False Creek and Coal Harbour neighbourhoods.

“We’re encouraging city council to really take a second to think about that, [and] do the appropriate planning for the whole area as they’ve done in other areas,” he said.

“We’re really offering it as a set of, we hope, intelligent questions around what we might see in this area, and whether or not the stadium fits into that bigger planning picture.”

Gastown Business Improvement Society President Paul Ardagh said the waterfront land can become “a destination . . . to accommodate a variety of interests — tourism, retail, business, transit and entertainment — in one location.”

But Vancouver Whitecaps Director of Operations Bob Lenarduzzi said the club is focused on just one goal: getting its stadium built.

The soccer club bought the whole stretch of railway land from Waterfront to Main Street because CP wouldn’t break it up into parcels, but “we have no plans for that right now,” Lenarduzzi said. “The single purpose that the land was purchased for was to build a stadium.”

He said the club is expecting the tracks to stay in place, and has not considered larger development schemes. The sale includes an easement giving CP the right to keep using the land.

The Whitecaps are dealing with city hall concerns, including making the stadium proposal fit better with historic Gastown, providing an adequate street network, addressing dangerous-goods movement by rail under the stadium and its impact on the port lands to the north.

“We feel that those issues can be overcome and we move forward,” Lenarduzzi said. “We’re confident that on June 27 council will vote to send the process to the next stage.”

He wouldn’t commit to the club’s earlier goal of building the stadium by early 2009, but said it is asking the city “to prioritize the time line . . . and make it a project that they’re prepared to pull out from the rest of the development of the waterfront.”

 

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

William Boei
Sun

Vancouver intends to oppose the core of the provincial government’s controversial Gateway Program, Mayor Sam Sullivan said Tuesday.

However, he said the city should also accept political reality and plan for the possibility that the Port Mann Bridge and the Trans-Canada Highway will be expanded over its objections.

Sullivan’s Non-Partisan Association majority voted to defer until next week a motion to reject the bridge and highway expansion while giving conditional approval to the rest of the program — new truck routes along both shores of the Fraser River and a new Pitt River Bridge.

Opposition council members accused Sullivan of being soft on Gateway despite warnings that it could destroy the city’s world-famous livability.

Sullivan denied it.

“I’m trying to keep an open mind,” he said in an interview, “but I am on record as supporting the official city position, being opposed to the widening and the twinning.

“I also recognize the political realities that are driving this.”

Transit advocates and environmental groups had urged council to lead the region in a fight against the project, which they say will cause sprawl into the Fraser Valley and more traffic congestion in the city.

“Please don’t roll over and play dead on this issue,” Eric Doherty of the Livable Region Coalition told council. “People are looking for leadership from the City of Vancouver.”

“We were not asked whether we want to become the loading dock for North America,” added Surrey resident Pierre Rovtar of the Fraser Valley Conservation Coalition.

But Rovtar and others questioned whether goods movement is the real agenda.

“This is not about creating capacity for the movement of goods,” said film producer Colleen Nystedt, a former council candidate and the daughter of Walter Hardwick, who helped stop freeway construction through Vancouver and was a driving force behind the region’s growth strategy.

“It is about land use decisions and particularly real estate speculation,” Nystedt said.

NPA councillors agreed with the COPE and Vision civic parties that Vancouver doesn’t need more traffic, but argued in favour of a staff recommendation to ask the province to include “mitigating” measures if Gateway goes ahead.

Critics, led by COPE Coun. David Cadman, said that amounts to giving a green light on a project that “basically takes the whole regional strategy and destroys it.”

The proposed mitigating measures include using tolls not only to pay for the project, but also to manage transportation demand; giving priority to transit, high-occupancy vehicles and trucks ahead of single-occupant vehicles; and not promoting the Pattullo Bridge as an un-tolled alternative to the Port Mann Bridge.

City staff said traffic diverting to the Pattullo and Queensborough bridges to avoid tolling on the Port Mann is likely to add to congestion on the Kingsway and Marine Drive corridors into southeast Vancouver, in addition to arterial roads that carry traffic from the highway in northeast Vancouver.

Cadman and Vision councillors Raymond Louie and Heather Deal also complained that by deferring the vote, the NPA is preventing the city from taking a clear stand at this Friday’s Vancouver Caucus, a meeting of council with local members of Parliament and the legislature.

But Sullivan said Gateway is not on Friday’s agenda because there is only so much time. He also deflected criticism that he has been lobbying federal politicians on Vancouver’s behalf without bringing up the Gateway project as one of Vancouver’s 30 priority issues.

“What are those 30 issues?” Cadman asked. “If this isn’t a priority for this city, what are they?”

Sullivan said he didn’t bring it up in Ottawa because the controversial parts of the Gateway Program — the bridge and highway expansion — are driven and will be paid for by the provincial government.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

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