Vancouver councillor questions new staff role and funding for mayor's office

See. Well, Vancouver Mayor Ken SIM is facing some criticism this week over an additional $80,000 being allocated to his office budget. Now, City Council voted seven to three along party lines last night to add a new administrative position. And this in addition to a $100,000 boost the City Council approved in discretionary funding for the mayor's personal office in December. Opposition councillors are questioning the need for this latest role. That would be the role of a scheduler. That's the $80,000 job. Mayor SIM also being scrutinized online for appearing to turn one of the city Hall's rooms into a gym. And joining us now for more on this is Vancouver city Councillor Pete Fry who is with us in studio. Good morning to you. Good morning. First off, this additional position for the mayor, it's an additional $80,000 has been allocated. I understand it. It's for a scheduler, isn't? Yeah. So this was originally allocated along with $100,000 in the budget. This 80,000 was for a civil servant position. And it's since the city managers recommended that it's probably more appropriate to run this as a political position rather than a civil servant position. OK. So it would be someone attached to the mayor's political office then. And so we, we had a lot of questions about it, but we weren't able to really dig in on it. AB CS majority sort of pulled a, an arcane procedural process using their supermajority to call the question and basically eliminate any further discussion on the matter, right. And and so this would be 80 the the city manager calls this a political position and yet it's coming out of the city budget tax. It'll be a taxpayer funded position essentially, Yeah. And I would say that the the city manager didn't necessarily characterize it as a political position. He was a bit more diplomatic and just said that it was more appropriately funded through the mayor's office. Oh, OK, I understand now. Now, the $100,000, what was that put in place for the, Because correct me if I'm wrong, the the mayor's budget is about, is it about $1.4 million? Yeah. I don't have the number in front of me, but, yeah, it's grown significantly over the last few years. And certainly since this administration, it's grown quite a bit, about 40%, I believe. OK. It's where we need Justin McElroy, really, to tease out those numbers. Yeah, well, he's on a train somewhere. The mayor says the role is to help manage his busy schedule. And during the meeting, this was yesterday, we'll recall, he said the scheduling of my activity, of my activities are off the chart, insanely crazy and complicated and literally change every 15 minutes. And then SIM added that the staffer would free him up to work on other priorities, things like developing interest in the city from investors and from others. What do you make of that explanation? I mean, you know, I'm not the mayor, obviously. And I appreciate that He probably does have a really busy schedule. We as counselors have very busy schedules as well. And we have civil servants that handle our scheduling for us. And we typically have a shared staff assistant there, so, you know, two or three counselors will share one assistant who does all our scheduling. So I can totally appreciate that the mayor would need his own scheduling assistant. That said, I'm not sure why it needs to be a political position rather than a civil servant position like the rest of us have now. You posted a picture to X, formerly Twitter, about a room in City Hall that you say has been turned into a gym. You also implied that this was done exclusively for the mayor's use. Tell me the back story here. What is this about? Along with this $180,000 allocation at the budget in in December, we were informed by the city manager in January that that the mayor's office had let him know that they would be taking over that office for the mayor's support team. Now, presumably at the time, we just all assumed that that was because he's hiring more staff, 180 thousand. He needs more space for it. On Friday, I happened to be working at City Hall and nobody was there and the doors were left open. And I was somewhat astonished to see what was formerly a boardroom that had been expropriated. And it was a 12 seater boardroom that we used quite a bit had been turned into a what seems to be a personal gym. Now, you know, at the time that the city manager had to let us know about this, we had to scramble to reschedule our our sitting appointments that we had because this is typically where we meet large delegations, members of the community. I've been there before as a, as a citizen myself, so it was rather shocking to discover that it wasn't being used. And it's it's not the issue of the gym so much. It's the personal use of a civic asset like that that I find more galling. Sure. But I mean, you know, the, the police station has a giant gym for police officers. We have a gym downstairs. We have a gym downstairs in City Hall. Yeah, we have. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. OK, I know. I was not aware of that. And I mean, as far as it being a gym go, I see like a sort of rack that you could put weights on or do chin UPS or pull ups or something on. I see what looks to be an, a bicycle, a stationary bicycle. And I mean, is it, it looks rather temporary? Is it, is it at all possible that this stuff just got tossed in, tossed in there because the temporary, I guess that'd be a question for the mayor. But I think the point being for me is that it was an actual functional boardroom that we used quite, quite extensively. And we're inexplicably expropriated and and scrambling to find other locations to have our meetings and do city business. Have you had a a chance to talk to the mayor about it? No, and so that was my intention to bring it up yesterday. But they called the question and shut down the debate. OK, now I want to ask about also at City Hall this week, Vancouver staff recommending council eliminate minimum parking space requirements for land users in the city. Parking can already be difficult to find. And and it seems to me that as we do this, at some point it's going to reach the kind of like crisis point or a gridlock point where we're going to go, Oh my gosh, there's no place to park anymore. And and then, you know, we'll start trying to figure it out when when the inevitable happens. Yeah. So to to add some clarity to this. So there's the transit oriented area of legislation from the province that's basically saying around transit stations eliminate parking minimums. The city of Vancouver's going a little farther and saying, you know what, we don't need parking minimums. So parking minimums are basically where we say you're building a, a, a building with, you know, X amount of units, you need X amount of parking spaces. What we're seeing in a lot of the new rental properties is that people don't want to pay for parking. Parking comes at a premium. Underground parking stalls cost anywhere from 70 to $80,000 a piece to, to build in and it gets passed on to the consumer. And so with bike share, car share, better transit, a lot of folks are saying, you know what, I don't need a car. I can use an Evo if I need to use a car and I don't want a personal car. I don't want to pay for that extra use of a parking space. And we know that a lot of buildings are going with parking spaces that are empty. And so developers are coming back and saying, look, we really, these parking minimums aren't working for us. Nobody's using them. It's just empty space. And we could do better and deliver a more affordable product. Now, whether or not it actually does deliver a more affordable housing product, that's a whole other piece. And we did have a housing housing strategy update, which was pretty disappointing, in fact, for us to recognize that we are not beating the targets for folks who live here. I I, I'm sure the, the discount for a lack of a parking space will be clearly marked on the sale of each condo from now on. Counselor, thanks so much. Oh, by and, and sorry, is this just one more question about the room that's apparently been converted to a gym. Is this for the mayor's exclusive use or can any other counselor go in there and use it or it's a nice bike. I mean, ABC counselors have access with their non ABC counselors don't have access. It's they changed the key locks on it. Oh, for real? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. So the only reason I saw this was the door was left ajar. Presumably they were bearing it out or something. They were had all the doors open. So it was a shock to me. All right, Councillor Fry, thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Vancouver city councillor Pete Fry, we did request an interview with Mayor Ken SIM. He did not get back to us by deadline and.