People with chickens, people with bylaws

For publication in The Kamloops Daily News, Saturday, Jan. 31

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have chickens, and those who have bylaws.

So, as I enjoy planning my chicken coop for spring, I think of my city cousins, and sympathize. They will not know the joy of collecting eggs, watching hens scratch happily in the yard, or lopping off their heads come dinner time. No, they must make do with supermarket chickens, those commercially raised birds you see turning on a spit in the delicatessen section. Just not the same.

Chickens are fascinating creatures, and deserving of more respect than they get. When I was 10 or 12 years old, I went to my friend Franklin Endreny’s house on a day he was assigned to decapitate a few chickens for the freezer.

Chickens, as you may know, generally like to run around a bit after losing their heads (thus, “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”) Frank was a very efficient executioner, and not at all emotional about it. (As Phil Gaglardi once said, “If you’re going to cut the head off a chicken, you don’t pet it for three hours first.”)

I will never forget watching drop-jawed as one particular headless chicken ran away from the chopping block, flapped up and over a fence, and kept going.

Most people don’t believe me when I tell them this, or they say it was all just a coincidence, that the chicken didn’t really know what it was doing. But the story of Mike the Headless Chicken convinces me otherwise.

The story goes that a Colorado farmer named Lloyd Olsen was sent out to the yard by his wife one evening in 1940 to get a chicken for dinner. He picked out a young victim named Mike. Lloyd’s aim was slightly off, and while the capon’s head was removed, one ear and most of the brain steam was missed. At least that’s the scientific explanation for what followed.

“On the first night after decapitation, Mike slept with his severed head under his wing.” That’s a quote. Apparently, when Mike woke up he fumbled the ball, so to speak, and dropped his head, at which point a cat ate it. I’m not making this up.

Anyway, Mike went on tour for more than a year, bringing in some pretty good money for Lloyd, who charged admission at country fairs. Poor Mike choked on his dinner one night in a Phoenix motel — seems he’d had trouble swallowing ever since he lost his head, and Lloyd couldn’t revive him.

Point is, chickens are more than dinner, although they are that too. They’ve gotten a bad rap about noise and smell and all that. I haven’t read so much bafflegab about the trouble with chickens as I have in the City staff report presented to council this week.

It’s highly unusual, to begin with, that staff would basically ignore direction from council and come up with a report to their own liking instead. In fact, I’m not aware of it ever happening before.

Back on Dec. 9, Bonnie Klohn of the Urban Hen Committee asked council to amend its animal control bylaw to allow a pilot project in which 40 families with lots of less than an acre would have three chickens.

This, she said, would provide an opportunity to assess the impact of urban chickens. Council unanimously approved a motion directing staff “to draft a pilot project concept for Council’s review in consultation with the Urban Hen Committee to permit poultry on lots smaller than one acre.”

But when staff returned with a report, it was nothing of the kind. Instead, it recommended that council “not approve the Urban Hen Pilot Project and therefore maintain status quo for keeping of chickens within Kamloops.”

Although the report acknowledged there may be benefits to allowing urban chickens, it launched into a litany of supposed problems that are, frankly, a bit of a stretch.

For example, staff worried that training the 40 pilot-project families in good chicken husbandry “would create participants that are ‘more responsible’ than the average person would otherwise be.” And the problem is?

Again, I’m not making this up — that’s what the report says. Then there’s the concern about who would dispose of the chickens in the pilot program if council decided not to go ahead.

And what if, Heaven forbid, chickens got loose, or people just set their chickens free when their laying days were over? We could have feral chickens roaming around the city creating havoc. 

Besides, chickens might upset dogs and cats, the coops might smell, the chickens might make noise, blah blah.

I’m not surprised that councillors Denis Walsh and Tina Lange, who moved and seconded the original motion for a pilot project, were miffed at staff. What is surprising is that council, after having unanimously requested the report, split 4-4 on the staff recommendation to renege instead of telling them to go back and try again.

A tie vote defeats a motion so the Urban Hen folks don’t get their consultation on how to accommodate chickens in the city. At the least, when next there is a full council in attendance, the matter should be reconsidered.

I have high respect for City staff, but it would seem they forgot that the purpose of a pilot project is to identify real problems — not stuff conjured up on word processors in City Hall — and gain experience on whether they can be managed.

For example, the answer to disposing of chickens is to cut off their heads and have them for a tasty meal. I’m confident the pilot project would have confirmed that.

Worrying that chicken owners will become too knowledgeable about chickens is highly creative but, again, something that could be better answered via a pilot project rather than no project at all. Common sense suggests the more people involved in urban-chicken farming, the more general knowledge of good practice will increase.

As for noise and smell, chickens cluck, roosters crow, but roosters aren’t allowed within City limits anyway. Chickens scratch about during the day and go home to their coops to roost at night. A pilot project would be a great way to assess whether these things can be managed.

There are volumes of information on controlling noise and smell. Indeed, as I happily design my own coop, I realize there’s a lot that must be considered — ventilation, adequate space, feeding devices, winter warmth, ease of maintenance, safety from predators.

I already have an offer to provide me with a few free chickens and a rooster, and can hardly wait for the snow to melt so I can get busy. For my urban friends who will never know the joys of chickens, I promise to report back from time to time on progress.

And maybe you can visit some time — you know what we’ll be having for dinner.

Chicken flap should be revisited

I’m quite interested in this chicken flap. Mind you, I’d like to see an end to all the puns that writers like to use to prove they’re clever.

One reason I’m interested in this is that I plan to build a chicken coop this spring and house a few chickens. The staff report on the Urban Hen pilot project is an interesting read. It’s the first time I can remember that staff went in such a totally different direction with a report than what council asked for.

Council asked staff to outline a pilot project on urban chickens for discussion with the Urban Hen Committee. Instead, staff came back with a recommendation against the project.

I just got off the phone with City CAO Randy Diehl, who explained that staff felt it must consider not just council’s resolution but the discussion around it. “From our perspective we felt strongly enough about the issue to address the questions that went unanswered (during council debate),” he told me.

Diehl admitted, “We (staff) don’t support it because we have many other problems with pets. . . . It’s about values at the end of the day.”

I have a high regard for City Hall staff because they are very good at what they do, and I know how hard they work. But it seems to me they went too far in this report. They could have raised all the concerns they wanted about urban chickens, but within the context of what needed to be answered via the pilot project. They could have made lots of recommendations about questions that would need to be answered, without opposing the project.

Council makes policy, staff carries it out, but sometimes the line gets blurred. I suggest it got blurred in the case of chickens. Council should have asked staff to go back and do what was asked in the first place.

I’ll have more to say about the so-called ruffled-feathers controversy in Saturday’s Armchair Mayor column in The Daily News.

Red-light runners getting bolder and bolder

A couple of weeks ago, The Daily News published a front-page story on the growing trend of Kamloops drivers to ignore red stop lights. I assigned the story because I see it happening every day, and its getting worse.

I thought the story went a little too easy on the issue. It truly is the case that more and more drivers are blatantly breaking the law and putting others at risk by running red lights. 

Used to be that when some drivers saw an intersection light change from green to yellow they would speed up to get through before it goes red. That, in itself, is dangerous and illegal. Yellow lights are an alert that you should slow down and be prepared to stop, not that you should speed up.

There are two types of red-light bandits. The ones I just mentioned, and the left-turn cheaters. It’s common for drivers waiting to turn left to pull into the intersection and wait for the light to go yellow so the oncoming cars stop, then do their left turn before cross-traffic gets rolling.

Often, one or two other left-turners will tag along. This helps clear things out at controlled intersections without left-turn lanes, and no harm done.

Now, though, people are speeding into intersections that have already turned red and cranking through their left turns.

The secret to “success” in running red lights is that you get into the intersection before the cross traffic has hit the gas pedal. If you mistime it, you’re in trouble.

People do it because they know they can get away with it. It’s an increasingly dangerous situation, and it’s becoming so accepted that the red-light runners will become bolder and bolder, pushing the envelope. And people will start getting hurt or killed.

Federal budget like a shiny new car for Kamloops

Whenever a new provincial or federal budget is announced, I tend to look for things that will directly affect our community. Sure, things like personal tax cuts, renovation grants and such are important, but I’m more interested in drilling into the budget to see what we in Kamloops as a whole might benefit from.

The budget announced in Ottawa a couple of hours ago is like a shiny new car we’ve decided to buy now rather than wait until we can afford cash. We get the advantage of driving it right away instead of plugging along with the old beater.

The trick with new cars, and deficit budgets, is that we don’t want to get into the habit of borrowing for one every single year. Sooner or later, we’ve got to pay down the loan. The most worrisome part of this federal budget plan is that it wipes out the payments we’ve made over the past many years and puts us in the position of starting over.

That said, there’s a lot to be commended in this budget. I’m always particularly interested in infrastructure programs, because they hit close to home. They create jobs quickly, and infuse money into the local economy fast. An additional reason municipalities have been swarming around this budget like goldfish at feeding time is that there has been a huge infrastructure gap in Canadian cities for a long time. Sewers, water plants, roads and facilities are badly in need of repair or replacement.

The infrastructure money included in the federal budget is good news for Kamloops. There’s $4 billion for general infrastructure, and $500 million specifically for recreational infrastructure. The question is how fast we can access some of it.

As I read the budget document, the money will only be available through federal-provincial agreements. That means, once again, the federal government will negotiate separate contracts for distribution of the money with each and every province and territory.

If that seems like a waste of time, it is, but necessary the way things are done in Canada. City governments are directly bossed by provincial governments, so the feds avoid like the plague any notion of doing business directly with City councils when it comes to handing out money. It must flow through the provinces.

The key, then, is to accelerate the signing of those agreements. I don’t know exactly how that can be achieved, but it’s essential in order for infrastructure funding to be put to its best, and quickest, use. City Hall may have a different view of the situation, but that’s the way I see it.

Housing, by the way, hasn’t been ignored in this budget but, on first reading, I would like to have seen more.

There’s also money for First Nations projects. As always, the question is, what kind of projects, and which ones specifically, but local Bands will surely be able to get some of the funding. And, I’m betting the Interior Science Innovation Council’s ears perked up at the $225 million one-year program for expanding broadband access in rural areas — it should fit in nicely with ISIC’s current program. (Maybe we’ll even see some benefit in Black Pines.)

TRU will be busy looking at what it needs to do to “repair, retrofit and expand” its facilities with the $2 billion set aside from that. And maybe some of the Trans Canada Highway money will make its way into the Interior of B.C.

There are a lot of features to look at on this shiny new car. Question is how long it will take to kick the tires so we can take it for a drive around the block.

STV: The good, the bad, the pro and the con

In addition to picking our new B.C. government in May, we’ll be asked if we want to change the way we vote. The Single Transferrable Vote is on the ballot again, and British Columbians will have to try to figure it out, then decide if they want it to replace the system we have.

As a director of the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce, I was asked by the board to prepare a report outlining how the STV works, and the pros and cons being debated.

What follows is the thrust of that report, which doesn’t include a recommended position for or against. At half a dozen pages, it may seem long but, believe me, this is an issue that could take up many volumes.

I offer it here for the information of anyone who is trying to figure out whether or not to support the change to STV. The chamber is working on a public information session and debate as we get closer to the election.

HISTORY AND USAGE

Variations of the STV are used in elections for various levels of government in several countries. Ireland and Malta use it for national elections, while Tasmania, North Ireland and Australia use it for electing some other levels of government. Opponents say Ireland and Malta, the only countries to use STV for electing national legislatures, represent only .1 per cent of the world’s population, while the First Past The Post system is used in 67 countries with 45 per cent of the population living in democratic countries.

In 2004, Premier Gordon Campbell established the Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform, with a mandate to examine the current First Past The Post voting system to either reconfirm it or recommend an alternative. The Assembly, which totalled 160 members, conducted 50 public hearings and received 1,603 written submissions. The result was the release in December 2004 of the Assembly’s report, Making Every Vote Count, which recommended a variation of the STV it called BC-STV. In the general election of May 17, 2005, a referendum narrowly defeated the proposal (it received 57.7 per cent support but required 60 per cent to succeed).

As a result of the closeness of the vote, the government decided to hold a second vote on the issue in the May 12, 2009 general provincial election. Premier Campbell has committed to implement the BC-STV for the following election if it achieves the 60 per cent threshold of valid votes cast, and if 60 per cent of all constituencies vote in favour by simple majority.

Blackberry manners a matter of culture

I’ve been spending some quality time today with the instruction manual for my new Blackberry. I don’t understand a word of it.

Apparently, this Blackberry can do amazing things. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never read a cellphone manual I could understand. The very helpful Rogers guy gave me a whirlwind three-minute Blackberry course Friday night when I acquired this little wizard of a machine, but neither of us believed for a minute I’d remember anything he showed me.

Why get one, then? Well, I had a Palm when I was in City Hall — in those days every minute of the day was scheduled. When I left, I figured I wouldn’t need any such device, so I reverted to a regular cellphone. I enjoy the comparative freedom of being my own boss, but there are times I’ve missed being connected, electronically speaking.

So when I lost my cell on the way  to emceeing a press conference last week, I thought I may as well get a more sophisticated device as a replacement.

The big thing about this is that when I enter a committee meeting now, I’ll fit right in with the rest of them who sit there at the table fooling with their Blackberries through the entire meeting. Blackberry etiquette is cultural. In Canada, it’s considered normal to do this, but completely rude to answer a call on your cell.

When Chinese delegations visit, they frequently stop in the middle of a conversation to answer a cellphone call. In their culture, this is considered perfectly alright. Though it’s the height of rudeness in Canada, being Canadians, we politely put up with it. We tend to try to go by other people’s rules, assuming they’re better than ours.

When I was signing my life away, and those of my wife and children, to a new cellphone contract Friday night so I could have my very own Blackberry, Bob Price of Radio NL happened to walk by the store. Seeing me inside, he stopped in for a chat. As it happens, Bob doesn’t have a cellphone of any kind.

Poor guy. He says he gets along happily without it, but you can’t always believe those radio guys. I’ll bet he feels completely out of place at a meeting.

A tale of two mayors and why open government matters

For publication in The Kamloops Daily News, Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009

This is a new kind of mayor we have.

If Terry Lake was hip hop, Peter Milobar is elevator music. Lake, track shoes; Milobar, comfy slippers. Testosterone vs. Valium. 

Lake used to voice message his phone daily with who he was, where he was, why he couldn’t come to the phone at this particular moment, and a peppy assurance he’d get back to you ASAP. Milobar is a “Hullo, leave a message” kind of guy.

One style vs. the other is not right or wrong, good or bad, it just is. While Lake was complicated and edgy, Milobar is what you see is what you get. He is, in other words, calm, cool and collected, comfortable and reliable. 

Not quite unflappable, but darn close.

So when the new mayor accuses a newspaper editor of having a mental illness, specifically of being neurotic and of “having a conspiracy theory in your head all the time,” you know he’s feeling peevish about the line of questioning.

The subject was the closed-door two-day strategic planning session council held last weekend and the question was how the mayor could possibly justify planning the future of the city in secret. 

The mayor knew the call would be coming so he was ready for me, but at the end of the conversation we hadn’t convinced each other of anything.

“There was nothing earth-shattering,” he said, noting that council members feel more comfortable tossing around ideas — some of which might sound pretty dumb — without press and public there to hear them.

“I don’t see the harm in it,” he added. Besides which, all of the stuff will be discussed again at a public workshop, and, anyway, nobody should have been surprised because council voted unanimously to hold the session in camera.

That’s technically true but it’s interesting that a number of councillors had no idea that’s what they were doing.

“No, we didn’t vote on it,” one councillor told me. “It was a directive from the mayor.”

“We really didn’t have a vote as to whether it would be in camera or not,” another councillor told me.

But yes they did. It worked this way. Chief administrative officer Randy Diehl asked Milobar if he wanted the strategic planning exercise to be open, or closed. Milobar wanted it closed.

Well, you can’t hold a meeting of council in secret unless there are specific and approved reasons, and unless council votes in favour of doing so. 

So, at the regular meeting of Tuesday, Jan. 13, a resolution was put on the council agenda to authorize putting the meeting in camera. But get a load of the wording:

Recommendation to schedule an in-camera meeting “2009 January 16 and 17 under Section 90 (1)(l) (municipal objectives, measures and progress reports for the purposes of preparing an annual report).”

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t exactly say to me, “let’s hold a secret meeting to figure out what we’re going to do in this city for the next three years.”

A few years ago, the provincial government made amendments to the Local Government Act/Community Charter to put a lid on a growing tendency of City councils to hold closed meetings on everything under the sun.

Under the new rule, any in-camera meeting had to be approved by council and it had to be about confidential land, labour or legal matters.

A couple of years later, the geniuses in Victoria decided strategic planning meetings should be added to the exemptions (that’s where section 90-1l comes in).

Anyway, on Jan. 13, council obediently raised their hands to approve the motion. Those who had no idea what it really meant didn’t ask, and nobody told them.

“I just don’t think anyone picked up on that,” one veteran councillor explained.

When I pointed this out to Milobar, his answer basically was that he couldn’t help that and “we weren’t hiding it.”

A neurotic conspiracy theorist might think the whole thing was an intentional gambit to keep council in the dark and slide it through, but not me. It was, in all likelihood, a case of the mayor either thinking it not important or simply assuming everybody should know what was going on. 

So, they all hived off to TRU for a couple of days with a facilitator brought in from Vancouver, flip charts, muffins and coloured markers, and a dinner of vegetarian lasagna, roast beef and custard dessert (the latter described by one participant as “awful”).

Attitudes toward the secrecy issue vary from one councillor to another.

“I had a concern,” said Denis Walsh, but added he was assured it was all a good idea. He’d like to see a process in which the public can have input before the council ever sits down to do its strategic plan.

“I felt awkward about it,” admitted Pat Wallace, but said Milobar thought it was necessary.

“That’s a good question,” responded Marg Spina when asked about the necessity for closing the meeting. “My preference is for as open a forum as possible.”

Nancy Bepple, though, was fine with it, though she pointed out, “I’m so new on council.”

And John O’Fee, who has been to more strategic planning sessions than he likely wishes to count: “I think the first one, with a new council, benefits from being held outside of the all-seeing media eye.”

The rationale for excluding the public seems to come down to a few basics: we didn’t want to look stupid, nothing earth shattering was discussed, we wanted to build a team, we didn’t want any misunderstanding about what our intentions are.

To which I say, if you don’t want to look stupid, don’t go into politics. If nothing earth-shattering was discussed, there was clearly no reason not to open the meeting. If you want to build a team, there are much better ways of doing it. If you don’t want to be misunderstood, the more transparent you are the better.

Back to the Lake-Milobar comparison, they do have something in common. 

“I’m comfortable with the business we do in-camera,” Lake once said in response to questions about why something as basic as paying the legal costs of a member of council wasn’t done in open meeting. (He also preferred having budget meetings in camera.)

I once described Milobar as a young Cliff Branchflower. It was a compliment, but as it happens Branchflower presided over one of the most secretive councils in the city’s history.

It’s not even the end of January and Milobar has now held two important strategy sessions behind closed doors, the other one being with businesses on the issue of the local economy.

In my declining years, I suppose, I will become one of those cranky old farts who writes endless letters to the editor and stands up at public meetings and harangues City council about everything it’s doing wrong.

“Don’t worry about him,” the council veterans will reassure the rookies. “He’s just a neurotic old conspiracy theorist. We’re waiting for him to die.”

I will always believe, though, that accountability and transparency in government not only must be real, but must be seen to be real.

Closed government is easy; open government is difficult. I’ll never stop hoping politicians will take the less easy road.

Nothing personal, Mayor Milobar

I’ve just finished polishing up my weekly column for tomorrow’s edition of The Daily News; I’ll also post it to this blog. I’ve tentatively headlined it A Tale of Two Mayors And Why Open Government Is Important.

In the column, I criticize Mayor Peter Milobar for his handling of an in-camera City council strategic planning session last weekend. I just know somebody out there is gonna moan, “Aw, geez, there he goes again. Will a politician ever do anything right in his opinion?”

So let me say this about that. I like Peter Milobar a lot. We did a lot of work together on the Tournament Capital project. In fact, we laid the ceremonial first brick together at the Tournament Capital Centre when construction got underway. We travelled to Ottawa together looking for federal money for Kamloops. We’ve always gotten along.

So, I think he will make a good mayor, overall, and I don’t intend to spend column after column taking him to pieces. Indeed, I’m looking forward to a bit of a reprieve, just as I’m more than happy to have a Member of Parliament who doesn’t make me tear my hair out week after week.

Some people say I was too harsh on Terry Lake. I had nothing against him, either. He was a good councillor and a lacklustre mayor. He had good style and less substance. His record, when dissected, was hardly outstanding. During the three years of his term, I found myself consciously avoiding writing about him at times because it would have been negative.

Betty Hinton was, in my view, one of the worst MPs I’ve ever seen. Not even Lake could get along with her. I wrote about her screwups frequently, but sometimes I purposely chose other topics, just as I did with Lake.

Commenting on politics and politicians is what I do. I confess to a certain delight in holding politicians to account but, for the record, politicians do many good things. For close to 40 years I’ve been writing about politics and politicians in Kamloops, since long before I served two terms as the mayor of this city.

Writing about them now has nothing to do with the fact I was mayor, except that the experience did provide me with some added insight into politics. I don’t believe that, simply because a mayor does something differently than I did or would, it must be wrong.

I do, though, hold to the same principles that were the very reason I went into politics for a time. One of those principles is transparency in government. Peter Milobar isn’t making the grade so far, so I’m going to write about it.

When he does good stuff, I’ll write about that, too.

From Peter Milobar 2009/01/23 at 6:52pm: Haven’t seen the editorial yet Mel, but no problem. As is the case more often than not in the political world, people have a different way of doing things. Given that you campaigned on open government almost ten years ago now, I would have been surprised had you not had a comment to make about our planning meeting. I’m sure over the next three years, there will be other viewpoints that we will have to agree to disagree on.

A day of strange emotions

I’m wrestling with why I feel a sense of exhilaration on the day an American president is sworn in, when I have felt no such emotion when a new prime minister takes office in Ottawa.

Jealousy is certainly one of the emotions Canadians are feeling today, wishing we could feel one hundredth the excitement over our government that Americans are experiencing about theirs.

As I’ve previously written, Barack Obama is bound to disappoint, because he can’t possibly live up to expectations. For now, though, he embodies the hope that we’ve reached a turning point. In that sense, he’s simply a poster boy for national and international hopes that we can do better.

We’ve been discussing Obama in the newsroom today and piecing together thoughts on our editorial for tomorrow’s Daily News. There seems to be some consensus that Obama’s much-anticipated speech was a bit anti-climactic.

I think my contribution to the editorial might be that his speech was less about catchy one-liners than trying to capture a sense of that hope for change. It was a little bit FDR, a little bit JFK, and a little bit Martin Luther King. Yet there was no single line in this speech that will be remembered. There was no “We have nothing to fear. . . .,” no “Ask not what your country can do for you. . . .,” no “I have a dream.”

Maybe I’m entirely wrong about what he can do. Years from now, we won’t remember much about Barack Obama’s speech, perhaps surprising given his much-vaunted gift for oratory. Maybe, though, we’ll remember something more important — that his election ushered in a new era of peace and prosperity. Maybe we’ll remember him for achieving what he promised not in his inaugural speech, but on the campaign trail — “Yes we can.”

Mel on vacation for a few days

Apologies for lack of activity here. I’m vacationing at home until next week. Working on the next chapter of the City Hall series. Mel.