Since I wrote my piece about last Saturday’s Grandview-Woodland Community Plan meeting I have received several more eye-witness accounts of the event — and none of them make it sound any better.
One wrote that “we also had a table that seemed to be stacked in favour of the city’s density agenda, mainly because like the other tables we were saddled with a pro-density city employee as our leader and our spokesperson.” Another wrote to me, talking about this being just another valueless “sticky note” exercise, and a third wrote describing the “farcical exercise.”
I was also sent the “Backgrounder” circulated both before and at the meeting. My correspondent pointed out that the City staff couldn’t even get the names of the streets right!
The devil is in the details, they say. This wasn’t a junior high school show-and-tell class where you might expect an error or two; this was a presentation by our well-paid and well-equipped City Planning staff. Do foolish mistakes like this indicate a lack of care? You have to wonder.
Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 
Jak, in the time you have spent on this issue I was wondering if you had seen or heard of a process of citizen consultation that would serve as a model for an effective process for Vancouver?
Absolutely, at least three.
Back in the late 1970s we had what was called Local Area Planning, and this was how the 1980 GW Plan was created. A more formalized process, called City Plan (followed up by Community Visions) took hold in the 1990s. Both of these were neighbourhood-up processes, and worked very well.
In 2014, the Coaltion of Vancouver Neighbourhoods published its Principles & Goals document which, in essence, updated City Plan and is a third consultation paradigm.. Every party — except Vision — endorsed this new paradigm during the recebt campaign.