Patrick Johnstone

And it is a beautiful building. An integrated and connected aquatic, fitness and community complex, physically and demographically accessible to all, and a new social hub and community destinatio...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/04/t%C9%99m%C9%99sew%CC%93tx%CA%B7.html

We had a long meeting this week, but it is a busy time in the City, so nothing to surprising there. We started with a somewhat uncommon thing, the Parcel Tax Roll: Parcel Tax Roll Review Panel: C...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/04/council-april-22-2024.html

Every week or so I put out a newsletter to subscribers. Usually Wednesday. It’s generally shorter-form than my posts here, provides updates on what I’ve been up to, with occasional opinion an...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/04/this-happened-2.html

As a follow-up to my Council report from last week, there were two items I promised to circle back to, like how I circled back to the preposition at the end of that sentence. English teachers wil...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/04/mixing-business.html

Back at it after Spring Break and Easter and all of those things, we had a full agenda on Monday, but got through it pretty quickly, partly because we got through this many things On Consent: Act...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/04/council-april-8-2024.html

The 2024-2028 5 year Financial Plan was formally adopted by Council on March 11. This is the last step of the annual budget process for Council, though Staff have a lot of work to do yet in submi...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/03/budget-2024-enhancements.html

We had a pretty light agenda on Monday, and even with a good collection of public delegations we had a fairly short night by recent standards. Not that it wasn’t packed with quality content! We...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/03/council-march-11-2024.html

The fun part of the annual budget is the capital budget, because this is the part that pays for the things that we need to have a functional and fun city. Like the rest of the budget, our Capital...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/03/budget-2024-capital-plan.html

This is the second in a series of posts about the 2024 Budget. I wrote recently about the general operating fund, and now am diving in to the utility funds. The City of New Westminster has four u...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/03/budget-2024-utilities.html

There is a principle known as Brandolini’s Law. I’m trying to run a family program here, so look it up to understand how it applies to what I am about to write about. I was pointed to some me...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/03/brand-o-lini.html

It’s Budget time. The City is currently approving its annual budget, which is more accurately and bureaucratically called the 2024-2028 Five Year Financial Plan Bylaw. There is a lot that goes ...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/03/budget-2024-general-operations.html

We got a lot of work done at Council on Monday night, with a fairly long agenda, starting with an increasingly unusual Public Hearing: Heritage Revitalization Agreement Bylaw No. 8425, 2024 and H...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/02/council-feb-23-2024.html

The Monday meeting was an eventful one, and I have already written some initial thoughts about that, and have more thinking and work to do. But before that all, we did get through our full Agenda...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/02/council-feb-5-2024.html

We had a challenging meeting on Monday. I am still a little unsettled by what occurred, and as the person required to chair meetings, I am still uncertain about how we could have managed the situ...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/02/humility-and-power.html

We were back to a full agenda in our January 22nd meeting, so let’s get right into it with a few Information Reports that were pulled for discussion: Member Selection for the Community Advisory...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/01/council-jan-22-2024.html

Since I wasn’t there, and I still feel compelled to write a report about it as some sort of Completest thing, I am going to take a slightly different approach. I will talk a bit more about the ...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/01/council-jan-8-2024.html

I have written a couple of posts now on New Westminster’s presence at COP28, and the experience of the Local Climate Action Summit. I’m going to try to wrap up this series pulling highlights ...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2024/01/cop28-part-3.html

In this post I am going to write about the role of Local Governments at the event, and detail the Local Climate Action Summit that opened the conference.

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2023/12/cop28-part-2.html

this quick report-out has turned into a series of blog posts about the COP28 experience: The inspiring part (local governments kicking ass!), the less inspiring (national governments writ large),...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2023/12/cop28-part-1.html

We had a full Council day on Monday, the last meeting of 2023. It included daytime workshops where among other things we worked through some details of the operational budget (including our first...

https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2023/12/council-dec-11-2023.html