Homeless in Abbotsford, BC

City Manager Gary Guthrie cites "lack of expertise."

That certainly explains the mismanagement of Abbotsford by Abbotsford City Hall and I certainly believe him. I am speaking of city manager Gary Guthrie’s statement about Abbotsford City Hall lacking expertise. Of course in this case he was speaking specifically to the contact with MHPM Project Managers on Plan A. Then there was the lack of “expertise” that led to the Spectrum contract and then there is… and then there is … . A little lack here and a little lack there and before long you are totally lacking in expertise.

The proposed construction projects and day-to-day operations of the proposed Arena are fairly simple operations to manage in comparison to the management required to meet the City of Abbotsford’s operational and business needs. Rather clearly explains why Abbotsford is so badly run, does it not?

Abbotsford City Hall will undoubtedly have an excuse, after all serving special interests, ignoring citizens, bad financial management and making excuses are demonstrated areas of major expertise. It is truly unfortunate that there is no demand in other municipalities for these skills, especially excuse making, otherwise Abbotsford would have a source of revenue that would render the casino/revenue debate moot once and for all.

Let us ignore, as did Mr. Guthrie, the fact that project delivery on time and within budget would, for most cities, be specified in and part of the project construction contract as Mr. Beck promised during the slick Plan A sales campaign. After all the process that led to the hiring of MHPM was so badly managed and executed that 3 of 4 contractors could not understand what it was Abbotsford City Hall wanted done. Defining the requirements of this type of management contract is small potatoes really, easy, simple and straight forward in comparison to the complexity of setting out what you want built when you refuse to be bothered drawing up architectural and engineering plans to present to the bidders. Leaving me shuddering at the potential for disaster inherent in the lack of competence just demonstrated by Abbotsford City Hall in clearly setting out – in even this relatively simple matter – what is required from the bidder.

More directly on this question of expertise, I know of at least two people in Abbotsford who are capable of managing these construction projects, available on a contract basis for considerably less that $524,250, who would be devoting full time to the project management. The idea of time devoted to actually managing the projects is important because, as anyone familiar with these types of management contracts would tell you, there are not likely a great number of hours available within this contract to be spent on actual management.

Of course hiring somebody locally to oversee project construction or running the proposed Arena would leave witnesses of what actually took place in Abbotsford and available to tell the citizens of Abbotsford what went or is going wrong. I tip my hat to Abbotsford City Hall’s brilliant posterior covering insurance policy with MHPM Inc which ensures them someone out of town to blame for the debacle Plan A holds promise to become. Leaving witnesses safely hidden away in Ottawa or the USA.

As I said, the City would have a fantastic source of revenue if only there was a need or demand in other municipalities for this kind of cover-you-posterior activity. Instead we are left with the $524,250 cost of posterior insurance for Abbotsford City Hall. But then what is another paltry $524,250 added into the $97,000, 000+ nightmare that is Plan A? After all, it is only taxpayer’s money, a few additional percentage points on the old tax bill.

New Page added

I would like to draw your attention to a page I have added to the site under the Sagacity link. I am using it to post longer (1500+ word) consideration of questions such as what do we mean when we say Homeless and how should Homeless be truely defined. The web address below will also take you to this page. Please - feedback to these ponderings is important so if you have some interesting thoughts please share.


http://arcanesagacity.blogspot.com/

Here we go again - Rush, Rush, Rush.

Does no one at Abbotsford City Hall understand the concept of careful consideration, thinking things through, acting with due deliberation and diligence? It would appear, based on reading the coverage in the local papers, that the question: is it rational, intelligent behaviour to go running around madly trying to get a bid for an ECHL team, a bid that should be a year or more in the making, done in a month?

Desperation is a very, very bad position to be bargaining from. And Abbotsford City Hall is well past desperate on this matter given the multimillion dollar mistake they made on Plan A already, in not having the common sense to secure provincial funds BEFORE taking it to the taxpayers. Now they face the looming possibility of the mirage of an ECHL team they sold the taxpayers as part of their snake-oil sales pitch, disappearing the way all mirages do when approached.

How many more dollars is Abbotsford City Hall’s desperation going to cost taxpayers? What is Abbotsford City Hall willing to pay to avoid being so clearly stuck with a white elephant of an arena? Given their demonstrated inability to admit misjudgement and accept responsibility for local taxpayers being stuck footing the entire bill for Plan A, one can only expect them to adopt an attitude of “cover our A**es”. I fear, based on their attitude and performance so far on Plan A, they will be willing to spend any amount of taxpayer’s money in order to hide from reality or acceptance of responsibility.

I have little doubt that with a willingness to throw any amount of money at this situation, you may well be able to find a black knight to ride to the rescue of Abbotsford City Hall and their white elephant. I say black knight because the bills for this team are likely to end up being paid by taxpayers.

Should Abbotsford City Hall find their black knight I think we can be sure of two things. The first is that Abbotsford City Hall will crank up the smoke machines and roll out the mirrors to once again sell a mirage to taxpayers. And two, that all the important financial arrangements and agreements that lead to a team in the city will be deemed sensitive and hidden from taxpayers as none of their business.

OK three things. The third being that should you decide you really want to know what was agreed to and pursue the truth trough “freedom of information legislation” the city will fight you, as they have and continue to do with those seeking full disclosure on the original finances for Plan A.

This behaviour has left taxpayers only one option in dealing with Abbotsford City Hall: caveat emptor – let the taxpayer beware.

Surreal Mind Voyaging

I want to share what may well rank as the most bizarrely weird and surreal occurrence to transpire in entirety of my current existence within this space/time continuum. I am just not sure that the English language, or any language with the possible exception of Navaho, has words capable of expressing the concepts and ideas needed to truly convey the strange eeriness of what took place among the neurons, bio-chemistry and pathways within my brain. I can but endeavour to give you a taste of what was happening in my head when:

Atomic explosions in my brain
Threatened me with being insane

I find the “Holiday Season” stressful and gloomy, so my focus in December was on surviving the Season. This year I navigated the shoals of the season with the most success I have had in decades, sailing through without encountering any real rough weather. I fell into the trap of congratulating myself on my solid mental health. As so often happens when I become smug about progress on the mental hygiene front the Universe rose up and smacked me back into reality.

So it was that a few days before the start of the New Year Mr. DEPRESSION came to visit. Now, over the last few years in my quest to continue on my path to recovery and steadily improving mental health I had endured and dealt with a few visits from his much smaller, younger brother Mr Depression. This visit was from the Big Bro’ - Mr. DEPRESSION himself, taking hold and dragging me down through the floor my medication usually puts on Depression plunging downward into a Hole of Calcutta pit of despair, where the old “floor” was now a ceiling appearing higher than the stars themselves.

Mr. Big D brought along his old friends, and my old acquaintances, anxiety, panic attack, obsessive/compulsive behaviours, agoraphobia, fear, anger, low self-esteem, old ways of thinking, destructive core beliefs, squirrel on a running-wheel run-a-way thinking et al. Up until this visit, while I may have been depressed, my head was full of “reasons” to be depressed courtesy of these travelling companions who filled my head with their ceaseless screaming chatter. So it was that I came to be facing the New Year with a head full of negative voices and depressed as *bleep*.

This time however I was not standing on the precipice unarmed, helpless and cowering before DEPRESSION and old acquaintances. Over the past months and years I have acquired a toolbox full of tools for maintaining and improving my mental health. Knowledge, understanding, cognitive therapy techniques, support group, Wellness Recovery Action Plan(ning) all permit me to be proactive in my own headspace.

So it was that the battle was joined! Living in the moment, paying careful attention to the thoughts in my mind, examining those thoughts as they entered my consciousness, examining underlying assumptions back to their supporting core beliefs, together with the many other tools in my mental toolbox let me deal with all my old acquaintances. Steadily whittling down these mental weeds until I and Mr. DEPRESSION were left alone, facing each other in the recesses of my mind.

Then things proceeded to get REALLY strange. DEPRESSION had always before been obscured by all the chatter, the static from every other thought and voice in my head. Suddenly I found myself in quiet solitude with DEPRESSION, no distractions, nothing to come between us, just me and DEPRESSION face-to-face. Mano a mano as it were. Un-really surreal. Uncanny. Bizarre. An idiosyncratic voyage to the lunatic fringe.

As I noted the English language fails to provide me with words or concepts sufficient to convey the timeless, twilight zone, alternate dimension feel that I found myself experiencing at this point in time.

I found myself in the calm of my centered mind, almost serene – just depressed as *bleep*, enveloped by the stygian darkness of my mental illness. A rational part of my mind was ticking over, monitoring and evaluating the FACTS, seeing no reason for being depressed yet aware that what was going on was DEPRESSION. Just being, serenely looking at a world of deepest BLACK. Strange does not, can not, begin to express just how other-worldly an experience it indeed was.

This other worldliness was compounded by the knowledge of depression, brain chemical imbalances and my own mental information processing. Totally aware of the reality of what was transpiring, literally a prisoner in my own mind, of my own brain chemistry, looking out at the world through my eyes – aware of the unseen and un-see-able bars on my cell.

I knew what was going on and KNEW all I could do was endure the journey, however long it would prove to be. Time and timing of the “visit” was a part of the unreality of the situation. One night I had gone to bed upbeat. Sometime during that night Mr. DEPRESSION had crawled into my head and I awoke depressed having no idea how long HE would stay. I just knew the length of the visit was beyond my control, that the duration was up to the alchemical processes of my brain.

Calmly wielding the tools needed to deal with attempted intrusions from my old acquaintances left me alone with DEPRESSION. Calm logical, rational, almost computer like awareness, Serenity and DEPRESSION all inhabited a common space between my ears. So for the next 2+ weeks it was just ME, the logical, rational observer portion of my mind and DEPRESSION dwelling together in the calm, serene center of my mind. With the logical, rational observer that resides in my mind keeping me informed of exactly what was going on.

Each day I forced myself from bed rather than giving into the urge to hibernate 20 hours a day. Choosing a few of tasks to perform each day in order to make myself leave my dark cave and venture out into the world of light and air because I knew it was necessary to Recovery. It was also part of my WRAP plan for when Mr. DEPRESSION came to play head games.

When I ran into people in the world I let friends and acquaintances know I was deeply depressed but dealing with it and to give me extra space. Others I warned that my depression made me prone to either flaying the skin from their bodies, verbally for the most part, or simply ripping their heads off. This served to cause them to also be careful of giving me the space I needed. In the past denial had caused many problems and stresses in dealing with people. In being up front I found myself with the space I needed to function with a minimum of added stress or problems. The truth shall set you free indeed.

So it went ME and DEPRESSION with the observer providing information and dispassionate commentary. There just are no words to truly express the strangeness of spending days, hours, minutes, seconds looking at a world that is deepest BLACK with a total awareness of why it was so BLACK. As time and awareness past it just grew more surreal, even weirder. It was this AWARENESS that made this such an ultra strange journey.

Then I woke one morning, looked around, and there was light in the world again. One night *click* and DEPRESSION was present, time passes and one night *click* and LIGHT was present. In between I had made a most bizarrely weird and surreal journey through the recesses of my own MIND.

MLA gold diggers.

So our MLA’s are once again trying to chow down deeper from the public trough. This time they have concocted a very clever scheme to cover their posteriors with the public. We now have a “independent” triumvirate appointed to apply whitewash to the MLA’s quest for salary increases.

Two points to keep in mind about this so-called independent review. The first is that they are chosen by the government, not through a random or “blind” selection process. I do not see anyone on the review that is known as being anti-raise to represent the “they are already overpaid” point of view. Why am I not surprised? Second, where is the ordinary citizen represented on this committee or is the salary issue “to complex” for them to understand.

Salary raises should be earned by accomplishment. Have you needed medical services lately? Health care system crisis; growing homelessness and poverty; people being squeezed out of homeownership due to astronomical prices; a growing crisis of affordable housing – people who even with full time employment who cannot afford housing; the list goes on and on. Address or better yet come up with innovative solutions to these issues THEN talk to me about deserving a pay raise.

I see nothing from ANY of our provincial politicians that suggests they deserve or are worthy of a pay raise.

If they find it to tough to live on their $83,000, perks and benefits let them do what many of those whose tax dollars pay their salary are forced to do when faced with needing extra money – get a second job. Wal-Mart, McDonalds are always looking for people which would both put them in up close and personal contact with the citizens and deliver to them a reminded/sharp lesson on real life for the non-privileged politician.

What is/who are the homeless?

We throw the term homeless around without stopping to think about exactly what the word homeless means. The way we view the homeless issue, the policies we design to deal with the issue and the effectiveness of these policies in reducing homelessness and its related social ills is directly affected by the definition of homeless. Defining homeless incorrectly will disguise the cause of these social ills resulting in misdiagnoses, with the result that your course of treatment or action will have no effect, may in fact worsen or perpetuate these ills.

Let’s frame this in terms of something we all have experience with: the common cold. Colds are viruses but many people run to their doctors demanding antibiotics to “cure” them in the mistaken belief antibiotics will cure a cold. The antibiotics have no effect on the cold, but as we have learned to our grief using antibiotics in this way has led to the development of super bacteria which many of our overused medications no longer affect.

If we look at the common cold as to what its true nature is, a virus, we know that frequent washing of hands and an awareness of how viruses spread is effective in combating the common cold. Similarly we need to define or see homeless in a way that reveals its true nature before we can begin to “cure” it.

Stop and consider for a moment: what is meant by homeless and of far more significance what should be meant by homeless. The definitions below are from Webster’s dictionary. Unfortunately for both the homeless, who remain homeless, and the taxpayers, whose money is wasted in ineffectual manners, politicians and policy makers focus on or use “sleep in the streets, parks, etc.”

Homeless: adj. having no home; without a permanent place of residence.

**the homeless: those typically poor or sometimes mentally ill people who are unable to maintain a place to live and therefore often may sleep in the streets, parks, etc.

The result of this is programs and actions such as the current focus on outreach programs designed to get the homeless into housing. Get them a place to stay and you have success right? Wrong. Placing somebody into housing when they are “unable to maintain a place to live” is a pointless exercise. It gives the appearance of doing something and taking action but accomplishes nothing. The only real things this type of approach, getting someone into housing for a month or two before the true nature of their illness causes them to lose their temporary housing, achieves is to waste the resources expended while allowing the homeless to multiply.

The important parts or concepts in the above definitions are “without a permanent place of residence” and “unable to maintain a place to live”.

The first portion “without a permanent place of residence” allows us to better see and appreciate the scope and the progress of this social ill. In many ways the visibly homeless are the tip of an iceberg of homeless. With a fluid, moving population that is motivated to remain out-of-sight and out-of-mind of the authorities it is impossible to count this population with any accuracy. This is reflected in the recent assertions that the actual number of those without shelter is 4 – 5 times the “official” numbers. Before we get bogged down in a fruitless, since you will never be able to count the homeless accurately enough to determine the actual number of “outdoors” homeless, arguments let us consider an important and very large group most fail to consider in their definition of homeless.

This group would consist of those with a place of residence but whose place of residence is without permanence. There are several residential treatment facilities in the Abbotsford, BC area. Among these clients some will be returning to family, jobs, homes etc. However a significant portion of these people have no permanent place of residence to return to. Are they not effectively homeless? Once they are out of treatment they are on their own and on the streets.

Think about the growing population of those who have lost their jobs, cannot afford their rent and will in the near future be evicted. Or those who cannot afford to pay their debts will soon face foreclosure and being on the streets. Do not forget those with mental health or addictions issues that will soon see them on the street. Consider the plight of the working poor who even though employed full time cannot afford the sky-high cost of housing in the Lower Mainland. Are not all these groups of people effectively homeless?

The object of this thinking exercise is not to run up the homeless count as high as possible. Rather it is to frame the true extent of the problem facing us. The Homeless population is growing and in looking at homeless in its most broad terms we can see the potential for a tidal wave of homeless pouring onto the streets, swamping the system with the potential for crime, violence and an escalating crisis.

This looming social crisis with its inherent possibility of disaster demands that we take effective action to begin to reduce the homeless population. We can no longer afford the practice of continuing to repeat, over and over, policies and programs that have demonstrated they do not work in the hope that by some miracle they will work THIS TIME. That is an insane way to behave and while this is normal government behaviour we can no longer, as a society, allow government to practice this insanity. The cost, the potential for disastrous consequences, has become too high.

We need to look to and consider the second point that flows out of the definitions for direction in creating an approach and programs to avoid the potential disaster. The second “unable to maintain a place to live” points us at what it is, the virus as it were, that we need to focus our efforts to affect a “cure” on. Sticking them into housing over and over and over again will accomplish nothing unless we address what it is that renders them “unable to maintain a place to live”.

Our programs must therefore be designed to allow the homeless to make the changes they need to make in themselves in order to be able to maintain their housing on a permanent basis. We know that this population has problems and issues that render them “unable to maintain a place to live” such as addictions, mental health challenges, behaviour problems, personal issues etc. We need to acknowledge that these are not easy difficulties to deal with and frame our terms of reference in a realistic manner.

The most important, overriding feature is the need for a realistic view of the time and support that is required to accomplish what must be done in order for the homeless to bring about the personal changes they need to make in order that they will be able to “maintain a place to live”. Only once they are capable of functioning in a manner permitting them to have a home on a permanent basis will they cease to be homeless.

My personal experience with mental illness and pursuing mental health has taught me just how much time, effort and support is required in this change/journey. Unless we begin to design our programs to address the homeless based on the reality of the critical need to invest time and support to bring about the needed personal changes the numbers of homeless will only continue to grow and accelerate until they spiral out of control.

We like to claim to be an intelligent species. If we wish to remain masters of our own fate on issues such as the homeless we need to stop business as usual and start acting in an intelligent manner on this and other pressing social, environmental and economic issues.

Banned and Forbidden in Abbotsford.

Free Speech, citizen’s right to access information in city records and the right to hear or express dissenting views seem to have been added to the long list of things, such as fun, forbidden in Abbotsford.

Apparently City Hall and Council are continuing their assault on these rights. It looks as though the Post’s behaving like a newspaper rather than a cheering section for the City has upset city hall and city politicos. Once upon a time not long ago those unfortunate souls who did not receive the Post delivered to their homes could drop by some of Abbotsford’s city facilities and pickup their copy of the Post. Nevermore.

The Post it seems has become publication non grata on city property. Their crimes: not unquestioningly accepting decrees for city hall or council as from on high; daring to ask questions about city claims; to present both sides of questions and the argument; to - GASP! – disagree in print with city positions. These crimes may also serve to explain the appearance and long stay of a stop work order on the new home of the Post.

It was objectionable enough when the city trampled on the free speech rights of those who disagreed with them during their plan A high pressure sales campaign. It was and is worse that the city continues to deny citizens access to information contained within city records. But city behaviour towards the Post is behaviour well beyond acceptable.

It is time city staff and council respect citizen’s rights: of speech and access to all information concerning the way the city conducts business. They need either to begin respecting the citizens of Abbotsford and their rights or resign.