The Record

Voters approved borrowing up to $168.9 million for a new Crystal Pool in a February 2025 referendum. By 2026, the total project cost — including reserves and financing — reached $209.2 million, with completion not expected until 2030.

• Coun. Dave Thompson said in March 2025 he would vote against any further increase to the $209.2 million cap; Coun. Stephen Hammond moved to formally cap the budget at that figure.
• During the 2026 budget crunch, council voted to protect Crystal Pool's $1.23-million annual debt payment from cuts even while trimming other services, calling it non-negotiable.
• Mayor Alto has said she regrets that an earlier council didn't act in 2017, when a replacement could reportedly have been built for about a third of today's cost — notably, Alto herself was a sitting councillor at that time, having served on council continuously from 2010 until becoming mayor in 2022.

Ahead of the February 8, 2025 referendum, the City of Victoria spent $45,000 of taxpayer money on a Crystal Pool awareness campaign — bus shelter ads, a half-page Times Colonist ad, newsletter placements and information sessions. Two councillors and the "No" campaign argued the materials promoted the project rather than neutrally informing voters.

• Bus shelter ads and a half-page Times Colonist ad (Dec. 29, 2024) used the language "a more accessible, sustainable, modern, more inclusive, bigger Crystal Pool and Wellness Centre" — descriptors Coun. Hammond argued presented only benefits, with no information on costs or financial risks of a Yes vote.
• Hammond brought a motion to halt the advertising and require both Yes and No reasoning in remaining sessions. It was defeated. Caradonna called it "one of the worst motions" he had seen, saying it implied staff had not done their job properly. Dell said changing course would cause "absolute chaos."
• Coun. Gardiner, who supported the pool project, nevertheless said she had hoped the city's presentation would be neutral so as "not to influence public opinion" — and noted that changed when councillors joined community groups openly advocating for Yes.
• The "No" campaign's organizer said it faced an uphill battle fighting against both a Yes campaign and what he considered biased city advertising, with no equivalent city-funded platform for the opposing case.
• All of council had previously voted unanimously to approve the communications language — meaning those who later raised bias concerns had agreed to the wording months earlier.

Victoria's property taxes rose 32% from 2023 to 2026, confirmed by the city's own CFO. The annual approved increases were 6.15% (2023), 7.93% (2024), 6.99% (2025) and 7.28% (2026). City spending grew from $298M to $389M over the same period.

• Every draft budget opened at double digits before cuts — 2025 started at 12.17%, 2026 at 13.31%. The final headline rate is always the result of cuts from an inflated opening figure, not a genuine starting point.
• Some homeowners saw far more than 7.28% in 2026 once school taxes and other levies were added. One Times Colonist commentary put the total at 15.28% — the largest in 46 years.
• A $38.5M savings gap remains. To hit a stated 4% annual target through 2030, city staff say council still needs to find that amount in structural savings — the 2026 cuts did not solve it. See Case 16.
• Coun. Gardiner called the 2026 budget an "election-year budget" that "will not fool" taxpayers, noting reserve cuts deferred costs rather than eliminated them.

The 900-block has been an entrenched street encampment and open drug-use site for years, and remains one under this council. Enforcement and rehabilitation spending tied to the block and the wider downtown/Pandora corridor totals roughly $15 million combined so far.

• In December 2024, the city said a plan to prohibit daytime sheltering and step up enforcement on Pandora would cost $4.7 million, potentially adding 3 percentage points to the 2025 tax increase.
• In 2025, council reallocated $10.35 million from reserves toward downtown/Pandora street-crime response, on top of the enforcement costs above.
• In April 2025, councillors Krista Loughton and Dave Thompson brought a motion for a $15/hour "stipend" pilot paying unhoused residents to clean the block, and a locking dumpster, at a cost of $5,400 for a 3-month trial.
• In July 2025, council reallocated $10.35 million from existing budget lines — including $2.5M stripped from the cancelled Centennial Square revitalization — as the first phase of a 99-point Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan. The breakdown: $3.75M to rebuild the 900-block of Pandora, $4.86M for Pandora and Princess avenue repairs, $1.95M for new emergency shelter spaces, $1.9M for 12 new bylaw officers, $624K for non-profit outreach, and $390K for additional street cleaning. Mayor Alto said publicly: "In six months you'll see a difference."
• Ten months later, by May 2026, Douglas Magazine reported downtown businesses still faced the same street disorder daily, calling the promised change "unrealized." Measurable outcomes from the plan as of March 2026 were modest: six Indigenous people relocated or returned home, six others housed by Pacifica Housing, a few youth connected to services — small numbers against an entrenched population that the city itself acknowledges it cannot precisely count.
• In June 2026, a police-assisted "annual maintenance day" cleanup of the block drew criticism from outreach workers and residents as a disguised displacement effort — while the city says the same cleanups are about basic sanitation and safety.
• As of early 2026, reporting found the block still has "little change" despite a stated end-of-year deadline for improvement, and a July 2024 incident in which a paramedic responding to a medical call there was attacked underscored how unresolved conditions remain.

In January 2024, the city paid $11 million from its parks land reserve for two adjoining properties at 1703 and 1725–1745 Blanshard Street — the former Romeo's Restaurant and Urbana Kitchens sites, 25,000 sq. ft. combined — with the stated purpose of building a new downtown park wrapping around the Philippine Bayanihan Community Centre. Mayor Alto called it "a strategic investment in our community" at the time.

• By December 2025, the city confirmed the former Romeo's building would instead be leased out to a new restaurant tenant for five years, until May 2031, rather than be cleared for parkland.
• The lease rate is $122,979 per year. Against the $11-million purchase price of the combined property, that works out to roughly a 1.1% annual gross return — and that lease covers only one of the two buildings the city bought, not the full site.
• Park design work is now not expected to start until 2028–2030, with construction "currently scheduled" for mid-2031 — four years after the purchase's original park announcement, and explicitly described by the city as still "pending future approval from council," meaning it isn't locked in even now.
• Coun. Matt Dell defended the delay as a "long game," saying the city needs to think about "what things will look like 50 years from now" rather than rush a park.
• City staff said the delay is also due to capacity: the team that would plan the park is currently focused on the $209.2-million Crystal Pool project.

In 2024, council approved spending $3.95 million from the city's Land Sale Reserve to buy the View Street building housing Hermann's Jazz Club and View Street Social, about $691,000 above its assessed value, to "preserve" the live-music venue. Two years later, the operator nearly went under — but a community fundraising campaign saved it, and as of June 2026 the venue is closed for renovations rather than permanently shut.

• Mayor Alto called the 2024 purchase a demonstration of council's commitment to music spaces under its strategic plan.
• In March 2026, operator Arts on View Society announced it would permanently close both venues by April 30, 2026, citing inherited debt (including a significant outstanding GST liability) and structural financial problems from previous leadership — this despite the city owning the building.
• Coun. Matt Dell publicly committed the city to finding a new operator if Arts on View folded, and within days the society itself launched a $450,000 pledge-model fundraising campaign to pay down debt and repair the long-neglected building instead of shutting down.
• The campaign hit its $450,000 goal within about a month, and pledges were then collected.
• As of June 2026, Arts on View says the inherited debts are paid off and the venues are undergoing a more extensive renovation than originally expected, after years of deferred maintenance; no reopening date had been confirmed at last check.

In June 2024, the city announced a partnership with SOLID Outreach Society to open a homeless-services "access hub" at 2155 Dowler Place, in the North Park neighbourhood, meant to serve up to 300 unhoused people a day. The city committed $300,000 to help SOLID buy the property plus up to $1.8 million in first-year operating funding — roughly $2.1 million in year-one city funding for a facility neighbours learned about only after the decision was made.

• Residents said they had no consultation before the announcement, and pushed back hard on a facility they feared would function like a supervised consumption site, in a residential neighbourhood.
• Mayor Alto told CHEK News in June 2024 the facility was "absolutely not" an overdose-prevention site. A confidential draft proposal she authored, later released through a Freedom of Information request, described a considerably more expansive "new vision" for the site than what was publicly announced at the time.
• The site that ultimately opened in 2025 operates as a drug-free recovery site rather than the more intensive model floated in that earlier draft — but the lack of upfront consultation with the neighbourhood, and the gap between the private planning document and the public description, remain distinct governance issues on their own.
• A packed town hall of well over 200 North Park residents in September 2024 confronted Mayor Alto directly. When challenged on the lack of consultation, Alto told the room the city is not required to run a consultation process for this type of project, and added that had one been held, no one in any area of Victoria would have supported it — a candid admission that the outcome, not the process, drove the decision.
• In June 2025, following a CHEK News FOI story revealing the gap between her draft vision and the public announcement, Mayor Alto issued a formal written apology: "I recognize that there has been confusion and frustration regarding the process that established the access hub at Dowler Place, and I acknowledge that residents haven't had a full or accurate picture of the project. I apologize for that confusion, and acknowledge the frustration that many residents have expressed. While Council approved the Dowler project, as Mayor, I take responsibility for a process that could have been better."

Council spent years and money planning a revitalization of Centennial Square before scrapping the project outright in December 2025. By the time it was cancelled, the city had already spent $750,000 hiring design firm DIALOG to develop concepts — money that produced only renderings, not a rebuilt square.

• The project had already been trimmed from its original $12.1-million budget to $9.6 million, after council cut $2.5 million in July 2025 to help fund the Community Safety and Wellbeing plan instead.
• On December 4, 2025, council voted 8–1 (only Coun. Jeremy Caradonna opposed) to halt the project indefinitely, citing the city's "growing debt costs" and the need to prioritize public safety spending.
• Cancelling the project meant returning $1.1 million in federal Federation of Canadian Municipalities grants that had been earmarked for the work.
• Mayor Alto called the final design "attractive and compelling" but said it wasn't affordable and "not ready to advance at this time."
• The project, first proposed in 2016 and adopted by council in 2018, is now shelved for a future council to pick up — with the sequoia tree and fountain monoliths at its centre still unresolved after nearly a decade of planning. Both Mayor Alto (a councillor since 2010) and Coun. Chris Coleman (a councillor from 1986–2018, and again from 2022) were sitting members of the council that adopted the project in 2018, so its cancellation isn't purely a story about undoing a stranger's decision.

Since 2022, the city has run a free, staffed "coat check" service at Centennial Square where cyclists can leave their bikes in a secured, covered area rather than lock them on the street. The stated purpose, per then-mayor Lisa Helps at launch, was to offer "peace of mind" and "deter bike theft" downtown. What began as a one-off, federally-funded pilot has become a permanent, fully tax-funded city service — now a recurring $448,000/year cost.

• 2022 (launch, 6 months): $146,000, paid from a $500,000 federal Canada Community Building Fund grant the city had set aside for secure bike-parking projects.
• 2023 (full year): $260,000, which used up the last of that federal grant — after this, the city itself confirmed "future funding uncertain."
• 2024: absorbed into the city's own property-tax-funded operating budget for the first time; the draft budget allocated 0.18 percentage points of that year's tax increase to it, working out to about $5/year per household.
• 2026: with council staff proposing to cut costs by handing the service to the Capital Regional District, council instead voted to fully protect its $448,000 annual budget from cuts, the same budget round in which hanging baskets were cut in half.

On March 14, 2024, a motion to raise councillor pay by 25% — from $52,420 to $65,525 — was brought forward as a same-day addition, not listed on the public agenda in advance, and passed 5–3. It was co-sponsored by Couns. Jeremy Caradonna and Matt Dell. Fully enacted, it would have added roughly $105,000/year in payroll costs — it was paused within weeks after public backlash, before taking effect, but a version of it was adopted through a more formal process five months later.

• In favour: councillors Jeremy Caradonna and Matt Dell (who co-sponsored it), Dave Thompson, Krista Loughton, and Susan Kim. Opposed: Mayor Alto, Coun. Marg Gardiner and Coun. Stephen Hammond. Coun. Chris Coleman was absent.
• Mayor Alto said it is "never appropriate" for any body to vote itself a raise and argued any increase should wait for the next council; her proposed delay was voted down.
• After three weeks of public backlash and Times Colonist op-eds, council voted unanimously on April 4, 2024 to pause the raise and hand the decision to an independent three-person task force instead.
• That task force reported back in July 2024, recommending a smaller structural change (councillor pay set at 45% of the mayor's salary, up from 40%) — but delayed until after the 2026 election — plus an immediate retroactive cost-of-living bump the city had skipped in 2021.
• In September 2024, council adopted the task force's recommendations by a 6–3 vote. This time, Coun. Coleman was present and voted in favour; only Hammond, Gardiner and Alto voted against.
• In November 2025, Gardiner brought a motion to roll back part of that bylaw — capping the mayor's pay to inflation-only increases and ending acting-mayor payments — with Coleman and Hammond in support. Both parts of the motion were defeated, 6–3 and 7–2.

The city had planned a paid, three-day "Spark and Shift" conference on its Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan for January 18–21, 2026. By December 3, 2025, only 22 tickets had sold, so the city scrapped the paid model and instead hosted a free, invite-only, one-day forum at the Victoria Conference Centre on January 21, 2026 — fully funded by taxpayers, at just under $50,000.

• The event cost included $24,000 paid to a contracted event manager, according to documents obtained by CHEK News through a Freedom of Information request.
• The forum was closed to the general public and media; the attendee list was redacted in the released documents.
• CHEK News reported that no new information was presented at the event beyond what had already been shared publicly.
• Asked about the event, Mayor Alto's first response was, "really, that's a story?" She went on to defend the spending, saying attendees "would have found it a very valuable day" and that the city made "the difficult decision" to switch to a free format once it became clear budget-conscious agencies weren't willing to pay to attend.
• Coun. Marg Gardiner said she didn't think the targeted, invite-only event was a good use of $50,000 to share information "given out at previous council meeting," and noted the day itself ran shorter than planned due to low turnout.
• A local business association representative also questioned the spending, saying he'd rather see that money go to "the front line" given businesses were being asked to cut back at the same time.

The Downtown Victoria Business Association's 2026 annual survey of 544 respondents graded downtown a C+ for the second year running, with public drug use (73.16%) and vandalism (35.11%) cited as the top challenges. This entry provides context on outcomes rather than a single spending decision; related cost figures appear in earlier case files.

• Storefront vacancy improved to 9.6% in 2026, down from 11% in 2025, after the city and province added police and bylaw resources.
• Council approved a 13.73% increase to the VicPD budget for 2026 (to $89.85 million) after the department requested more officers to reach full strength.
• For fairness: Statistics Canada's Crime Severity Index for the region fell to a 5-year low in 2025, so perceived street disorder and the official crime-severity trend point in different directions.

In 2023, council adopted a code-of-conduct bylaw that lets only fellow council members, committee members and city employees file a formal complaint against a councillor directly — members of the public can only complain by routing a request through a councillor. This is a procedural decision with no direct dollar cost, ranked here for that reason.

• The approach, championed by Coun. Dave Thompson and backed by councillors Matt Dell, Jeremy Caradonna, Krista Loughton and Susan Kim, was criticized in a Times Colonist editorial as putting "the fox in charge of the chicken coop" rather than using an independent, publicly accessible complaints process.
• Coun. Marg Gardiner said in December 2025 that subsequent amendments improved the bylaw but still don't meet the standard of a "robust code of conduct" with full rights for a complainant to be heard.
• To date the bylaw has been tested once: the 2024 investigation into Coun. Susan Kim (see Case File 14 below), which found a breach but recommended no sanction.

In November 2023, Kim's name appeared on an open letter, signed "Susan Kim, City Councillor," that called a line from federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh about sexual violence during the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel an "unverified accusation." She also liked a related social-media post. Both drew calls for her resignation, including from B.C.'s then-Opposition leader. This case carries no direct fiscal cost — it's included for its significance as a controversy, not its cost to taxpayers.

• Kim said she signed and liked the post as a private citizen and had not noticed the post's original date; she asked to have her name removed from the letter and issued two public apologies.
• Mayor Alto, who does not have authority to remove a councillor, forwarded a resident's complaint to the city's new code-of-conduct process — the bylaw's first-ever test.
• In June 2024, an independent investigator found Kim had breached the code by not making clear her comments were personal rather than official, but recommended no sanction, concluding the breach was inadvertent. Council voted 7–1 to accept that finding (Kim recused herself).
• Coun. Stephen Hammond, joined only by Coun. Marg Gardiner, tried and failed to add a further sanction requiring a written apology on the public record, despite Kim having already issued one.
• An online petition calling for Kim's resignation and censure drew more than 10,000 signatures.

As part of 2026 budget-trimming, council cut Victoria's iconic hanging-basket program in half — from 1,200 baskets to 600, concentrated in high-tourism areas — saving roughly half of the program's $260,000 budget. Ranked last because, unlike everything else on this page, this decision reduced spending rather than adding to it.

• A vote to fully restore basket funding failed 6–3; only Coun. Chris Coleman, Coun. Marg Gardiner and Mayor Alto voted to keep full funding.
• Gardiner argued the cut was made without genuine public consultation and later moved to have the city partner with Destination Greater Victoria to crowdfund the program's restoration.

The 7.28% figure council landed on for 2026 was not reached by finding efficiencies. It was reached largely by cancelling money the city owed to its own future — roughly $7 million stripped out of reserve contributions and debt reduction in a single three-and-a-half-hour meeting on March 3, 2026.

• $2.8 million: the entire annual contribution to parking services infrastructure, eliminated.
• $2 million: a scheduled debt-reduction payment, cancelled.
• $500,000 trimmed from the heavy equipment allocation.
• $600,000 cut from the budget contingency — leaving just $400,000 of unallocated cushion against a $389-million operating budget, roughly one tenth of one percent.
• Mayor Alto acknowledged on the record that this is not a long-term solution and that while the reserves won't be felt in 2026, the effects arrive later.
• Coun. Caradonna, who opposed the motion, warned the costs don't disappear — the reserves must be replenished, likely meaning a larger tax increase in 2027 than currently forecast.
• Coun. Gardiner opposed the final budget on precisely these grounds, pointing to the five-year forecast, and called it an election-year budget that "will not fool" taxpayers.

The same budget round cut or deferred capital maintenance and the downtown event programming that draws visitors — categories where the bill does not vanish, it just arrives later or shows up as lost tourism revenue.

• Coun. Matt Dell moved to reduce the city's infrastructure funding from $5.5 million to $4 million. Staff noted the reduction could affect roadwork, the municipal fleet, parks infrastructure and playgrounds — assets that degrade on a schedule regardless of the budget cycle.
• The Government Street Refresh was deferred, and the multi-modal corridors project pushed to 2027 — after concept design work had already been adopted by council back in July 2022.
• $146,500 in performance-space programming was put on the chopping block, covering the Cameron Bandshell ($71,500), Centennial Square ($30,000), Ship Point ($34,500), Fort Commons ($5,000) and other events — including the Eventide Music Series, a free summer draw in the exact downtown blocks the city says it wants revitalized.

Victoria's Inner Harbour parking lot at Ship Point has been a revitalization commitment since 2017. This council unanimously re-approved the master plan in late 2023 after it was shelved in 2019. There is still no approved construction budget and no cap.

• The project was first directed to staff by council in 2017. Staff returned with a plan in 2019; council dropped it. This council unanimously re-approved the master plan concept in committee in September 2023, calling for a festival pier, plaza, terraces, picnic area and possible pavilion — with council also directing staff to return with a revised concept reducing parking further.
• The project was originally pegged at $65 million in 2018. By January 2024, Mayor Alto stated publicly she would not be surprised if the final cost exceeded $100 million, citing geotechnical challenges and restoration costs — the same inflation dynamic that tripled the Crystal Pool estimate.
• No construction budget has been set and no cap approved by council. The project will be handed to the next council with its cost undefined and its funding unresolved — the same outcome as Centennial Square, except Ship Point has no cancellation vote on record.
• In the same 2026 budget round that cut hanging baskets in half, the $34,500 annual programming budget for Ship Point events was put on the chopping block, raising the question of whether the city is maintaining public interest in a site it intends to spend tens of millions redeveloping.

Across this council's term, inadequate or absent public consultation is not a one-off complaint — it is a recurring criticism documented in multiple case files, each with its own sourced record.

• Crystal Pool referendum advertising (Case 2): $45,000 in city communications described only the project's benefits during a binding financial vote, with no equivalent city-funded platform for the No case.
• Dowler Place (Case 7): No neighbourhood consultation before a $2.1M facility was announced in a residential area. Mayor Alto formally apologized and on record told residents consultation was skipped partly because she knew the answer would be no.
• Centennial Square (Case 8): In 2024, Coun. Gardiner sought better public access to the redesign plan and consultation records; Hammond said the amended result appeared to do "everything we can not to be transparent." The project was then cancelled — without a renewed public process — after $750,000 had already been spent.
• Council pay raise (Case 10): Motion brought same-day without advance public notice. Loughton called the experience "humiliating" and said "the public was surprised." A rushed process, later partially reversed under public pressure, forced council into a damage-control task force.
• $50,000 closed-door safety forum (Case 11): A public safety event closed to the public and media, with a redacted attendee list, used to relay information already available at open council meetings.
• Hanging baskets (Case 15): Coun. Gardiner explicitly stated the cut was made without genuine public consultation, and afterward moved to crowdfund restoration as a remediation measure.

A BC Human Rights Tribunal complaint (CS-000715) filed in 2020 by a parent of one of the female players alleges the City of Victoria discriminated against 100% female softball players by denying facility upgrades at Pemberton Park that were approved for 95–96% male baseball players at Hollywood Park — even though the upgrades would have been largely self-funded by the association.

• Only after the tribunal accepted the complaint did the city install a skinned infield in 2021. The tribunal found in August 2025 that the complaint alleges a continuing contravention — meaning the disparity is ongoing. In 2023 the city applied to dismiss without a hearing; the tribunal denied it.
• In November 2024, Orders to Attend Hearing (Form 8s) were served on Mayor Marianne Alto (listed as "Councillor 2016–2022 and Mayor & CEO 2022–present"), former Mayor Helps, CAO Jocelyn Jenkyns and former Coun. Jeremy Loveday. The city applied to block all four orders; the tribunal denied the application in August 2025. The city applied for reconsideration; denied again in March 2026.
• A Freedom of Information request for the city's total legal costs on the case was refused. In July 2026, the BC Information and Privacy Commissioner upheld the refusal (OIPC Order F26-61). Some costs are covered by the Municipal Insurance Association of BC — but the full amount, and the insurance-vs-direct split, remains unknown to the public.
• As of July 2026, the hearing has been adjourned and the parties are in mediation. This council has not publicly moved to settle, remediate, or acknowledge the ongoing facility disparity.

The Victoria-Saanich Citizens' Assembly cost just under $682,000, split between Victoria, Saanich and the province. Forty-eight members deliberated eight months and recommended the two municipalities merge. What voters get on the October ballot is a non-binding opinion question.

• In April 2026 the province refused to authorize a binding referendum, requiring further analysis of financial, transitional and service impacts plus First Nations consultation first — requirements the city's own staff report noted had not been signalled at any point until after the assembly had finished its work.
• Council fell back to a non-binding question, "Do you support Saanich and Victoria becoming one municipality?", approved June 25, 2026 on a narrow 5–4 vote.
• Coun. Loughton called the province's move disrespectful to the electorate and a shifting of the goalposts, arguing another temperature check isn't what's needed.
• Saanich's director of legislative services stated the costs of an actual amalgamation process are "currently undefined," and that integration would consume much of both municipalities' resources through the 2026–2030 term.
• Mayor Alto led the process throughout — moving the July 2025 motion to draft the question, co-signing the letter to the minister, and backing the non-binding fallback — while consistently framing it as honouring the assembly's work rather than stating her own position on the merits. She has not said how she would vote. Her own 2022 campaign disclosure states she lives on the Saanich side of the boundary — a successful merger would fold her home municipality into the city she leads.

When the new Johnson Street fire headquarters opened in 2023, firefighters used the old Firehall No. 2 at 1240 Yates Street for parking. When the city moved other departments into that building, those spots disappeared. Council has since rejected every proposal the union brought forward, denied the resulting policy grievance — and in June 2026 voted to study converting 16 spaces at the nearby Johnson Street Parkade into garden plots.

• IAFF Local 730 (Victoria Firefighters Association) says the city eliminated employer-provided parking for firefighters reporting to the downtown headquarters and then rejected each practical alternative the union proposed. The city's stated reason: dedicated firefighter parking was deemed an "unreasonable use of public assets."
• The union filed a policy grievance. The city denied it.
• Local 730 states Victoria is now the only fire department in Western Canada that does not provide parking for firefighters reporting to duty — a claim that has not been publicly contested by the city.
• In June 2026, three councillors (Thompson, Caradonna and Loughton) moved a motion to explore converting 16 rooftop spaces at the Johnson Street Parkade — steps from the fire headquarters — into a community garden pilot. Council passed the motion to have staff study it. The firefighters union responded within days: "The City rejected practical solutions because dedicated firefighter parking was deemed an unreasonable use of public assets. Now we're hearing there is excess parking capacity and that those same assets could be repurposed for garden plots. That contradiction speaks for itself."
• The garden pilot is still at the staff-study stage and has not been approved. No money has been spent on it. The firefighter parking dispute, however, is a resolved council decision: the spots were removed, the proposals were rejected, and the grievance was denied — all on this council's watch.