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City council chamber unveiled $600K reno intended to welcome the public BRENT RICHTER brichter@nsnews.com
Mayor Darrell Mussatto beams as he shows off the City of North Vancouver’s newly renovated council chamber. While council was on its usual August break, work crews were dismantling the 1975-era bunker made up of yellow, brown and more brown, and replacing it with a much lighter and more modern design. “We really want to make it more friendly for the public.That’s the major driver on this,” Mussatto said on a tour of the chamber. “We wanted to make sure it fit in with the renovations of city hall.You can see it’s much brighter.” The chamber will get its public debut at the first council meeting of the new season on Monday night, when the city’s elected members are expected to debate funding a memorial to residential school survivors, and designs for public spaces in Lower Lonsdale. After receiving years of complaints, both from the council table and the gallery, about the old technology, bad visibility and worse acoustics, council resolved in the spring to go ahead with the $600,000 reno. Gone are the dark wooden walls, carpets and seat upholstery.The city has pushed back the rear glass
North Vancouver Mayor Darrell Mussatto is off his previously elevated perch in the city’s newly redesigned council chambers. The $600,000 renovation is intended to bring the hall out of the 1970s with new microphones, flat screen TVs and a lighter colour scheme. Scan with Layar to compare before and after photos of the decor. PHOTO CINDY GOODMAN wall and put in another row of seating and a convenient aisle down the centre.The lights, cameras, mics and speakers have also received a sorely needed update.The south wall behind the new semi-circular council table is now adorned with two 90inch, flat screen TVs — a big step up from the overhead projector on white canvas system council had before. “The technology also allows for better broadcast quality for television,
Internet and our mobile accessibility for iPads and iPhones. It meets all those standards now when we were stuck in the ’80s for a long time,’ said Connie Rabold, city spokeswoman. The hope, beyond allowing everyone to hear and see council much better, is to make the council experience more inviting, and increase engagement with the city. See Tech page 5
DNV hosts pipeline debate The District of North Vancouver is placing itself in the centre of the debate over whether Kinder Morgan should be able to twin its Trans Mountain oil pipeline to Burnaby. Mayor Richard Walton will moderate a panel discussion at district hall on Sept. 12 between representatives from Kinder
Morgan, Port Metro Vancouver as well as the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation and the Georgia Strait Alliance, both of which are opposing the project. Walton said the district decided to host the meeting after being lobbied by various groups to take a position. “Our council is not one to do a lot of extraneous
motions on provincial and federal and world kinds of issues,” he said. Instead, the district chose the route of public education, which may inform a council position in the future,Walton said. To register for the forum, call 604-990-2421 or email chesterp@dnv.org. — Brent Richter