Vancouver First park board candidate Brent Hayden is no longer the only person with an Olympic bronze medal for swimming who is running in the upcoming civic election. Bob Kasting, who came in third as a member of the Canadian national 4x100m Medley Relay team at the 1972 Munich Games, announced Tuesday afternoon on the steps at city hall that he is running for mayor as an independent candidate.
Kasting, 64, recently made headlines for winning a lawsuit that put the brakes on the city’s plan for a new bike path through Hadden Park and also for representing the False Creek Residents Association in their legal fight to have land owned by Concord Pacific near Science World turned into a long-promised park.
Kasting said it was his experience in fighting city hall that convinced him of the need for change in management.
“You shouldn’t have to be fighting city hall,” he said. “There are lawsuits about the parks, about the bike lanes, about the community centres, the view cones, the highrise developments and it seems to me that that is a recipe for civic disaster.”
Like COPE mayoral candidate Meena Wong, he believes Vancouver residents are fed up with both Vision Vancouver and the NPA, which both receive massive funding from real estate development companies.
“There are two dominant political parties. The one in power clearly has shown it is incapable of making the right choices and is incapable of owning up to mistakes they’ve made. The other party is one that an awful lot of people don’t seem to have faith in either. It seems to be an urban fact that both of those parties are beholden to the real estate development industry. The city … needs to get out of the pocket of big real estate development. It needs to get out of the business of spot zoning to create highrise condos in neighbourhoods where nobody wants them and they aren’t needed.”
When asked how he would address the city’s notorious affordable housing problem, Kasting said he is in favour of creating a housing authority similar to those in Calgary, Whistler, Hong Kong and Vienna.
“There is a lot of vacant land in the city of Vancouver that is owned by faith-based institutions and the provincial government and federal government and civic government that is just sitting there and there is no use being put to it at the moment. There is also a lot of land owned by First Nations. Those are all partnership opportunities, and once we can get discussions going about that, we can figure out how we can increase the rental stock.”
Kasting said he is also against building a subway out to Alma Street or UBC and borrowing more money to fund new projects.
“It seems like every year city hall is borrowing more and more money to fund its operations. That can’t continue. In the coming election, one of the questions that is going to be asked is ‘are you prepared to vote for the borrowing of an additional $400 million?’ I don’t think that is a sustainable proposition in the long run.”
Kasting is the sixth candidate so far running for mayor in the Nov. 15 election along with Vision incumbent Gregor Robertson, Wong, NPA candidate Kirk Lapointe, the upstart Cedar Party’s Glen Chernen and fellow independent Colin Shandler.
