Anne Cirrillo's Tomato Sauce is available

My friend and neighbour makes a great tomato sauce.   It is made in small batches and worth checking out.   Here is the text of the email she sent me today

Hello Everyone and Happy Spring!

I'm making a batch of sauce and kneading bread and pizza doughs!

Let me know if you'd like to order. I will be delivering early next week.

Cirillo's Italian Cuisine

My grandparents, Joseph and Elgesera Cirillo emigrated from Calabria, Italy with their five children to Ontario, Canada in the late 1950's. Together they opened Cirillo's Italian Restaurant’. My grandmother became famous for her traditional Italian cuisine, especially her tomato sauce. It is my honour to continue the family tradition of making delicious Italian foods.

Tomato Sauce - Tomato sauce comes canned in glass jars

·       1 Litre  $12

·       1/2 Litre  $7

Herbed Italian Bread Dough  - Make fresh Italian Bread with your pasta dinner!

    $3 per loaf  (Bread dough comes frozen, shaped in a loaf and ready to thaw and bake)

 Pizza Dough - Pizza dough and side baggie of sauce come frozen

·       Small dough $3 (makes one - 13 X 13 inch medium pizza)

·       Large dough $5 (makes one very large pizza)

Love and Blessings,

Anne

250-507-5197

New Blog about Victoria Urban Design

Make Victoria Better started a few weeks ago.  You can follow on Twitter as well.  The author is called Evan and 27, but that is all I know about him.

I am not sure what to make of his ideas and where he is coming from, I need to read more of what he has to say.

Ideas for the City of Victoria OCP

I am working a number of different ideas to propose for the City of Victoria Official Community Plan, and as I go along and develop them, I will post some of them here first.

One of my areas of interest for a number of years has been how to reduce the amount of pavement in a city and increase green space or usable space.   One thing I would like to propose is that in the OCP the city set a target of 100 acres of paved city owned land to be converted to park or green space.

Where could the city find this land?

1. Add to existing parks from road right of ways on the park borders, example Cook Street along Beacon Hill Park. Cook Street is much wider at this location than is needed for traffic. The street is over 15 metres wide and only needs to be 10 metres wide to serve the needs of the location. 5 metres for 500 metres along the park would add 2500 sq metres of area to the park, or more than half an acre.
2. Remove paved areas within parks, example paved roads within Beacon Hill Park. There is no need to have a paved road to the top of Beacon Hill or to have all the roadways through the park going all the way through,  Several more acres of green space could be added to Beacon Hill park through this.
3. Create pocket parks on small through streets that could be cul de sacs – example Rithet Street at Menzies – block off the street at this location and make it a small community park with benches and a playground – 500 sq metres is available at this location with no impact to the street.
4. Take wide street wide of ways and blouvards and create a function park space – example Cook Street from Fairfield to Fort – the street and right of way that belongs to the City is 30 metres wide. Given the volume of traffic, 13 metres for the right of way is more than enough. This leaves a strip 17 metres wide and 600 metres long that could be a linear park of close to 2.5 acres in size

There are many locations throughout the city that fit into one or another of these examples.  It should not take a lot of work to know where it could be done and where it could not be done.  Frankly the city should do research into how much land is owned by the city and is paved.  

Urbanspoon

I thought I would quickly highlight a website I found useful, Urbanspoon.  It is great for finding out about restaurants.  It is a tool that you can use on smart phones and which has allowed us to find places to eat when we have been on the road, we really lucked out in Port Townsend with the Silverwater Cafe.

The site has a listing of the 100 best restaurants in Victoria.   In general it is a list I agree with, though there are some clunkers on it.   What I like about Urbanspoon is that enough people are using that there is a good database of information on the site about restaurants.  You can see how much I use it from my profile.  

I was recently at the Beacon Drive In and I should have known better than to order the food there.  I should have read the reviews on line and remembered that I should only order ice cream there.

So why am I touting this website?   Mainly because I would love to see even more people use it so that there is even more information available on the site.   Try it out and see how it works for you.   More and better information on the site will mean we all be able to make better dining choices.

House prices in Victoria

With the new rules for borrowing money and the relatively high cost of houses in this city, I suspect there will be some dampening of the market.   The only thing I see working against this is misconception that new houses will be more expensive with the HST which could keep sales stronger than expected till July 1st.

Transitionally the best sales months are May through to August.   I expect that to happen again.

Where will interest rates go?   One measure says they need to rise to control growth, another measure says we need a lower dollar.  I make no predictions what this means.

All in all, taking these factors into consideration, I see the volume of sales decline dramatically in the fall.  Will the prices fall as well?  That is unclear.  House prices are sticky and resist downward price pressure for some time.

November to February should be a very good time to get into the market, many vendors will likely be desperate for a sale.

The biggest impact will be the new restrictions on heavily leveraged mortgages.   It will reduce the pool of people that will be able to get into this market and that will eventually force the price to fall.

Shelbourne Corridor

There has been some planning exercises being done by Saanich about Shelbourne street - the Shelbourne Corridor Action Plan. While it is nice that Saanich is finally sitting down and thinking about Shelbourne, they are not doing in the manner that makes sense to me.

Shelbourne is not just a Saanich street, it is a Victoria one as well. The two local governments should be doing this jointly as what one does effects the other. The planning should be running from Bay Street all the way up to Mount Doug. But it seems Saanich will go it alone.

They are hosting a virtual open house with materials about the corridor. The 20 page pdf does provide some good background, but even here they act as if the world ends at the Saanich border. You can not make a good plan if you do not work with the whole area you are looking at.

So what would I like to see in this corridor?

It strikes me that what makes the most sense is a dramatic increase in density along Shelbourne. What I would see are buildings 4-8 stories tall all along the corridor. I see them coming close to the street, but allowing for much larger sidewalks and ideally a bicycle lane. They buildings would be ground floor retail and then either office commercial or residential above them.

The corner of Shelbourne and Cedar Hill X road is under developed. I would see that area have a dramatic increase in density. I would also see that area have some light industrial, nothing big and dramatic, but the sort of light industrial that allows for warehousing and small manufacturing. The existing Shelbourne Plaza would be a good location for this.

I note that this area in Saanich has virtually no industrial lands and therefore has to rely on neighbourhoods further away to service the community.

Any long term vision should keep in mind that if Greater Victoria ever does build rail based rapid transit, Shelbourne would be a very good location for a line running from Downtown to UVic. With a higher density of people along Shelbourne, there may actually be enough transit use to warrant the construction of a line.

I gave my opinion in their online survey.

This Sunday there will be an event called "Our Human and Natural History" at 2 pm at St Aidan's church on St Aidan's Street. I would love to go, but I will be at a meeting of the Gorge Tillicum Urban Farmers at the same time.

On May 3th at 7 pm there will be a meeting for stakeholders at St Aidans

The ever increasing price of water in the CRD

Last November I did the math on water rates the costs of rain barrels, the math did not make much sense because waters were not high enough and I could not find a source of cheap barrels. Both of these things have changed.

The water rates have gone up again as raised in this discussion on Vibrant Victoria. The total charged per 100 cubic feet has risen to $4.78 from $3.9162, a total of $0.8638. It was only a short while ago that it cost $2.64 per 100 cubic feet.

When I did the math last year, the water one would collect in a 100 litre rain barrel would have a value of $0.55, now this has risen to $0.68.

Today I was pointed in the direction of a source of barrels for $30 for a 211 litre barrel. A 211 litre barrel holds $1.43 of water under the new rates. If I can capture 1200 litres during the summer months for gardening and lawn and if I use 4 litres a day for 250 days a year for the chickens, this means I save about 2200 litres in a year. This is about $15 a year, so I pay back a barrel in two years.

My plan is to buy three of them and because I do not need anymore water in the winter, the total I will capture and use will be 4600 litres or $31.18 per year. This means to pay for all three it will take me three years. I will be picking up the barrels on Monday.

Suddenly it makes good sense to have rain barrels

Secondary Suites

The local governments in this region are falling down in protection of the public by not ensuring all the secondary suites are up to code. At the moment almost all the local governments turn a blind eye to secondary suites and allow them to exist.

The current regime rewards people that do not try to make their suites legal. You build it without a permit and no inspections, this costs less than going through the local government hoops. The official rules will not allow secondary suites, but many people flaunt this and do not try to make them legal. The upshot is that the majority of secondary suites in the region are not suitable housing for the public.

The local governments need to take three actions. First they need to generally make secondary suites legal. Second they need to make sure that all suites are registered and up to the current building code. Third, they need to actively and regularly ensure that there are no illegal secondary suites.

The reality is that we need secondary suites to house the population of this city, but the way they are now is not helping. The current situation is clearly and completely due to the local governments dropping the ball on the issue. When the by-laws were created to make secondary suites in most residential neighbourhoods illegal the city population was dramatically smaller than now, the demand for inexpensive housing was not as crucial as today. These restrictions are no longer relevant or useful.

One only needs to look at the real estate listings and see how many of the houses being sold are advertised with secondary suites, almost none of them legal. There is an issue of professional ethics from realtors for allowing advertising which mention of illegal secondary suites, but this is for another time and place. The information is out there about the secondary suites, how many and where and if they are legal or not. Local governments can very easily find the suites through the real estate ads and the information held by BC Assessment, but no one can be bothered to look.

Looking at the MLS listings, it is clear that there are no neighbourhoods in Greater Victoria that do not have secondary suites. They exist in Fairfield, South Oak Bay, Uplands and Broadmead, the sort of tony neighbourhoods that are supposed to be locations that do not have secondary suites.

I think there is a case for local government liability with respect to secondary suites. The information to find the suites is there and many of them are wildly substandard, but the local governments tacitly agrees with them existing. Are they then saying it is OK to have them and that they are suitable housing?

Given the price of housing in this region, the average person needs to be able to rent out part of the house to make the payments. The way the local governments operate with respect to secondary suites is making many people break the law that normally would not. It is always bad when government laws cause people break them. It starts a process public corruption and harms the social fabric of our city.

We have to change the status quo with respect to secondary suites and it is local governments have to take responsibility immediately.

This is a letter Ryan Vantreight posted on Facebook today

“Farmland should be saved for farming” - We couldn’t agree more!

My name is Ryan Vantreight. I am a young father, local farmer and a proud member of the community of Central Saanich.

What we want most of all is to continue the farming tradition that has been in my family for five generations – to explore and implement exciting, innovative ways of farming and to connect our farm, the flowers and, most importantly, the food it produces directly to the community in which we live. We want our farm to thrive, we want to work hard, and, personally, I want to be able to pass a successful farming operation to my children, if one day they want to be farmers too. That is my motivation every day, from sunup to sundown.

At the present moment, our future is uncertain. Five years ago my father and my uncle had a very long and very public dispute about ownership and the future of the farm that ended in the courts ruling the farm to be sold in its entirety, piece by piece. If my father and I were not completely committed to the continuation of our farming tradition, we could have given-up at that point, allowed the land to be sold and the farm would not exist today. Thankfully, a deal was reached to buy my uncle’s share and the land was mortgaged in order to preserve the farm as a whole. We knew then, as we know now, that this deal left us with only two choices in the business plan: to sell land or to sell land. The only question has been which land to sell in order to continue the farm and satisfy the debt. Our goal has always been to sell land that is not arable, that is not farmable and that is not in the ALR in order to preserve the land base we currently farm today. And so we focused our efforts on The Hill Project, which achieves all of these goals.

What some members of the community may not realize is that if the Hill Project is not successful, then the only other option in the business plan is to sell our arable farmland piece by piece. The landscape will inevitably be changed forever and the future agricultural use of that land for food production will be uncertain and impossible to control. Selling the farm has never been our goal and is what we have been trying to avoid for over five years.

This is, and always has been, about keeping the farm together so we can continue to farm it. At a CRD meeting I attended on January 27th, I said to the Committee, "Our hearts are in the land and our futures are staked in it." And I meant it. My heart is in this land, and I long for a time when I can stop worrying about the very existence of the farm, and simply farm it.

We have so many innovative ideas and plans for the future that will connect the farm and the community even further. We hope to continue to positively contribute to our community and local economy through our ever-expanding local food programs and environmental initiatives, such as the use of anaerobic digesters to create heat and power for the farm and community. The community wants and needs farms, and I am a farmer ready and willing. Our goal is to preserve our farmland for farming purposes – in this sense, I believe we want the same thing the community wants.

So my question to the community is this: How can we come closer together on this issue to meet our mutual needs, and keep this family farm intact?

If you want to learn more about Vantreight Farms and our Hill Project please visit www.daffodil.com or contact Ian or myself directly at 250-652-7777.

Sincerely,


Ryan Vantreight

The issue is definitely creating serious divisions out on the peninsula. It would be shame to see one of the major economic farms in this region have to sell off land to all for more horse farms for the rich.

The only reason the project is not OK now is because the regional growth strategy is there to fossilize bad decisions from the past. If one were to look at where the best locations were to build houses in Central Saanich, this would be one of them. The fact that there are houses on good farm land is allowed to stand while the land that is suited for development is caught out because it is coming after a regional process.

This is also the sort of location that is too small to have been given proper consideration in the regional growth strategy. The RGS is a big picture plan with an intent. Allowing the Hills project is closer keeping with the intent and spirit of the RGS than blocking it.