Vaughn Palmer
Sun

VICTORIA – The B.C. Liberals are still struggling with the Vancouver convention centre expansion, amid reports that the over-budget project is headed for another huge jump in cost.

The waterfront project was launched as a $495-million undertaking back in the days when the Liberals said “yes” to several billion dollars worth of Olympics-related infrastructure.

Since then, it has undergone a steady escalation in costs, with taxpayers on the hook for virtually the entire tab.

The expansion was initially touted as a partnership with the private sector. But there were no private sector takers, investors knowing too well that convention centres are chronic money losers.

The expansion faced other challenges as well. Vancouver city council, dominated by the left-of-centre majority during the approval stages, insisted on some expensive additions.

Once construction got underway, there were the usual cost pressures — rising price of materials, shortages of skilled workers and construction cranes — and some unusual ones as well.

Driving piles through the shoreline mud to construct the waterfront platform for the building, crews ran into everything from deeply mired boulders and discarded concrete to the shell of a long-gone customs house.

For those on budget watch, the dollars just kept climbing. To $550 million … $565 million … and in September 2005 the project crossed the $600-million threshold.

Supposedly, that was to be the last of it. The then cabinet minister in charge, Olga Ilich, had worked in the development industry. “I come from that business,” she said. “I’ve been all over this file.” She was confident “we won’t be seeing any further increases.”

As of last September, project managers were still saying the project was “on budget” at $615 million. Mind, “on budget” meant 24 per cent and $120 million more than the initial estimate.

But there were rumblings that the expanded convention centre couldn’t possibly be delivered for that figure.

Project chair Ken Dobell, a senior adviser to Premier Gordon Campbell, all but confirmed another overrun in a November interview with The Vancouver Sun’s Jeff Lee.

“It’s big, it’s complicated, it’s challenging and it’s being built at the worst possible time in the marketplace,” Dobell said. “It is being built at what the construction industry would call the time of the perfect storm.”

Dobell confirmed he was preparing an update on the project for treasury board, the cabinet committee that vets the provincial budget.

Meaning the project was over budget? “I am not going to speculate about where we will be and what we will be reporting to government,” Dobell said. “That is something for the government to report after we’ve talked to them.”

Looking for specifics, reporter Lee went to the minister in charge. By then Ilich had moved to a new portfolio. The new minister, Stan Hagen, a 20-year political veteran, wasn’t inclined to make take-it-to-the-bank pronouncements before project managers had delivered their latest.

“I don’t think they know whether they will need more money until later,” Hagen said. “At this point they are trying to be mindful of the costs and they are trying to keep them under control.”

The new numbers were supposed to be in by early this year. Treasury board wants to put the revised estimate in the budget, slated for tabling in the legislature Feb. 20.

But Hagen is still looking for a firm number. “One number,” he emphasizes. Not a range. Not one more subject-to-revision forecast that will guarantee more negative stories like this one.

Perhaps the challenge is getting Dobell’s attention. At last report, the convention centre chair was also on hire as senior adviser to the premier, coastal forestry czar, finance committee chair on the Olympics and consultant to Vancouver city council.

The joke around government is that he’s had to hire someone to sit in meetings and remind him who he’s working for today.

But until the many-hatted Dobell and the folks at the convention centre project weigh in, the rumour mill is alive with guesses.

The $700-million mark has already been passed, I’m told, and $750 million is not out of the question.

With Ottawa nixing further contributions beyond an already-promised $222 million, with Tourism BC capped at $90 million and revenues maxed out at $30 million, the provincial government would probably have to cover the entire overrun.

Budget day will tell the full story. But I’m hearing that B.C. could be on the hook for as much as $400 million, almost double what provincial taxpayers were initially going to put into the Vancouver convention centre expansion.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

‘Cameras are now in places were cameras never used to be’

David Bauder
Province

NEW YORK – M ichael Richards in a West Hollywood comedy club and the authorities in Iraq who executed Saddam Hussein painfully learned that the prying eyes of television news can belong to anyone who carries a cellphone.

Saddam’s execution and Richards’ flameout illustrate the growing power of cellphone video as a news tool, not only to supplement stories but also to change them.

“It brought to a fore the sense that wow, this is a ubiquitous technology,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News vice-president for digital media. “Cameras are now in places where cameras never used to be. That’s transformational.”

Iraqi authorities angrily searched for the people who recorded and distributed a video of Saddam’s execution, after the grainy footage emerged and spread quickly over the Internet and, in abridged form, on television.

It told a much different story from the government-authorized video issued about six hours after Saddam’s hanging. That depicted the former leader fitted first with a black scarf, then a thick noose. Separate pictures showed his body in a white shroud, with visible blood stains. The pictures had no audio.

“For the first time, I felt as a certainty that there was going to be bootlegged distribution of the official tape or a bootlegged version of the execution,” said Jonathan Klein, CNN U.S. president. “I had never had that level of certainty before. Somehow, you just knew.”

Within 12 hours, Klein was proven right.

TV networks had little use for pictures of Saddam falling through the trap door. They weren’t shown for taste reasons. But this video had audio, revealing angry exchanges and people loudly taunting Saddam in his final moments.

Without the cellphone video, viewers were left to assume that the execution was carried out professionally. Instead, the video revealed a chaotic scene that to many commentators symbolized everything that had gone wrong with the Iraq war and somehow made a brutal dictator a sympathetic figure.

An audience member’s cellphone caught the angry, racially offensive tirade unleashed by Richards at a Los Angeles comedy club in November. Repeated over and over on news networks, it became a major story that may effectively end Richards’ career.

Would it have even been a story without the video? If witnesses had described it later and Richards denied his actions, it could have been a he-said, she-said story with many people not believing the beloved Kramer would do such a thing. There’s a good chance the story would have gotten out in some form, however, because a friend of a CNN producer was in the audience and phoned in a tip.

“It probably would have been a story but it wouldn’t have been as big a story,” Klein said. “That was the smoking gun. It was so appalling to watch. It was like watching a train wreck.”

Cellphone video, despite having not nearly the picture quality of those produced by professional broadcasters, “does what pictures often do — it reveals the truth of the story,” Lukasiewicz said.

“Witnesses tend to argue,” he said. “What one person saw might be different from what another person saw. The picture doesn’t lie, but the picture isn’t the whole story.”

Television networks have taken viewer-contributed video ever since the advent of hand-held video cameras. Still, people aren’t likely to be carrying a video camera when news suddenly happens. They probably have their cellphones, however.

Video capability has been around since the camera phones were introduced in 2000, but didn’t gain significant acceptance in the United States until Sprint introduced a popular service in 2003.

An estimated 70 per cent of Americans carry cellphones. Nearly one-quarter of cellphone users — an estimated 55.5 million people — have phones with video capability. One-third of them claim to use their video feature at least once a week, according to analyses by InfoTrends and the Yankee Group.

News organizations became aware of the potential of cellphone video during the 2005 London subway bombing, when riders’ phones captured images conventional cameras didn’t, said David Rhodes, Fox News Channel vice-president of news.

Networks even use their own cellphone video in cases where reporters aren’t accompanied by cameramen. NBC’s first pictures of roof damage from inside the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina were taken by Brian Williams. Fox News aired cellphone video in the initial stages of covering New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle’s fatal plane crash.

Digital technology has the power to make everyone a news reporter, said David Westin, ABC News president.

“That has enormous potential for good and also has enormous potential for mischief,” he said. “The challenge for us is to get the good and weed out the mischief.”

Someone with a camera, an agenda and modest acting abilities can try to fool a news organization. Some people simply enjoy the sport of it. During coverage of a hurricane, one viewer sent NBC News a picture of supposed damage, when in fact it was a professionally taken photo from another storm, Lukasiewicz said.

It requires a careful vetting process unnecessary when the networks gather their own material, Westin said.

But it’s the future. Or, more accurately, the present. CNN in 2006 introduced technology to enable viewers to upload video taken on any device and easily send it to the network, where a staff is assigned to look over the material for newsworthiness.

Things like the Richards video, which stunned Klein when he first saw it.

“There was an intensity to it,” he said. “It became an ‘Oh, my God, we have to put that on the air’ kind of story. There will be many, many more of those to come in the future.”

© The Vancouver Province 2007

Couple with asteroid bearing their name has lodging out of this world

Scott Sutherland
Province

Stay the night and see the stars at Jack and Alice Newton’s Observatory Bed & Breakfast on Anarchist Mountain near Osoyoos. Photograph by : The Canadian Press

Jack and Alice Newton can see a long way from their retirement home perched high on the slopes of Anarchist Mountain above Osoyoos– millions of kilometres in fact.

Or make that millions of light-years.

When the Marks and Spencer retail chain pulled out of Canada in 1999, Jack Newton, manager of the British firm’s Victoria store, opted for retirement.

An internationally recognized amateur astronomer, he and his wife decided to sell their Vancouver Island home and head to where the skies were not cloudy and grey.

Aiming to combine a down-to-earth post-retirement income with his more celestial passions, Newton had a specific spot in mind to build a comfortable bed-and-breakfast with a unique home observatory.

They bought 4.5 hectares on a mountainside high above of Osoyoos because the desert air there is dry and the locale offers more hours of sunshine than virtually anywhere in the lower latitudes of Canada.

“We’re about 1,600 feet above the valley and 2,500 feet above sea level,” said Newton, now 64. “It’s a spectacular location.”

Their Observatory Bed & Breakfast motto: “We promise our guests the sun, the moon and stars and . . . we deliver.”

Operating between May and early October, the house sports two suites and a single “Moon Room” for guests. All have panoramic views over Lake Osoyoos, private baths, satellite TV and Internet connections.

Weather permitting — which is usually the case — a stay includes an introductory tour of the night skies through a 40-cm, computer-controlled, Meade telescope housed in the rooftop observatory.

Newton built the dome over the telescope himself, the “seventh or eighth” dome he’s built in a lifelong pursuit of astronomy that began as a boy in Winnipeg.

He’s recognized now as a pioneer in the field of astro-imaging, his photographs having graced the pages of National Geographic, Life, Newsweek, Photo Life and Astronomy magazines. Newton also has a half-dozen astronomy-related books to his credit and has led expeditions to far corners of the Earth to observe solar eclipses and comets.

And he’s the recipient of numerous awards, including the Queen Elizabeth Silver Jubilee Medal for his contributions to science.

While his wife does not quite share his astronomical bent, she is very supportive. Alice, whom he describes as a “workaholic,” handles the bookings for the B&B, which come from all over the world. “We’re running at about 99.9 per cent occupancy,” he said.

The couple share in a unique honour bestowed by the International Astronomical Union.

“They named an asteroid after us,” he said with pride. “It’s the first husband-and-wife asteroid name for an astronomer.”

But Newton said the B&B doesn’t only attract committed astronomy buffs.

“It’s not your hard-core observers,” he explained. “It’s the family who wants to have an interesting experience.”

Many arrive with no knowledge, having never even looked through a telescope before.

“Of course I love that because that gives me an opportunity to really blow their socks off. They get a tremendous awakening of the night sky, where we are in the universe and how fragile this little planet really is.”

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IF YOU GO

On the web: For more information, visit www.jacknewton.com

© The Vancouver Province 2007