CityCaucus.com

» see citycaucus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

CityCaucus.com went up on 7 December 2008 to cover the civic affairs of Vancouver, which is about as local as a website can get, and I am roughly ten thousand kilometers outside its readership. The shape of it travels anyway. Two men who had worked inside city hall started writing about it from the outside, several times a day, for three and a half years.

Daniel Fontaine had been chief of staff to Mayor Sam Sullivan. Mike Klassen had been vice chair of the Vancouver City Planning Commission. That pedigree got them called partisan, often by people who then quoted the posts, and the same pedigree is why the reporting kept landing: they knew which department a document came from and who in it would be unhappy about a question. In 2010 they broke the story that city staff were miserable and afraid of how hard the ruling Vision Vancouver party was pushing its agenda.

During the 2010 Winter Olympics, with the whole city full of people who did not know where anything was, the blog ran a guide to the free events, and that is what a lot of Vancouver knew it for. Nearly 2,400 posts went up over three and a half years, which is roughly two a day, written by people who both had other jobs.

~ the chronicle ~

~ city hall wrote back ~

In September 2010 the municipal government did something it had not done before and replied in public to the blog's criticism of a civic trade mission to China. A municipal government had not answered a blog on the record there before. For about two years after that, CityCaucus sat at the front of the argument over how Vancouver was being run, with the local papers citing it and the local parties watching it.

~ leaving on a high note ~

Klassen ran for council on the Non-Partisan Association ticket in November 2011 and finished thirteenth for ten seats, which is close enough to sting. Eight months later the two of them retired the blog. His explanation to the Georgia Straight was that it was difficult to keep carrying these things, and that they had agreed it was best to leave on a high note. Four Vancouver outlets covered the closing on the same day, 3 July 2012.

The archive did not survive the retirement intact. Today citycaucus.com forwards to Mike Klassen's own site, where he is listed as a city councillor, elected to the thing he used to write about.

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