Pricey catering ‘quite ironic’ at affordable housing talks
Peppered beef carpaccio, beerbrined chicken sliders and salted caramel cream puffs.
Those are just a small selection of the generous spread of sweets and canapés the City of Vancouver provided to attendees at last year’s Re:Address housing conference.
In all, the city spent nearly $90,000 to cater three days of meetings where 391 guests and speakers mulled ideas to pull Vancouver out of its housing and homelessness crisis, according to documents obtained by Postmedia through a freedom of information request. Critics say that kind of spending makes for bad optics.
Some of the catering costs were recouped by the city. Ticketed or sponsored guests collectively brought in $64,000 in revenue — just over two-thirds of what it had spent in catering.
The conference kicked off at the University of B.C.’s Museum of Anthropology on Oct. 26, 2016, with an official welcome for delegates by Mayor Gregor Robertson.
Conference guests supped on $12,000 of food and drink that night. Among the nearly two dozen menu items were 165 $8 plates of artisan cheese, 100 servings of equally priced pork terrine from Gelderman Farms, and 75 orders of exotic fruit worth $6 a pop.
Austrian housing director Kurt Puchinger was the keynote speaker that night, talking about how Vienna was able to deliver affordable housing to its residents while gripped by rising land costs.
Attendees washed down their food with blends of Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris, Syrah and Gamay Noir from the Okanagan Valley, and ale and lager from Vancouver breweries Parallel 49 and Red Truck.
The final catering bill for the evening, including all expenses, was nearly $24,000.
Kathleen Llewellyn-Thomas, the city’s general manager of community services, said in an interview that the conference was part of a major housing rethink and it was held “in order to get the best advice and expertise” available. It wasn’t a money-making venture.
Of the 391 attendees, just 114 people paid the $375 conference fee and another 42 people were sponsored. The 86 staff members who attended did not pay for tickets. The city did not recoup its overall costs, which were covered as part of an approved budget, Llewellyn-Thomas said.
On Oct. 27, the day after the official welcome, Robertson moderated a panel on issues including the commodification of housing. Shortly into the session, antipoverty protesters rushed the podium with chants like: “Tax the rich. House the poor. Social housing now.”
Later that day, at the Fairmont Pacific Rim in downtown Vancouver, conference goers grazed on dishes that featured ingredients like spiced Neufchatel, porcini mushrooms, organic buffalo mozzarella and truffled honey. There was Dungeness crab, Qualicum Beach scallops, Angus beef brisket sliders, and wild salmon poke. The catering bill exceeded $59,000 that day.
That level of spending for that type of event did not sit well with Non-Partisan Association Coun. Melissa De Genova.
“The biggest concern I had was the optics, especially considering the protest … This just seemed quite ironic,” she said in an interview.
De Genova said she believed the conference should have been catered, but wanted to know why staff failed to bring in enough revenue to cover expenses.
“I understand that perhaps the City of Vancouver was trying to keep the ticket cost down, but that being said, at the end of the day, taxpayers then foot the bill.”