Vision Vancouver sailed into office last November promising to provide more open government. At the heart of its campaign was the former NPA-controlled council's handling of the Olympic Village at in-camera meetings.

Since getting elected, however, Mayor Gregor Robertson and the Vision-controlled council have demonstrated a penchant for  accepting late-distribution reports from staff, and introducing  out-of-the-blue motions, which have the effect of sidestepping public input.

On Thursday (May 21), staff brought forward yet another late-distribution report. This  concerned the governance of the city-owned Pacific National Exhibition.

If there's a late-distribution report, it isn't put on the city's Web site for a week in advance, which makes it far more difficult for the public to provide input to the politicians before the issue goes to a vote.

The report to the city services and budgets committee recommended dissolving the PNE board structure and appointing a city councillor, a park commissioner, and three senior city staff members and the general manager of parks and recreation.

Two community reps and three business community reps would be appointed to two-year staggered terms. The chair will be a member of council, who will no doubt collect a nice supplementary income for this work.

The effect  is to give city staff and Vision Vancouver control over the PNE,  and clears the way for the politicization of the annual fair.

Later that afternoon at the planning and environment committee, Vision councillor Andrea Reimer introduced a surprise motion concerning industrial land.

Reimer's motion was in connection with a staff report regarding Metro Vancouver's draft regional growth strategy. Metro Vancouver wanted a reply by May 22, and Reimer cited this urgency as justification for bringing it forward.

Staff had earlier recommended in a report that land-use decisions remain under municipal control. Reimer's amendment proposed instead that the regional government have authority to create an industrial land reserve, albeit with several caveats.

I would like to be able to provide you with a list of those caveats, but I can't because the motion has not been posted on the city's Web site. Nor was it read aloud at the meeting that I watched on the site. And Reimer hasn't posted it on her site, either.

I'm sure that some owners of industrial land in Vancouver might be interested in the wording of this motion, which I will post here as soon as it becomes available.

Reimer and Coun. Raymond Louie both said at the meeting that they discussed the wording of the motion with staff in advance of the meeting. If this is the case, why couldn't they have distributed the wording through their own Web sites or their party's Web site  before the committee met?

We are living in the 21st century. It's not so difficult to make this information available if they really wanted to do this.