Although he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, Mayor Gregor Robertson has finally agreed to meet with representatives of some Vancouver neighbourhood associations.

The sit-down over land use, planning, and development issues is expected to happen sometime in late April, according to Fern Jeffries, cochair of the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods. That’s more five months after the group wrote Robertson a day after his successful November 15, 2014, reelection to ask for a dialogue.

“Our coalition of 25 neighbourhood groups would be very happy to meet with him and talk about ways to improve relationships and to do collaborative planning,” Jeffries told the Straight in a March 3 phone interview. She said that rather than have the courts mediate disputes between neighbourhood associations and the city, perhaps there’s a nicer way of dealing with each other.

Jeffries isn’t a stranger when it comes to fighting city hall.

In 2014, the False Creek Residents Association, which she cochairs, launched legal action against the city.

The court has yet to release a decision on this case, which involves the city’s authority to allow developer Concord Pacific to use for commercial purposes a waterfront property that was zoned as a park and was supposedly meant to be added to the existing Creekside Park.

The Community Association of New Yaletown is another member of the coalition. That neighbourhood group also took the city to court over rezoning and development decisions that were part of a land swap with Brenhill Developments Ltd. The New Yaletown group won, and the city is appealing.

As Jeffries put it, neighbourhoods don’t have a lot of trust about the city’s dealings with property developers.

“We’re very suspicious when we go to council and we are disputing issues that have been brought forward by developers who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting politicians,” she said.

Last spring, Jeffries’s coalition developed a set of principles and goals for collaborative neighbourhood-based planning. One objective stated in the document was to see “Vancouver as community, not commodity”.

To realize this goal, the coalition proposed that planning processes should “place the public interest of communities and residents above developers’ profits”.

In the lead-up to the 2014 municipal election, all major parties, except Robertson’s Vision Vancouver, endorsed the document.

During the election campaign, Robertson issued a general apology, saying he made “mistakes” and that he’ll “do better”.

Jeffries said: “We thought that, given the mayor’s apology and the number of lawsuits, that we would ask to meet with him and see if we could have a more collaborative, less confrontational future with this new administration.”