News and Features
One Tough Broad
By Frances Bula published Oct 1, 2008
Council may be the public face of civic politics, but everyone at City Hall knows that Judy Rogers runs the show
2008-12-12 Update: Judy Rogers quit her post this morning. Penny Ballem is the new city manager.
In the ecclesiastical chamber that passes for Vancouver city council’s boardroom, it’s tempting to think that the person who presides from the raised platform at the far end must be the most important. That’s the mayor, after all, your eye is inexorably drawn to in this sombre room with its red carpets, rich panelling, and pewlike wooden benches where the public comes to pray for relief from taxes, rezoning, and development.
By contrast, the small table against the north wall, behind one of the two curved rows of council members that frame the mayor, is almost invisible. And the woman who sits at that table—looking both matronly, with her pearls and business suit and sternly watchful expression, and girlish, with her rosy cheeks and cap of silver-blond hair that glints in the room’s dim light—hardly ever says anything. She almost always has a pile of folders in front of her that she steadily works her way through at every meeting—reading, signing, pencilling notes. On the rare occasions when she does stand to speak, it’s usually in the blandest language this side of the European Parliament’s constitutional-affairs committee. She doesn’t seem scary at all.
“ I wouldn’t go down an alley with her.” Former mayor, now senator, Larry Campbell, a onetime coroner who’s been down every bad alley in the Downtown Eastside, is talking about city manager Judy Rogers. “I think she could rip your heart out.” Campbell’s predecessor, Philip Owen, describes Rogers as fearless, willing to push people—including mayors, councillors, and police chiefs—to the wall if she thinks they’re doing the wrong thing. And current mayor Sam Sullivan sees her as the Supreme Court of city hall; if a mayor can’t convince her that something is worth doing, he doesn’t have much hope of accomplishing anything.
