Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim is taking heat over a City Hall boardroom critics say he converted into a private workout space.
The hubbub surrounds two rooms, the Ceremonial Board Room and a space known as the Grouse Room, which councillors have used to hold meetings with delegations and constituents.
In May, the Mayor’s Office told the city manager and city council the spaces were being taken over for “regular operations of the Mayor and his team,” Coun. Pete Fry told Global News.
Sim’s ABC council majority approved a $100,000 increase to the Mayor’s Office’s discretionary budget in December, and Fry said he expected the spaces to be used for more staff.
“Imagine my surprise on Friday when the office was largely empty and the doors were opened up… and lo and behold, the former board room was now clearly converted into some kind of personal gym for the mayor,” he said.
“I was shocked. Not because its a gym, it’s more because its personal use of public space, and it’s a space we legitimately used to do the city’s business.”
Fry posted about the space on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), where he quipped the boardroom had been “repurposed as Ken’s mojo dojo casa house,” in reference to the film Barbie.
Fry said there is already a fitness centre in City Hall as well as other gym and fitness facilities in the neighbourhood the mayor could use.
He added that losing the space for meetings has resulted in some councillors being forced to conduct city business off site.
The Mayor’s Office originally said Sim was not available for an interview, but after media pressure offered a tour of the space.
Sim said when he moved into the Mayor’s Office it was determined that confidential discussions could be heard in the adjacent boardroom.
That boardroom’s functions were relocated to another space in City Hall in the interest of privacy and efficiency, he said.
The old boardroom space was subsequently repurposed as a gym, and Sim personally purchased all of the equipment within, he said.
“We are utilizing space that is not really usable for anything else,” Sim said. “We used a room that is basically not fit for holding meetings.”
But Sim denied that the space was private.
“It’s not just for me,” Sim claimed.
“The reality is we’ve invited everyone to use this. People play politics and they like to make stories out of things that are small.”
It’s a claim Fry denied, saying the room is typically locked.
He said the key issue for him was that the room is a taxpayer-funded public space, and any conversion to private use should be subject to debate.
“Especially since the mayor had really run on a campaign of fiscal responsibility, reducing the ‘dumb spends’ in the mayor’s office as he called it and reducing the partisan activity in the mayor’s office.”
On Tuesday, Sim’s council majority approved another $80,000 for the mayor’s office to add a clerical staff position.
The Mayor’s Office budget for 2024 is estimated at $1.46 million, up from $1.11 million in 2021.
Despite withering criticism of spending in his predecessor Kennedy Stewart’s Mayor’s Office, Sim called the growing budget “value for money,” citing the example $500,000 in private donations he secured to re-start the shuttered Stanley Park train.