Dan Fumano: Vancouver council's many new priorities cost money
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:50:31 +0000
You can’t say Vancouver’s new mayor and council aren’t working hard.
During their first year in office, many meetings have been marathons.
Tuesday night, as council debated the same large, complicated staff report they’d started with almost 12 hours earlier, second-term NPA Coun. Melissa De Genova suggested it could be a record for a single agenda item. And there’s been no shortage of agenda items: This mixed council, where no party has a majority and nine of 11 members are new, has introduced motions at a far faster pace than their predecessors.
But now, as the city heads into the annual budgeting process, council faces one consequence of all those motions: They cost money.
This council approved the 2019 budget near the end of last year, weeks after they’d been sworn in, a budget they’d largely inherited from the previous council. Vancouver’s 2020 budget is the first one that really bears this new council’s fingerprints.
And when the 2020 draft budget was released this week, the eye-catching 8.2 per cent proposed property tax hike understandably made headlines. To put that in perspective, it’s more than double Vancouver’s average annual property tax increase in the previous 10 years. Between 2009 and 2018 — during Vision Vancouver’s three successive council majorities — Vancouver’s average annual property tax increase was less than three per cent, last year’s budget documents show, placing the city below the average for Metro Vancouver municipalities.
Metro’s highest 10-year average property tax increases for that period, in Surrey and Port Moody, were between four and five per cent. No city’s average came close to six per cent, let alone eight.
One inescapable fact is that during that decade, the growth of Vancouver’s budget has still far outpaced inflation or population growth.
Some councillors have expressed concerns around the large increase.
But they can’t say they were surprised.
Six months ago, city staff handed council a 2020-2024 budget outlook, which predicted a big tax hike could be in store.
That 64-page June report, described as a preview to start the annual city budgeting process, noted: “Council has put forward a number of motions over the past months, some of which will have budget implications.” In light of those motions, staff’s “preliminary scan” suggested all the new work directed by council would put more pressure on the budget, requiring a higher tax increase than the previously expected 4.9 per cent.
“The pressure would require a higher tax increase of six to seven per cent to balance and could be as high at 10 per cent to implement all of the various council motions,” the June report said.
Ken Sim, the NPA mayoral candidate last year who lost to Kennedy Stewart by fewer than 1,000 votes, said “staff are completely right” about the financial impact of all those new motions.
“It’s easy for councillors to put in their passion projects. And some of them may be valid, some of them may be just to position for the next election. But at the end of the day, it adds pressure to the staff,” Sim said. “It adds additional costs, and they’re actually pulling staff members’ time away from focusing on bigger projects.”
Asked what could be cut from the budget, Sim couldn’t provide specific answers, saying the 659-page draft released this week was difficult to wade through. And he’s a chartered professional accountant.
NPA Coun. Colleen Hardwick, however, is willing to say what she’d cut: basically, any areas she sees as outside a municipality’s traditional remit, including cultural grants, public art, housing, economic development, climate change, and “diversity and social issues.”
Hardwick has made fiscal restraint a priority during her time on council, introducing a series of motions aimed at improving financial transparency, including, most recently, establishing a municipal auditor general.
Other councillors have different priorities, and have defended the proposed 8.2 per cent increase, including council’s longest-serving member, Green Coun. Adriane Carr, and OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle, who wrote on Twitter: “Budgets are a statement of our values and priorities as a society. We pay for what we care about.”
This budget, Boyle wrote, gave top priority to “the things you elected us to address”: the climate emergency, housing, the opioid crisis, infrastructure.
Obviously no one wants higher taxes, especially an increase far above recent ones (which, many would complain, were already too high).
But Boyle’s not wrong when she said the priorities council has outlined in their first year are largely what they campaigned on and were elected on. Hardwick, however, campaigned on and was elected on fiscal restraint.
Boyle and Hardwick, who happen to sit side-by-side in chambers, find themselves on far ends of this question of civic spending. We’ll see which way the majority of council goes at Tuesday’s budget meeting.
Of course, there’s always a chance we’ll get the scenario Sim describes: Council counting on the taxpayers being so shocked by a proposed 8.2 per cent hike that the public “will be happy if it gets whittled down to 5 per cent.”