Dan Fumano: Climate preparation largest driver of new costs for 2020 Vancouver city budget
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2019 02:25:57 +0000
Vancouver’s mayor and council are currently considering the first budget reflecting their priorities, and as city staff flagged earlier this year, those priorities will cost: the proposed 2020 budget would require an 8.2 per cent property tax increase, more than double the average yearly increase over the last 10 years.
An internal City of Vancouver document shows that out of the more than 80 motions passed by this new council of mostly rookies, between December 2018 and last month, two big-ticket items stand out in terms of expected new funding needed for the 2020 budget: gearing up for a multi-year, city wide planning process and ramping up Vancouver’s response to climate change.
Both of those initiatives stem from motions passed unanimously in late 2018 and early 2019, in the early weeks of this new council’s term. A January motion directed staff to “increase targets and accelerate timelines” in the city’s current climate strategy, and report back on new actions to aid in the city’s goals.
Staff estimate implementing the climate motion will require $6.7 million in new funding for 2020 alone.
“It is a lot of money,” said OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle, who introduced the January motion. “And it will cost us even more money the longer we put off addressing climate change. So I feel strongly that it’s an important investment that we need to make now and continue to make for current residents and future residents of Vancouver.”
But some of those “future residents of Vancouver” who Boyle is talking about — those could potentially benefit from these investments — may not yet be of voting age or even born. And that’s one of the challenges around investing in climate readiness.
Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney describes a similar challenge he calls the “Tragedy of the Horizon” in an article published this week in an International Monetary Fund publication. Carney, who previously served as Canada’s top central banker, wrote: “The catastrophic effects of climate change will be felt well beyond the traditional horizons of most actors — imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has little direct incentive to fix.”
Still, Boyle believes most of the people of Vancouver are on-board.
“Unlike in some other places, I think climate action isn’t as politically divisive in Vancouver,” she said.
The city document, which hadn’t been made public but was provided to The Vancouver Sun upon request, includes projected financial implications for this year’s council motions. The report lists costs associated with the climate motion, including storm and snow-related investments, tidal gates and pipe upgrades, and other engineering-related costs. An appendix to the 659-page 2020 draft budget estimates the city would need to add four full-time staff members to implement council’s climate motion.
Vancouver isn’t the only city grappling with this challenge. In an essay this year in New York magazine, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio outlined his plan to “climate-proof” Lower Manhattan. The plan could cost US$10 billion, the mayor wrote, adding: “We’re going to build it, because we have no choice.”
Ensuring climate commitments are in the budget are a priority for local governments around the world, Boyle said, “because there’s a recognition — particularly at the municipal level where so much of our costs are infrastructure — it’s very clear that if we don’t act on it, our costs will skyrocket down the road.”
The staff report estimates cost implications for other council motions from the past year, including $240,000 of additional funding to support councillors’ constituency work and responding to public concerns, and $250,000 to expand dog-waste collection in city parks. Other work can be managed within existing resources, staff reported. Some more recent motions — like establishing a municipal auditor general, or developing a “decampment plan” for the tent city in Oppenheimer Park — require further review before staff could estimate costs.
After January’s climate motion, the other item with a noticeably big price tag in staff’s budget report is the city-wide planning initiative, approved last year as one of council’s first actions after their inauguration. Staff estimate the city plan’s first phase could require $5.5 million in new funding for the 2020 budget.
Of course, many Vancouverites already worry about how the city budget — which has grown far faster than population and inflation over the past decade — translates into higher costs for renters, homeowners and business owners.
To that end, councillors have been looking through the 2020 draft budget seeking opportunities to trim.
“We’re all looking to see what work from past councils can be moved aside or ramped down to make sure that the budget reflects the priorities of this council,” Boyle said.
Council will begin hearing from speakers on the budget Tuesday, after which will likely follow several hours of debate on how it could be amended to, potentially, bring that property-tax hike closer to the historical average.