Sooner or later, it had to happen.
You knew the wall was coming. You knew city council would hit it.
Many Vancouver councillors are in love with their own spending ideas. Who among us wouldn’t be? Only difference: we are using our own money, not someone else’s.
City staff is only too happy to indulge these inclinations. Who among them wouldn’t be? Particularly when the ideas are far enough away from an election, they can sculpt a bulked bureaucracy, create well-paying jobs, allot tax dollars to the task and know the bill will be paid by property owners and others in the myriad fees the city imposes.
But last week it became evident that if property taxes are not to rise more than 5% in this election year, it is time to walk back some of the habitual, chronic, magical thinking.
Not surprisingly for this council, not everyone agrees. After all, someone’s ox is going to be gored, someone’s barrel is no longer going to brim with pork, someone’s chicken is coming home to roost. The dispute over the 2022 budget, particularly the sour scrap over pet projects, is bound to set the tone for the election between the thrifty and the spendthrifts.
A sobering presentation overseen by new city manager Paul Mochrie portrayed a budget with seeds that cannot help but grow if left undisturbed. Expenses have overtaken revenues. Even with neither new investments nor cost reductions, the budget will organically exceed a 5% increase – closer to 9% if plans are proceeded with, it appears.
To be generous, what is clear is that many of the ideas that have emerged in 2019, 2020 and even 2021 from council were generated without sufficient contextual understanding of the pandemic’s economic influence. Where every household and business had to recalibrate, often in a rush, the city’s administration from the top on down was operating without adequate nimbleness and as if there could continue to be pre-COVID prerogatives. Even with the best of intentions to tackle the opioid menace, the overdue reckoning on race and reconciliation, and the incessant increments of climate change, the city’s underlying financial framework cannot service new needs without pulling the plug elsewhere.
To be less generous, council’s sanctioned spending didn’t think like a taxpayer, put personal ambitions ahead of those of the community it serves and left choices to be made that cut into things we might consider basic services – like, for instance, daytime street cleaning in the Downtown Eastside, the downtown and Chinatown and a pilot program to deal with, yes, the microcleaning of “feces.”
All told, some $45 million in existing and planned expenditures must be dashed or deferred to stay within the 5% scenario.
The number 45 is useful to remember in this, because in the documentation outlining how money can be saved, there is a sheet at the end of what is already an appended document to the presentation. It shows more than 45 council motions – 48, actually – that set in motion the spending that must now be tapered. Project after project piled upon the already bulbous budget and now must be squared with reality.
A 49th motion is vital to examine because it makes the confrontation of the outsized budget an imperative. Just as council created this excess, it has also conceded this necessity of a rollback. After it took heat for increases approaching double digits, it decided in July to cap the property tax increases at 5%. It’s easy to see now that it didn’t foresee the menu of cuts necessary to walk the talk, but walk it must.
The $1.6 billion city budget derives nearly 60% from property taxes and about 20% from utilities. If those are kept in check, of course, there are other ways to pluck funds from the public. At the same meeting council examined a raft of fee increases for housing permits. And while some on council are still smarting from a setback to introduce vehicle ownership fees and mandatory parking permits, this idea is bound to be back within months.
For a city the size of Vancouver, our council has enough big-city challenges that it ought to know to stay in its lane. But careen it does, and within a month it will need to determine how to stay on the right road.
The options on the table do not to most of us, but not all of us, appear dramatic to stay in line with what council moved to abide: vacancies across departments that won’t be filled, new positions (including 15 police) that won’t be created, the abandonment of a broadened park ranger program, libraries that will continue to reduce hours, housing and equity initiatives that will have to wait longer for a fuller economic recovery to finance them, among other things. Notable is $500,000 for reconciliation programs and a new role in Indigenous relations that will be hard to swallow for a council that has been so clearly supportive.
Of course, to get down to a 4% increase, we get much more serious: another 36 police, the end of the Medic 11 program in the Downtown Eastside to respond to overdoses, further reductions in street cleaning grants, more library and park board reductions and much else. Get down to 3% increases, and we are closing community centres, taking another 36 police officers out and possibly closing a couple of small libraries, among other matters.
Still, for this council, it provides less to show voters come the campaign. It might be baffling to many of us, but these days it is harder to get elected by saying you’ve been sparing than by saying you’ve been splurging. I can’t see some of the councillors taking pride in anything other than the fulfilment of their ideas, even if in life most of us have to eventually accept our dreams cannot come true. •
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
