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Cities hold the line on spending in a tough year

March 7th, 2012 · 11 Comments

Sounds like cities have been listening to the grumbling they hear around them.

As I note here, most municipalities have kept their tax increases low. (I hear West Van is pushing for zero)

They know they need to, because they bear the brunt of complaint for the whole tax bill, of which city taxes are usually only a half. But when school taxes, Metro Vancouver taxes and TransLink taxes go up as well, it’s councils that usually get blamed.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

  • jesse

    Rock, meet hard place.

    High house prices do matter here, rather somewhat exuberant levels of debt and mis-pricing of true carrying costs of property seems like the residents have no choice but to starve the beast.

    I don’t think it will get any easier.

  • Bill Lee

    Still think police costs are too high and that they need to leaven (fewer police, more social workers in patrol cars) the over-staffed forces.

  • MB

    The city of Vancouver’s budget works out to approximately $1,750 per capita. This is usually more than twice as much per capita as other Metro municipalities.

    I’d like to see some leavening on taxes between Metro munis because it’s obvious Vancouver taxpayers are footing the bill for being the primary regional economic and entertainment centre.

    Other cities ride on our coattails when it comes to picking up the tab on regional events, for example, or providing public services for the region’s top two employment centres (downtown + the Broadway corridor; I’d add the spillover from UBC too).

  • Agustin

    @ MB,

    I’d like to see some leavening on taxes between Metro munis because it’s obvious Vancouver taxpayers are footing the bill for being the primary regional economic and entertainment centre.

    I don’t disagree, but can you expand?

    What kind of regional events and public services do you have in mind?

  • MB

    @ Agustin, partial list of regional amenities and services follows.

    Olympics, Stanley Cup street gatherings, every NHL and NFL playoff game, servicing the cruise ships and large conventions, Granville Street’s infamous entertainment row otherwise called a vomitorium in a posting on this blog (I think by by gmgw), riot costs, emergency services protecting 100,000 (?) employees downtown and tens of thousands in Central Broadway on weekdays, engineering utility costs for servicing high density areas, seismically-stable salt water fire protection system in downtown and False Creek, a larger and more complex parks system, police and fire marine patrol, regional transit hubs ………………. I think you get the picture.

  • spartikus

    The City of Vancouver spent $37 million last year on Health, Social Services and Housing while the City of Surrey spent $0.

    But surely the citizens of Surrey benefit from Vancouver’s expenditure on this.

  • Agustin

    Thanks MB & spartikus!

  • Sean Nelson

    @MB # 3
    “I’d like to see some leavening on taxes between Metro munis because it’s obvious Vancouver taxpayers are footing the bill for being the primary regional economic and entertainment centre.”

    I hear what you’re saying, but what you’re talking about is a very slippery slope. If the ‘burbs start contributing tax dollars to the City then they’re going to want a say in how they’re spent, and before you know it we’ll end up with the kind of amalgamation that was forced on Toronto. And we’ve seen what happens when you do that – people like Rob Ford get voted in by the outlying districts even though City voters were overwhelmingly against him.

    No thanks, things are working quite well enough the way they are right now, IMHO.

  • T Ian McLeod

    As @MB’s #3 post states, there are many commuters and day trippers who consume Vancouver City services and don’t pay for them. The Granville Street pissoir, as mentioned, is a regional-scale entertainment gulag, set up to focus bad behaviour in one spot; under current arrangements, taxpayers in the City carry the full cost.

    However, some quibbles: First, I don’t believe the property tax differences are as wide as suggested here. Visit the BC Government’s “Local Government Statistics” site; total property taxes on a “representative house” in Burnaby were $4500 last year, in Richmond $4600, in North Van District $5300 and in the City $5500. Taxes in the outer rings are mostly lower (more like $3800) although White Rock and West Van are higher. I would love to see an analysis of these disparities; I’ll simply say for now that there would be a number of factors aside from in-bound commuting. Second, I’m sure you also benefit from being at the centre: Vancouver draws disproportionate economic stimulus from UBC, the Law Courts and other public-sector operations that everyone in the province pays for. It can’t all be negative, can it? Finally, checking Metro Vancouver’s Employment Trends table, the balance of economic activity is shifting away from the City quite rapidly. You had half the jobs in the region in 1981, closer to a quarter today; put another way, you’ve seen 10% job growth vs. 100% in Richmond and 140% in Surrey. We may see a time when the City is a net exporter of labour.

    In general, as @Sean Nelson states in #8, City residents and all Metro residents are better off under a multi-municipal system of government, even with the unfair or simply peculiar features attached to this model.

  • MB

    @ Sean #8, I hear you, and yes, I don’t see amalgamation as any kind of a reasonable solution.

    However, even when comparing Metro municipal budgets on a per capita basis, Vancouver’s still averages around $200 per capita more next to the nearest competitors like Burnaby (approx. $1,750 to $1,540; $1.1 billion for 630,000 people to $371 million for 240,000 people).

    Some of these cities are very well off financially, but part of the reason for this is they keep a lid on expenditures as long as Vancouver can pick up the tab, and they have fewer public amenties and lower design standards.

    Another is that these cities have large tracts of land that landed (pun intended) in their laps from bankrupted owners during the Great Depression. This land is, in essence, a default endowment, and is now incrementally sold to builders and developers without regard to the higher urban design standards Vancouver has fostered.

    Paying $4,500 on a house in these cities isn’t anything to complain about when they consist of 5,000 square foot plastic McMansions in 66-foot lots. Some of us are paying more taxes on 2,000 sf Vancouver houses sitting on lots occupying 30% of the land.

    There is no downtown eastside outside of Vancouver, yet homlessness exists everywhere. Some mayors have claimed they don’t have a homelessness ‘problem’, or that it is a uniquely Vancouver issue and therein refuse to spend money on the situation. Vancouver will take care of it, right?

    A few years ago is was “Vancouver is a no fun city” and look what happened to Granville Street as the result.

    Stanley Park is a 1,000 acre regional park that attracts millions of visitors every year, but who pays to maintain it?

    Moreover, there is a dearth of the deep analysis of the Metro’s economy at the Metro level where any tax ‘leavening’ should take place, as well as formulating regional economic policies.

    Admittedly, “tax leavening” may have been too narrow a term. But as far as I am concerned, the city of Vancouver has the right to send an invoice to other cities for the costs it bears for things like hosting the Olympics, city social services in the DTES for the regional homeless challenges, bearing the brunt of the Stanley Cup riots (thankfully the Abbotsford police and the RCMP from other cities helped the VPD on that one), and all the other stuff listed previously.

    Amalgamation in Ontario and Quebec was an idealogically-motivated technique to download provincial costs and services to cities, but it didn’t work as intended. The additional costs borne by this strategy included labour rates going up to the highest union levels in the metropolitan regions, for example. The Ford Effect is another byproduct of this strategy where too much power got concentrated into the mayor’s office.

    This is not to say there couldn’t be some efficiency gains from a little amalgamation locally (e.g. Tricities, North Shore), but I don’t believe wholesale amalgamation into a one-mayor and 5o councillors will do any good.

    Having said that, I would like to see more regional control over Metro Vancouver and TransLink, both with elected boards.

  • Calista

    Wondering if this is the website I have been looking for.

    Vancouverites should demand City Hall take a hard look at where spending can be cut. Our rising home prices have given many false comfort in paying higher property taxes. Who cares about more tax if your house keeps going up 10-20% per year.

    Did you know some city employees get over $100 PER MONTH for vision care? That’s just one example for fat benefits locked into agreements that the private sector would never see.

    Our current mayor, and most politicians, shy away from hard reviews at staff wages and benefits because they know they’re in for a big battle and so many in Vancouver will vote for the ‘little guy’ in the battle.

    Take a lesson from Greece. Soon we will be in a smaller version of the same problem.