Snow-covered houses and the downtown skyline are seen after a snowstorm, in Vancouver, B.C., on Nov. 30, 2022. Vancouver posted its draft budget with a proposed tax increase of 9.5 per cent.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
B.C.’s two largest cities – Vancouver and Surrey – are bracing for unprecedented property tax increases, as they grapple with new policing costs and what they say is needed catch-ups on basics that previous councils ignored.
Many other municipalities around British Columbia are also looking at noticeably higher policing costs. Councils say their residents are demanding more spent on security and safety.
Vancouver posted its draft budget with a proposed tax increase of 9.5 per cent.
Surrey posted a draft operating budget this week with a proposed tax increase of 17.5 per cent – more than half of that attributable to the partly completed transition to a new municipal police force. The city is creating its own force after more than seven decades of contracting out the service to the RCMP.
But Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke, elected last year after campaigning to bring back the RCMP, is trying to cancel the police transition. She said the police force jockeying by itself would require a 9.5-per-cent increase for at least two years, if not three, to help pay the projected $116-million cost of winding down the new Surrey Police Service and paying severance to everyone hired. The city needs approval from the province.
“Most of it is because of the inflated severance package that the Surrey police board signed – 18 months of severance after six months of work,” she said.
As for what the cost will be if the province decides next month that the transition to the new municipal police force should continue, Ms. Locke wouldn’t speculate.
“All bets are off then.”
Besides the policing transition costs, Ms. Locke said Surrey is also facing increased costs to hire more police and firefighters, which she said the previous council led by Doug McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition didn’t keep up with, even as the population of the rapidly growing city steadily increased.
In Vancouver, where a newly elected centre-right council came in promising more financial rigour, council members are saying the proposed 9.5-per-cent tax increase is needed to start paying more for basic city services that residents say have been lacking.
Almost one-third of the increase will go for increased policing that the ABC Vancouver party and Mayor Ken Sim promised, along with 100 nurses.
“We are dealing with an infrastructure deficit,” said ABC Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung. “We have been underfunding priority services – cleaning, police, fire, public-space order.”
Ms. Kirby-Yung said public satisfaction levels noticeably dropped this year because people felt they weren’t getting the basics.
The survey showed that 30 per cent of residents surveyed and 43 per cent of business operators felt the quality of city services had become worse.
“We’re digging out of a hole. What people want is to see the money spent on what they think is important,” said Ms. Kirby-Yung.
The draft budget proposes $390-million for police out of the almost $2-billion budget, $20-million more than what was budgeted in 2022. It also proposes $6-million for fire and rescue services, $8-million more for parks, and $5-million more for engineering.
All cities have to have approved budgets by March 31. Cities are not allowed to run deficits for operating expenses, although they take on debt to carry out long-term infrastructure projects, such as community centres, parks, libraries and road improvements.
Much of any city’s increased expenses comes from contract-mandated wage increases for staff, who constitute the biggest piece of city budgets. City taxes account for about half of the average resident or business tax bill, with school, TransLink and Metro Vancouver accounting for the rest.
Big property tax increases at the beginning of a term aren’t that unusual, as new councils work to carry out the improvements they campaigned on while hoping that people will have forgiven them for big increases in the first year by the time an election rolls around four years later.
But the ones for Surrey and Vancouver are record-setting.
Other municipalities are not exempt, however.
Coquitlam Councillor Craig Hodge, who sits on a provincial RCMP contract management committee and a community safety committee, said many cities are putting more money into police this year, as is Coquitlam.
“Coquitlam crime stats are actually looking good but people are not feeling safe. So councils are turning their attention to that.”
He acknowledged that even though it might not look like crime is increasing, police are having to spend much more time dealing with mental-health and illegal-drug issues.
Coquitlam is proposing to spend an additional $700,000 for police this year, in order to hire five new officers, bringing spending to a total of $44-million. It is looking at a minimum 3.55-per-cent tax increase.
North Vancouver, with a population of only about 62,000, has a budget that projects an increase of $1.46-million for police, although it is proposing holding that to around $700,000 by leaving some authorized positions vacant. The proposed tax rate increase there is 5.24 per cent for the total budget of $95-million.
Many cities and towns in B.C. that are policed by the RCMP are facing significantly higher costs for police, even if they don’t add a single new officer. That’s because a first-time union contract was settled in August, 2021, with police. It brought RCMP salaries up to the level of municipal police forces.
Cities haven’t yet had to cover the retroactive pay owing to all those officers because they are still negotiating to get the federal government to pay that part.
But they are having to pay the new levels now and are expecting more to come, as the RCMP contract expires this year and is about to be renegotiated.
The Union of B.C. Municipalities noted at the time of the settlement that cities would be looking at having to pay almost 24 per cent more in compounded wage increases from the beginning to the end of the six-year contract, if they were forced to pay all of the new costs on their own.