Saturday, April 05, 2008
Don Cayo
Vancouver Sun
Municipal spending is all over the map
Here’s a pop quiz for you. In 2006, your share of the cost of your municipal government was:
A. $5,035.
B. $361.
C. Somewhere in between.
If you live in Whistler, the correct answer is A, $5,035. (To be fair, Whistler has just 9,500 residents, yet an average of 28,000 people — residents, second-home owners, overnight tourists, day trippers and staff — may be in town, straining municipal services, at any given time. This skews the per-capita figure and makes the total spending more defensible, although still high.)
Meanwhile, if you live in Lantzville on Vancouver Island — 3,661 people do — then you should have picked B, $361. (To be fair, Lantzville spent nearly zero on things like recreation, culture, planning and development, which some taxpayers consider important enough to pay for.)
And, as you probably guessed, if you live anywhere else in B.C., the right choice is C. There’s a range of “right” answers that — like the places they apply to — are all over the map, according to some provincially generated data that arrived in my in-box via the Vancouver Fair Tax Coalition.
Looking at just the bigger city halls in the Metro Vancouver area, for example, the per capita cost of civic governance in 2006 ranged from $1,901 in West Van to $702 in Surrey.
Let me try to be fair to West Vancouver, as well, even though I think its spending is out of control. But I note that it did have high engineering costs in 2006, and this is a category of spending that can fluctuate a lot. So it may skew this one-year snapshot.
On the other hand, even if you totally omit these engineering costs, West Van’s total still crowds close to the $1,433 mark set by Vancouver, which is the region’s number-two big spender.
Elsewhere around the Lower Mainland, North Vancouver city’s per-capita spending was third-highest at about $1,300.
Next are, in order, Delta, New Westminster, Bowen Island and the District of North Vancouver, all hovering around $1,200. Richmond is about $1,100, followed by, in order, White Rock, Port Moody, Burnaby, Port Coquitlam, the City of Langley and Coquitlam at about $1,000.
Maple Ridge and Lions Bay are at about $850, followed by the District of Langley at about $800, and Pitt Meadows at $750 or so. Then there’s Surrey at a lean $701. Finally, tiny Anmore and Belcarra, with lots of nature but not much spending on recreation or culture, come in just over $650.
Five graphs, one depicting these numbers and the other four with similar information on all other B.C. municipalities, are posted on the web at vancouversun.com/news/business — check the online version of this story.
Bear in mind — especially today, when this newspaper is promoting civility in public discourse — that there may be good reasons for some spending differences. So don’t go yelling too early and too loudly at your city hall just yet.
For example, as I have already mentioned, there’s always the potential for one-off projects to skew a one-year snapshot.
Then, too, different municipalities offer very different levels of service, and some — thanks to spread-out geography or home-ownership patterns — have been given a much tougher row to hoe. For example, some, like Vancouver, absorb more than their share of costs for things regional like homelessness or, for that matter, big entertainment events.
So these numbers aren’t the only factor on which to judge a municipal government’s performance. But they do matter. So I think they should become the basis for some serious chats between those who spend municipal tax money and those who pay it.
