The current ABC “A Better City” party with the majority of seats on Vancouver City Council is well within their second year of governance. While they touted that they would be all about fiscal responsibility and citizen focus, that has not appeared to be at the forefront of many of their decisions, perceiving municipal governance as more of a business than a long-standing social compact to run services and address needs on behalf of the residents of Vancouver.
It has been clear that this Council’s emphasis is on promoting Vancouver business and keeping their social media accounts populated with obligatory visits and hand shaking.
There is the back pedalling (no pun intended) on Stanley Park’s Park Drive Bike Lane which was removed at a cost of $400,000 taxpayer dollars and the surprise announcement that they were dismantling the governance of the Park Board after running their own slate of Park Board commissioners . These two actions suggest that there’s really been no thoughtful commitment to prudent public process or evaluation, or consultation with experienced staff on how best to thoughtfully put forward any critical analysis of what is wrong. No accounting of savings from nixing the Park Board has been presented to the public. The Economic Development Commission has also been phased out, in favour of a Business and Economy office which Surprise! is within the City Manager’s Office close to Council and the Mayor. Again, no economic analysis or evaluative report was publicly provided to show any cost savings or business reasons for this elimination.
In many ways, this type of governance is a “father knows best” style more emblematic of the previous century.
This Council and Mayor use every opportunity to centre in front of the media, and city staff are tucked away somewhere in a back building. Council and the Mayor’s public take on policy interpretation is often awry, but there appears to be no feedback loop with senior staff to clarify or refute.
There is a also a lack of connectivity with municipal staff, who will be there much longer than this Council, and actually will serve to enact ongoing policy long after these politicians are gone.
This erodes public confidence in the city, when connections to staff and the work that they are doing is interpreted solely by political spokesmen. Along with the telephone system of 311 herding all calls to a centralized call centre, the frustrated public does not know who they can call to speak directly with staff, most who have not returned to full time work at the City, and are working on a hybrid model.
This foggy distancing means that few people know who the current Director of Engineering is, or who the Director of Planning was (fired in September 2023 by this Council and still not replaced) as unlike other Councils the senior heads of departments are not speaking publicly on their areas of expertise-Council does that for them.
I have written before about the Americanization of Vancouver City Hall. Six years ago I wrote “That means that the City of Vancouver now functions like any other American city. The City Manager is tied to the political well-being of the Mayor and party in power…Informed City staff were also no longer allowed to speak to the media on issues they were expert on, with the current council developing a media centre and hiring quite a lot of communications staff .“
Six years ago I also wrote that Development Cost Levies and Community Amenity Contributions were in danger of being axed so that more housing can be built more cheaply. But someone has to pay for what those levies provided, “items such as engineering infrastructure, park space, libraries, social and non-profit housing, childcare facilities and other public amenities.” In fact Coriolis Consulting has produced a detailed report on Community Amenity Contributions pointing out these charges are not causing rising house prices but “have paid for amenities that otherwise would have been funded by property taxes, and in some cases have created affordable housing units. ”
And property taxes? While Mayor Sim campaigned disparaging the previous Mayor who raised property taxes 25 percent over four years, the ABC Council majority has approved a 10.7% property tax increase in 2023 and a 7.5% property tax increase in 2024, an 18.2% raise in the first two years of their leadership. That’s only 6.8 % below that 25 percent that Mayor Sim criticized Mayor Stewart for with the previous municipal government. Will Mayor Sim keep taxes to 3.4% annually over the next two years?
images:sandyjames, britannica, cityofvancouver
The View From Vancouver 