Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Coming up in this episode, City Beat with Ian Mass. Today, the Mayor's Budget Task Force report recommends a major rethink of what the city is prepared to fund.
Speaker: Vancouver City Council's New Year starts next Tuesday with two new major policy reports, one from the Mayor's Budget Task Force and the other about the Jericho lands. There's also a huge rezoning proposed for the Joyce Street SkyTrain station. Red Eyes Ian Mass joins me today to walk us through these issues in his City Beat report. Hello Ian. Good morning Jane.
Speaker: Now, there have been a number of delays in the budget task force getting its report to council, but it's finally going to happen this coming week. Remind us who this task force is and what they set out to do.
Speaker: Sure. Well, it came directly from Mayor Ken Simms office came last April. He had a big press conference and unveiled it. The reports authors are seven volunteer accountants and they were supported by 22 students from SFU and UBC and Langara college. And they were asked, and I'll quote, to review the current city of Vancouver budget, examine where the funds are allocated on a line by line basis.
Speaker: and report its findings in preparation for the 2024 city of Vancouver budget process. Sounds like something only an accountant could do. But anyways, interestingly, they didn't do either of these tasks. The report wasn't ready for the 2024 city of Vancouver budget process.
Speaker: That's already taken place and that budget for 2024 was passed in December. So unless council decides to reopen that debate around this year's budget, it won't really, this report won't have any budget implications this year. And the task force didn't go over the budget on a line by line basis. They said they were more interested in understanding the long -term structural issues that confront the city.
Speaker: So if they didn't do those things, what did they say? Well, they had about 17 different recommendations and they made them with great gusto and great force. Let me give you some quotes. They declare in their introduction that this report is profound, just in case you didn't know.
Speaker: It's urgent. It's Vancouver's way forward. It's bold in its recommendations. And finally, it's the defining moment to secure Vancouver's status as a world -class city. So big expectations from this report. They've got three main points. I'll go over them in order. They start with a premise.
Speaker: that Vancouver seeing an unsustainable climb in property taxes. Now that's a big debate and I know that Primus would get some hard pushback from other economists who believe in fact that Vancouver real estate taxes are on the low side. And for the record, this ABC Council
Speaker: has approved 18 .6 % increase in city taxes over the last two years. The second point they make, this is a quote, there's a staggering $500 million annual gap in infrastructure funding. So what's that? Well, that's the money that's required every year to renew or replace these cities existing infrastructure and amenities.
Speaker: the streets, the sewers, the parks, community centers, libraries. Now, the city owns about $30 billion in property, but the one that they think should be the moneymaker is a smaller one called the property endowment funds.
Speaker: The city owns about $6 billion in land and facilities that they rent out or lease out all across the city. But the city only received about $13 million in profits from that in 2023, which is just a pitiful return on $6 billion in assets, a kind of less than 1%, 0 .2 % return.
Speaker: The task force is saying the city needs to get a lot more aggressive in getting a return out of these assets. And how would they do that? Well, they talk about privatizing services, selling public property to help fund this deficit. So you wonder with the denial of we're not going to sell any park board property, but that's certainly part of this endowment fund and the land that the city has.
Speaker: They are also saying that they want the city to compete with small nonprofits and hospital foundations for charitable donations and the naming rights to public buildings. And you may remember a couple of city beats ago, we were joking about the Chip Wilson Quetzalano Pool, but that may not be a joke at all. And thirdly, they concluded that the city's role is expanding beyond its core jurisdiction. They're doing more than they're supposed to.
Speaker: Although the report itself admits that the Vancouver Charter, and that's the thing, that's the provincial law that governs the city, essentially says the city can spend money on most anything it wants, as long as it makes sure that law and order in the city reigns supreme.
Speaker: So the task force wants the city to define what core services are and only fund those. And anything outside of core services would have to go through a really rigorous process that they're proposing before it gets approved.
Speaker: So despite not having a definition of what those core services are, the task force seems to assume that these non -core services include climate initiatives, social housing, childcare, emergency aid, healthcare, cost for drug poisoning. They name all of those things as really not core services. So all of those in their mind have been downloaded from senior governments onto municipalities.
Speaker: When you look at that package of services, that's a lot of money. It's about $380 million that the city is going to spend on those services in 2024, which is about 13 % of the $3 billion city budget in 2024. So a lot of people in organizations certainly depend on that funding. So council is going to consider a whole number of other recommendations, including those, the ones I just talked about. So we'll see what council
Speaker: does with this next week. Yikes. Yes, exactly. The second major policy report council is going to be looking at this coming week is about the Jericho land. So what's this about? Well, it refers to a 90 -acre site looking over beautiful Jericho Park and English Bay up in exclusive Point Grey.
Speaker: These lands, or Jericho lands, are owned by a joint partnership between the Musqueam, Squamish, and Sueda Tooth Nations, and a federal agency called Canada Lands Company. And they're proposing mid and real high rise development. They're high density development. They want it to be a mixed use, retail, residential, car light community centered on rapid transit, which includes a proposed SkyTrain station.
Speaker: when they build that extension from Arbutus out to UBC. They're talking about 13 ,000 new homes there, 24 ,000 new people and employment spaces for about 3 ,000 new jobs. 30 % of the housing is being built for low and moderate income households. There's going to be a community center, what they call a non -traditional library or a house of learning, social cultural spaces, 500 childcare spaces,
Speaker: and land for an elementary school. And on top of that, about 30 acres of new parks and open spaces. And all of it's going to be planned and designed to promote the First Nations culture. And all of that, big bill, $750 million in amenities, but apparently it's all going to be paid for by the development. What's the broader significance of this project for the Musqueam Squamish and Slaewa Tooth?
Speaker: Well, the report, which was done by the First Nations, describes this as a, quote, a generational opportunity for the nations to reaffirm their relationship with the land, to honor their heritage, and to rebuild their communities and to celebrate their unique identity under four themes of UNDRIP, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
Speaker: They talk about the nation's ownership of and self -determination in the provision of community amenities, a new culturally safe affordable housing for Indigenous people, opportunities to rebuild the Indigenous economy, and new spaces for the nation's cultural activities and celebrations. This is a huge development, especially for the West Side. What's the next step? Well, it's a policy statement.
Speaker: And if it passes, it essentially says...
Speaker: the proposals on the right track. So the next step is to go back and prepare an official development plan, which is really a blueprint. It's a legal blueprint. It goes into much more detail. It'll take about a year to do that. And when they do that, they're ready to start building. It'll take about 25 years to do that. But before you put a down payment on something out here, there's a lot of organized opposition to this.
Speaker: Many feel the density and the proposed building heights, I think they're 30, 40 stories. Some of the buildings are way too high for this area. The concerns about the potential negative impacts on the area is natural beauty and it is beautiful. The Tony neighborhood character will be negatively impacted and just overall livability. So we'll see how this plays out this coming Wednesday when council has its first look at the report.
Speaker: Now, you also have an interesting rezoning application around the Joyce Street SkyTrain station coming before Council next week. Tell us about that. Well, all we're talking about is towers, eh? And this is a tower one. It's two of them, a 30 and 33 story building. They want to put a lot of rental units in there, 679.
Speaker: with 10 % of those being below market rents. And there's a childcare facility they want to have in there, 37 spaces for kids there, which is underrepresented there in that Joyce Collingwood neighborhood. And it's right at the Joyce SkyTrain station, just south of the entrance there.
Speaker: It's crowded down there. There's lots of mid and high rises already built, and this will just add to the metro town feel of things. But this is the kind of density that Mayor Simms says he wants. So this is an interesting proposal that way.
Speaker: Interesting thing that I found about this application is there's already a 12 story tower there that was built only 30 years ago. It's not very old. Obviously 30 years is not there. 60, 65 years are in the normal building cycles for these kinds of things, but it's leaky. It was built back in the nineties, the leaky condo era and the repair costs are somewhere between 75 and a hundred thousand dollars per unit.
Speaker: So the strata owners in an existing leaky building are likely pretty happy to sell, probably even at a profit, to a developer who's asking the city for massive rezoning so they can make a profit. But the question that I couldn't, a couple of questions I couldn't see were even asked in the report. The first is, is it the city's role to help strata owners out of having to pay repairs?
Speaker: In fact, probably make a profit out of it. So because if you repaired the building and it sounds like it's repairable, they've got a quote on how much it would cost. You'd still have a 12 story building with 59 units. So this is a big tear down. So the other question is what's the environmental impact on demolishing a 12 story building and replacing it with something four times as big. But neither of these questions seem to have been addressed or even asked when I read the report.
Speaker: So I suspect this will pass easily. And there we go. That's all that fits this week at City Beat. That certainly is the Tower Report this week. It is. Thanks so much, Ian. You're welcome, Jane. I've been speaking with Red Eye Collective member Ian Mass, and he was here with his City Beat Report.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
