A bid by the Lower Mainland's mayors to use B.C.'s new municipal auditor to get a peek behind TransLink's closed doors has been stymied by the province. For now, anyway.
In a Nov. 9 letter on behalf of the Metro Vancouver Mayors' Council on Regional Transportation, District of North Vancouver Mayor Richard Walton asked Premier Christy Clark to bring the billion-dollar transit authority "under the eye and umbrella" of the new civic watchdog. The idea would be to "ensure value for public dollars," he wrote.
But in a reply that reached the council last week, Clark's government said no - or, more precisely, not now.
"The key priority right now is to move forward on the legislation this spring so that the (auditor) could be appointed and begin . . . the important work of undertaking performance audits on municipal and regional districts," said Community, Sport and Cultural Development Minister Ida Chong, replying on behalf of the province.
The response was a letdown for municipal taxpayers, said Walton, speaking to the North Shore News Tuesday.
"It did hit a nerve with a number of my colleagues," he said. "We believe the municipal government office auditing TransLink would be very much to the public benefit."
The disagreement is the latest in an ongoing struggle between the two levels of government over the region's transportation system that began several years ago when the provincial government took TransLink out of the hands of elected officials and handed it to an unelected board.
Since then, according to the mayor's council, important decisions about the funding and future direction of public transit have been taking place behind closed doors, leaving taxpayers blind to the authority's inner workings and cutting it off from the people who do the region's planning.
"You've got a group funded primarily though public funds . . . that has no elected people on it," said Walton. "This is not a good governance model."
The new watchdog, dubbed the Auditor General for Local Government, was announced by Clark's government last year and is due to begin its work in spring 2012. The idea, according to Victoria, is to ensure civic tax dollars are being spent wisely by the province's 190 municipalities and regional districts.
Many of B.C.'s mayors objected to the plan initially, saying their books were transparent enough - in fact more transparent in many cases than the province's.
But with the AGLG now a done deal, said Walton, it occurred to the Lower Mainland mayors that they might be able to use the new auditor to bring some degree of accountability to the undemocratic TransLink. Chong's response appears to quash that notion, he said.
The door may not be entirely closed, however, said West Vancouver-Capilano MLA Ralph Sultan. After speaking with the minister Tuesday, he said he was left with the impression her response was more a postponement than an absolute no.
"TransLink is sort of in a grey area," he said. "I think Ida's instincts were: 'Let's walk before we run; let's not try to tackle these hybrid entities like TransLink that are not strictly a municipal activity.'"
Every government body, TransLink included, should be subject to performance audits, he said, but the AGLG has to be allowed to find its feet before its mandate starts to expand.
"I would predict that with the passage of time entities such as TransLink will fall within its purview," said Sultan.
Both Walton and Sultan said the province appeared to be open to revisiting of TrasnLink's governance structure.
Walton said the mayors' council plans to follow up with Chong about its concerns.
