"Of course, taxing everyone a little bit is like putting the frog in the pot before turning up the heat - the mayors must hope the overtaxed and underserved don't notice the slight increase in pain."
George Pajari,
VANCOUVER SUN, OCT. 14,
WEST Vancouver resident, high-tech entrepreneur and thorn in the side of council, George Pajari is not too pleased with the TransLink Mayors' Council vote to approve a two-cents-a-litre gas tax.
Nor is he chuckling at the prospect of an annual $23 property tax hike which, of course, said mayors "hope to avoid."
Wait till Pajari hears the numbers crunched by fellow thorn, North Vancouver's Corrie Kost, namely that "the long-term debt of TransLink is about $1,000 per [Metro] resident."
To emphasize, that is $1,000 over and above the costs of an Evergreen Line and the latest commitments made by your representatives.
Pajari suggests that "people who choose not to use transit" should be "penalized" with road and congestion taxes.
That is where he and I part company, because my position with respect to pouring more dollars down the black hole that is TransLink is this: Not a penny more until we are given two things: a new board of directors and an arms-length, pre-project, value-for-money audit.
Members of the new board must have professional transportation/transit experience, preferably untainted by ties to the federal and provincial governments, and have no current or past connections to companies like Bombardier and SNC-Lavalin.
Next, the audit must be performed by transit-savvy staff from the B.C. auditor general's office, or similar professionals from the U.K. or Germany.
Why those caveats? Some of the most straightforward email conversations I have had about TransLink in recent months have been with Bowen Island councillor Peter Frinton, a member of the Mayors' Council. Although he and I differ on some points - along with 15 others he voted for the recent gas tax package - never once has he given me political spin in answer to my questions. Some of his revelations about what passes for democratic process in this region are enough to send you to the drugstore for anti-nauseants.
Last July, after I suggested that if only TransLink would build at-grade systems instead of SkyTrain, most of its funding problems would disappear, Frinton replied, "Most of the mayors/councillors feel the same way, but have made no headway with the province or feds . . . I have no idea why senior government has been so married to [SkyTrain] technology. . . ."
Well, having asked myself the same question every time TransLink held its hand out, I am ready to take the gloves off on a possible answer: Someone somewhere has found it advantageous to choose proprietary SkyTrain over more affordable alternatives - and the beneficiary cannot be Bombardier alone because, as Frinton observed, the company also manufactures light-rail cars.
Nor, despite their recent vote, does it appear to be the yeasayers on the Mayors' Council. The worst they are guilty of is not telling transportation minister Blair Lekstrom to take his dictates and pay for them.
No, although I have little doubt that some of the advantages have trickled down to a sequence of provincial governments, the TransLink buck stops in Ottawa. Also, because the question being asked has spanned at least 15 years of both Liberal and Conservative governments, whatever the advantages might be, they have been common to both.
Can it be that we pay through the nose merely to keep Quebec happy, or is the situation more sinister than that?
That there is an Ottawa connection seems obvious because, although the questions had their genesis in the mid-1980s when SkyTrain was chosen for the Expo Line, they gathered speed when former NDP premier Glen Clark abruptly changed his mind about using light-rail for the Millennium Line project.
The switch (pressure?) began after he visited Ottawa with Ken Dobell, a former Vancouver City manager under then-mayor Gordon Campbell. The rest is our very expensive TransLink history.
But no matter where the SkyTrain advantages originate, regional taxpayers are left paying for the mess because, as Frinton told me last March, "The provincial government has long attested that Lower Mainland municipalities have 'property tax room' as a result of lifting the hospital tax in our area."
There is much more to tell and sooner or later that will happen. For now, and in support of the relatively few people who try to keep this issue in the public eye, all I will add is this: Rather than trying to Occupy Vancouver without really knowing why, what the protestors could do is start small - Occupy TransLink, deal with that well documented billion-dollar problem and, if that succeeds, move on from there. [email protected]
