Public Hearing on Vancouver’s 2006 Budget: Hour 2
On March 22 and 23 Vancouver City Council heard from a list of 67 people about what our priorities for the 2006 City Operating Budget should be, and what could be done to save $29 million in order to balance this year’s budget without having to increase property taxes.
This review is Part 2 which reviews the second hour of the more than 6.5 hours it took to hear each of the 67 speakers.
Speaker # 6 Vancouver Children’s Safety Association. This was the first of two presentations on the same subject of making sure that dogs have a license and are kept on a leash where required. The arguments were that if the city hired more enforcement officers, more tickets could be issued raising revenue for the city. Also, if the by-laws were enforced more people would actually spend the money to license their dog. The figure of $1.2 million was raised in further license fees for the 70 percent of owners who do not have one for their dog as extra revenue to help with the budget. When the second presentation was made later Councillor Suzanne Anton said that if the fines were raised too high that the people hired to issue them wouldn’t. That kind of stunned me. I figure that if a fine is set at a high amount it will help encourage people to obey a by-law, it will also help cover the cost of collecting on the fine if it isn’t paid.
Speaker # 7 Vancouver Women’s Health Collective. This was a plea for the city to keep their grant going of $35,000 per year. This organization had received a letter from the city, along with other community service groups, telling them that their community services grant was being terminated and offering a final termination grant of less then what they had been receiving. There was concern expressed by councillors about the way termination notice was given and it was clear a few of them had no idea how grant priorities were set. Councillor Raymond Louie spent a lot of time debating city staff about how a city budget should be prepared and learning how it was prepared. For someone who has been through this process three times already since 2002 I am stunned that he still doesn’t understand how the whole thing works or why he didn’t raise these questions 4 years ago. Other councillors said they would see what they could do. The whole process took 23 minutes. A lot of political speeches, no solutions.
Speaker # 9 Vancouver Fair Tax Coalition. Their message was to keep the tax rate for commercial property owners frozen. This message will be echoed many times from other business groups. Councillors David Cadman and Heather Deal chose to give political speeches about how the Federal and Provincial governments do not allow the city to raise taxes any other way. No solutions.
And that was it for hour 2. Five presentations over 61 minutes. In total 9 speakers over the first two hours. Each allowed 5 minutes to make their presentation. In the first two hours of hearing from the public the city did most of the talking.
Read Part 1