Category: Uncategorized

Go logo

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

By now, most of you have probably seen something about a new logo at the City, or have seen it pop up in Social Media. If you want to get a sense of the thinking behind the logo, there is a great video produced by the City to put it in context:

There is also a bunch more background info here that includes discussions of new wordmarks and colour palates that will be used as design guides in new City digital and printed communications.

I have of course received some feedback on the new logo, and so far it’s about 50/50, which is about as positive as one can expect with something as subjective as this, especially when you recognize people are much more likely to write if angry than they are if happy. Examples from the two more recent emails I received on this:

“My husband and I are appalled at the change in the Logo. We were born and raised in this city, our children and grandchildren were all born and raised in this city. All very proud of the history of our city. Why do you have the right to try and change history by changing the Logo? It distinguishes us from all the other surrounding municipalities and cities.”

”Both my wife and I like the new logo. I represents both the history of New Westminster and today’s reality”.

(I am going to go ahead and assume these two emails were not from the same husband-wife couple).

I wrote a blog post about the process to create a new logo last year as we were launching the public engagement process, and it has a few answers to questions that came up at the time, and are coming up again.

The discussion about updating the logo began almost three years ago. The current yellow-crown-on blue-serif-wordmark logo, adopted in 2008, is pretty dated, and through extensive public consultation (more than 650 people) and guided by a committee of volunteer citizens of the City, the new logo was selected a few months ago (with some presentation development and refinements between then and now). I think it honours the past of the City – subtle but obvious-when-you-see-it nods to the Indigenous history of this place on the Fraser River, and a more obvious link to the industrial “working river” history and the present relationship to the river. Far from erasing history, the new logo it meant to honour the diverse and unique history of the City and this land. I think the process the City chose to let the community lead the rebranding process also honours the people who live, work, learn, and play in this community, and the builders of this community in the past and present.

I also like the modern symbolism of the logo, and this was the part that the brand creators talked about that really pulled me into seeing it. We often talk about New West as a small city with big ambitions, we make big moves and are bold in taking on large challenges. We think of ourselves as hardworking, powerful beyond our size. These characteristics of the humble tugboat – a small but incredibly powerful vehicle moving big loads against the current – evoke that same spirit. This sprit, and the clear centering of the Fraser River as the symbol of our City are the foundations of the new logo. And I can’t disagree with that.

As was the case last time, the new logo will be phased in as we work through old materials. You will be seeing both the old and new logos next to each other for some time. We will use the existing letterhead (for example) until the supply is exhausted, and the new supply when ordered will have the new logo. Things like vehicles that take a while to age out of use will have the old logo on them until the vehicle is replaced or refurbished (indeed, we still have older vehicles in the City with the old “Crest” logo on them because they are older than 2008!). That means the cost to shift to the new logo is minimized, and is part of regular operational budgets in the City.

Peter

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The things I wrote on this website used to be more political than they are now, and a lot more partisan. No shame, those things are still there in the archives, but since I am in this new role, I am trying to keep this page about what’s happening, about policy and outcomes, as there is lots of room elsewhere for the bickering part of the job (I engage in bit more of that at times over in my Newsletter, subscribe here). This post however, will be partisan and political, and maybe a bit personal. You are warned.

Peter Julian is an inspiring leader, was an incredible Member of Parliament, and I thank him for his service to the community and for his friendship.

I have said many times before, I expect a lot of a Member of Parliament. They need to be a bold voice for their community in caucus and Parliament, they need to push progressive policy in Ottawa that reflects the needs of our community but also builds our strength as a Country, and they need to be present here in community helping people connect with a distant and vague federal bureaucracy. Peter excelled at all three, which is amazing when you consider he never served in government caucus in his two decades of work.

Peter has been incredibly helpful in taking the concerns of our community to Ottawa, and in assuring our community was supported by the federal government. There are many examples, but even in the last year: his role in helping get my face in front of the Federal Minister of Housing so I could repeatedly make the case for New Westminster as an excellent Housing Accelerator Fund opportunity means more than $11 Million came here to better support housing affordability, housing diversity, and accelerated permitting and approval processes at the City. Peter’s support was instrumental in us getting $1.4 Million from the Emergency Treatment Fund to help pay for the Three Crises Response Pilot: the second largest ETF grant for any municipality in Canada, and the only grant given in BC. This is helping us move more firmly and faster addressing the combined crises of homelessness and untreated mental health and addictions. These are real, tangible wins for our community on the key issues affecting our community.

Peter was also instrumental in the federal NDP’s forcing of the minority Liberal government to bring in the biggest new social programs since before the lost decade of Mulroney: dental care, Pharmacare, and childcare programs are on the Federal agenda in part because of Peter’s work as House Leader. His work to make workplaces safer, to end corporal punishment of children, to assure COVID relief went to working people and those in need not just banks; to bring in new Anti-Scab legislation, there is a long list of substantive work Peter accomplished from the opposition and third party benches in Ottawa. He made a difference at the national level.

All along, Peter ran one of the more proactive constituency offices in the country, helping people manage immigration hiccups, get access to support programs to which they are entitled, and helping folks navigate the sometimes-challenging income tax and federal support programs designed to help those most in need on our community. When you attend a Peter Julian Christmas or Lunar New Year event, it is always remarkable to see the number of people who come up to thank Peter for the help he and his constituency staff  had provided them personally. It would be hard to imagine a more effective liaison between Ottawa and his constituents than Peter. He’s also a renowned hard worker in the House, a brilliant spokesperson for working and vulnerable people, and a hell of a nice guy.

I have been lucky to call Peter a friend for most of my time in New West. I remember the first time I really met him, I bought one of those “Dinner with the Member of Parliament” silent auction prizes, and my partner and I met Peter in a local pub. We had a few beers. Immediately it was clear he was an engaged listener, though I’m not sure he exactly knew how to take this loud opinionated guy who kept going on about bike lanes. He took it all in stride and with his characteristic class, and it ended up being the first of many, many conversations about community, about public policy, about working for change, and about leadership – conversations that continue to this day. In my elected life, Peter always answered the phone, always had time to hear about a problem or an idea, and was always quick to think about how he, the Federal Government, or someone else in his broad local network, could help. In that sense, he is a mentor and a support system as well as a friend.

Thank you Peter for everything you have done for the community that you love. I know you aren’t going away, the fight in you is too strong, and that love too strong.

Nothing here should be read as a slight to Jake Sawatzky. He won fair and square, and he seems like a really dedicated and engaged guy. I have heard him speak and think his heart is in the right place. I don’t envy the learning curve he is facing, but wish him nothing but the best in getting up to speed on this really important task, because his success in his role is our success as a community.

However, looking at this from the political side, I honestly don’t know what his win means. The election was for most of the night a statistical three-way tie between people who, by conventional campaign wisdom, should not have been in a tie. One is a long-established and highly respected candidate who might have the most famous name in the city and who ran a well designed and executed voter identification and GOTV campaign. The second was a young and inexperienced person whose name was completely unknown in the community two weeks after the writs dropped who had little visible campaign machinery. The third was a familiar if not well known local business man who was dropped in at the last minute to replace a turfed candidate that still ran against him. No disrespect at all to Indy Panchi or Jake Sawatzky, but on pure old-fashioned local campaign paper, it should not have been close. But it was.

At the surface level, it’s clear what happened: people voted nationally for the Prime Minister they wanted. They paid more attention to the Poll Aggregators and Vote Strategically campaigns than before. (IMHO) Poilievre ran on not-being-Trudeau and people’s fears of their neighbours while Carney ran on not-being-Poilievre and people’s fears of our neighbour to the south. Singh tried (unsuccessfully) to earn the credit he deserved for major new social programs while trying to take up space vacated by the Liberals by running messages about middle-class affordability until the campaign saw the writing on the wall and fell back on also-not-being-Poilievre. But re-imagining last month’s messaging isn’t what I want to talk about, I’m sure they all made sense in their respective campaign bubbles at the time.

Instead, I wonder what it means when community no longer sends a representative to Ottawa, but instead Ottawa sends  representatives for us to choose between. I know there has always been an aspect of the latter in our system, but I wonder what it means to the kind of politics I’m interested in – local organizing, talking directly to people, building community and taking local action and being present. I add this to the ongoing questions about how we even tell our local stories when there is no local journalism, our local conversation is increasingly moderated by social media algorithms, and bad actors seem interested in driving wedges between us for shit and giggles. Can we support our community and scale it outward? Will anyone care? I don’t want to go down the “Western Alienation” route, but how will Ottawa know about New West, and how will our values keep us together as democracy re-structures itself around the rest of the world going to hell?

So last Friday I got together with a couple of dozen people doing good things in this community, or interested in doing those good things, and I hope they will help me in a conversation about what’s next. Because community has to come first.

Anecdotes and Data

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I don’t usually dip into media criticism here – there is an old saying about politicians not pissing off people who buy ink by the barrel – but every once in a while an article comes out that needs a response.

In this case, a predictable Douglas Todd article mentions New West. For those who don’t know him, Todd is Post Media’s go-to guy for anti-immigration and anti-urbanism opinion. As in this article, he often taps Patrick Condon, a UBC Landscape Architect who feigns “housing expert” status by pining for Vancouver’s pastoral past.

The reason I highlight this story is that I wanted to test the central premise – that increased growth and increased density means increased taxes. Todd is an opinion writer, not a journalist, because a journalist would do a bit of research to test their idea against data, while an opinion writer is comfortable relying on anecdotes that fit the narrative he is trying to craft.

I’m not a journalist, but I do love data. So I dug through news articles and budget documents from 20 Lower Mainland municipalities (all but Anmore – because their data was hard to find, and after a bit of digging, I decided meh Anmore) to determine what their tax rate increases have been over the last three years, since the beginning of this council term. I do this all the time anyway because I see it as part of my job. I really should know where we stand in comparison to other cities, even if I am the first to acknowledge, it isn’t a competition. I also took the short term rate of growth data from the Metro Vancouver Population Projections report for 2024. Plot the two against each other, and this is what you get:

I don’t want to get all Stats 101 on you (the R-squared here is 0.07), but that distribution is pretty close to a circle, meaning there is no correlation between rate of growth and tax increases. The highest tax rate increases over on the right in red (Bowen Island, Langley City and Surrey) are cities pretty close to the middle in growth-wise and the three fastest growing cities up top in green (New West, North Van City, and Langley Township) are mid-to-low in tax rate increase.

Another common Todd/Condon argument is that density of population leads to tax increases. Data on population density is easy to find, so here goes plot number 2:

Again, the cluster of four highest-density cities up top (Vancouver, New West, White Rock, and North Van City) are about the middle of the tax increase range, and the tree highest and three lowest tax increase cities are across the spectrum of density, with none of them in the top 4 growth wise. With an R-squared of 0.003, the data here just doesn’t correlate.

The data does not tell the whole story, as it never does in these comparisons, because these are 20 different municipalities with different pressures and priorities. Some cities are intentionally running their reserves down to avoid tax increases, while others are building reserves. Some are making up for previous council underfunding of services, others are paring back on services. Langley City increasing taxes at a high rate doesn’t tell you that they have gone from the lowest-taxed jurisdiction in the region to the third-from lowest, or that West Vancouver at one tenth the density of New Westminster and with the lowest rate of growth in the entire region is still the highest-taxed municipality in Greater Vancouver, despite its relatively modest tax increases in the last few years. There are stories to be told in this data beyond the simple scatter graph; the anecdotes that Todd relies on belie those details.

His narrative is that density and growth are bad, and he will find any ill the public has concerns about, and blame it on density and growth, facts be damned.

The last time Douglas Todd wrote about New West, he lamented there are no cafes on Carnarvon Street, when there are at least 4 places to get coffee in the 500m stretch of Carnarvon he was describing. I just don’t know where Mr. Todd gets his bad information about our City. He sure never calls me.

If you want to read more into the data above, here’s my table. If you find a wrong number, or have Anmore tax data and really want me to include it, let me know!

On Electric Rates

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

As mentioned in last week’s Council Report, I brought a motion asking:

That the NW Electrical Commission include in its ongoing strategic planning and reporting back to Council a pathway to future residential rates that closely match BC Hydro rates while balancing other factors that assure the financial sustainability of the utility.

This was referred to the New Westminster Electrical Utility Commission for consideration, so I thought I would unpack a bit of my motivation for asking for this, with a bit of history of how we got here.

I have been on the Electrical Commission for about 6 years now, and am glad to have seen some significant evolution in how our Utility serves its community. Long appreciated for the reliability of the service and the professionalism of the crews that keep it buzzing, we are now in a time of bigger transition with new leadership and a modified corporate structure. These changes brought the need for the Commission to develop a renewed strategic plan, and they are currently starting that work.

One of the jobs of the Commission is to oversee the budget of the Utility (which is a bit separate from the rest of the City budget) and make a recommendation to Council about rate structures. Over the last 5 years, I would suggest this is somewhere I have sometimes disagreed with some of my Commission colleagues. I am not the Chair of the Commission, but as Mayor I am one of two Council representatives (along with Councillor Minhas) to serve on the commission along with members of the community who have subject matter experience. In my time on the Commission, I have invariably voted along with the consensus on the rate recommendation to Council, because that recommendation has always aligned with the priorities and mandate of the Commission and its existing strategic plan. So this motion is meant to engage the Commission in a discussion about those priorities and mandate and how those relate to rate setting.

As I have written here in the past, our rates need to cover the cost of operating the utility, including planning for significant infrastructure investment, and the utility has always returned a dividend to the City’s general coffers. Recently this dividend has been augmented by Low Carbon Fuel Credits that support the City’s capital planning.

To me, the value proposition of the utility has always been that we pay about the same as BC Hydro rates while we generally get more reliable service and have the ability to integrate other services like BridgeNet and District Energy. The Utility also gives us unique abilities to incentivize and promote community climate action measures like EV charging or air conditioners for low-income households, and allows us to “contract-in” city services like streetlight and traffic light maintenance. On top of this all, the utility still returns revenue to the City budget every year in the form of a dividend that benefits property tax payers. It is clearly a good deal for New Westminster residents and businesses, and makes suggestions that we sell off this valuable and profitable public asset a non-starter.

In the last few years, partly because of decisions we made at the Commission, but mostly because of unpredictable shifts in policy by several Provincial Governments and at BC Hydro, we have seen our rates here increasingly decoupled from BC Hydro Rates, with most New West Electrical residential customers paying a bit more than they would to BC Hydro. I am concerned if that trend continues, the value proposition above is eroded.

Council recently approved the recommendation of the Commission for 2025 rates, and in that reporting it was recognized our rates have increased more than Hydro’s over the last couple of years. This is largely because we anticipate upcoming increases in Hydro’s rates to reflect the significant capital investments they are going to need to support in coming years. Our practice has been to bring more rate stability to our customers, smaller increases every year instead of what we see happening at BC Hydro, where flatter rates will inevitably be accented by sudden jumps. The goals have been to buffer against random and unpredictable annual rate shifts, and to assure we have a stable fixed dividend to the city. See this graph from that report in our annual budget deliberations:

In my time on Council, we have never made explicit the goal of coupling our rates with those of BC Hydro, and it was my intent in this motion to ask Council whether this is an instruction we wanted to send to the Commission as they do strategic planning. Council unanimously agreed.

That said, rate setting is complicated, and includes in it a myriad of other policy goals, short and long term. This is part of the reason why we have a Commission to review this specific part of our budget setting. For those reasons, I didn’t think it was appropriate to hamstring the Commission or Council by suggesting our bills should look exactly like a BC Hydro bill. Instead, we sent a  message to the Commission that rates largely similar to BC Hydro’s should be one of the principles for future rate setting, and for them to come back with recommendations for how we get there while maintaining the economic sustainability of the Electrical Utility.

McBride

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Last night, another New Westminster pedestrian was struck by a vehicle on McBride Boulevard, and died of their injuries. My heart aches for the person who died, their bereaved family, and the driver or drivers involved who are no doubt dealing with their own trauma today. Everyone is harmed by an incident like this, including our First Responders who yet again have to respond to tragedy.

We don’t know the details of this tragic incident, and cannot rush to judgement, but this is the third serious incident involving pedestrians in less than 6 months on this 1km stretch of McBride, all with differing causes and impacts. We need to take action on the common thread.

With that in mind, I will be calling on ICBC to immediately install intersection cameras at two key intersections in New Westminster, and for the Minister of Public Safety to expeditiously act on the calls from UBCM member municipalities to give local governments the authority to install and operate these life-saving interventions, so that our City can take quick action to save more lives moving forward.

McBride Boulevard is a part of Highway 1a, a Provincially-regulated truck route and key connection to the Pattullo Bridge for regional commuters. It is also a local-serving road that connects New Westminster residents to key destinations, including schools, shopping and recreation areas. The intersections of McBride with Sixth and Eighth Avenues are important crossroads in our community for all modes of travel, and New Westminster residents need to feel safe when using them.

Along with this recent spike in serious incidents where pedestrians were killed or seriously injured, residents are sharing their numerous anecdotes of drivers far exceeding the 50km/h speed limit on McBride and ignoring the existing traffic lights in these heavily-travelled intersections with frightening regularity.

We must work to assure it is safe for New Westminster residents to move around in their City. Engineering improvements to McBride are already being considered following a recent Intersection Safety Review. With the upcoming opening of an expanded (and safer!) replacement for the Pattullo Bridge, we will be engaging with the Ministry of Transportation to determine what speed control measures are required to assure there won’t be negative impacts on vulnerable road users as new traffic patterns emerge. However, engineering alone cannot change the dangerous behaviours that are resulting in death and injury on our streets.

This year, the City of New Westminster is launching a Vision Zero task force to bring partners in from all provincial and municipal agencies involved in local road safety to change the culture of road safety in New Westminster, with a vision to put an end to these unnecessary injuries and deaths. In the meantime, we can still take action in areas where we know immediate intervention is possible.

Intersection and speed cameras save lives and reduce injuries. This is why ICBC funds the Integrated Safety Camera Program. With 140 cameras province-wide, it is insufficient to the current need, and local governments are not empowered to install cameras where we identify safety concerns in our communities.

Give us the cameras, and we will save lives.

Three serious pedestrian incidents in a 6 month period should be a wake-up call to everyone. Drivers need to slow down and follow the rules of the road, and governments have to work together to make the engineering and enforcement interventions we know will save lives. I’ll be delivering this message straight to the BC government when I meet with elected officials in Victoria next month.

Stay safe out there folks.

2025

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Is it just me, or did the Christmas break seemed a little extended his year? Maybe it’s the pace of media events unfolding faster than real life, maybe it’s the mid-week Christmas and New Years day that seems to encroach on two weekends, maybe its the existential dread…

This first week I was really back at it in the office, and it involved quite a bit of planning for what is coming in 2025. It looks like it’s going to be a big year, so I thought I would jot down some thoughts about what is on the horizon for New Westminster in 2025.

The biggest body of work in front of us right now are updates to our Official Community Plan to comply with the provincial housing regulations introduced last year. We have several interim measures in place to address SSMUH, TOA development and Amenity Funding, but much has changed, such that our understanding of the legislation and how it integrates with the City’s existing policies and Bylaws, that those three links I just pointed to are probably no longer very accurate. By December, 2025, we will need to have updated our OCP to include SSMUH across the City and TOA, to align our OCP with the newly regulated Housing Needs Assessment reports, and to figure out where townhouses and row homes fit in this new model. There will be some level of public consultation in regards to these OCP updates, so keep tuned to Be Heard New West if you are interested.

We will also be bringing forward new policies to address the provincial regulatory changes in how we finance growth. With new housing comes new infrastructure needs, from roads to sewers and parks, and new amenity needs like recreation and childcare. We use DCCs to pay for the former, but now have the tool called ACC to pay for the latter. However, this new tool comes with complications, and impacts our Density Bonus and other programs. We have an interim measure in place now, but by mid-2025 will have to have new ACC and Density Bonus policies in place, and will need to have a better understanding of the community need projected for ward a decade so we know what exactly it is we are trying to finance.

Fortunately, we are almost completed our new Parks and Recreation Comprehensive Plan, and expect to adopt a plan in 2025 that will set the course for the next generation of Parks and Rec investments. We have already been through some extensive public consultation on this, both from the “general public” and directed consultation with user groups like organized sports teams, youth, seniors, and neighbourhood groups. There is a tonne of reporting out you can read here. This consultation will be backstopped by detailed analysis by staff and consultants on anticipated needs for the decade ahead, recognizing the recreation space is different than it was even a decade ago as our population grows and demographics shift, as youth gravitate to less formal sports structures, as the regional offerings of fields, rinks, and pools has evolved, and as emergent trends (pickleball, anyone?) and shifting interest in park use towards more passive uses mean what we used ot need is not what we will be needing looking forward. I’m really excited to see where this study takes us as a community.

You may have heard the news that Lisa Spitale is retiring at the end of 2025, and the hiring of a new CAO is a pretty significant piece of work for Council – the only time we really get involved in HR projects. I also can emphasize how much of a shift this represents. Lisa has worked for New Westminster since 1992, and was appointed CAO in 2013. She has worked for five different mayors, and seen the population of New Westminster double during her New West career. She is one of the most respected City Managers in the province, highly respected by her staff, by the business community, and by the professional and academic planning communities. She is also a pleasure to work with. Council will have our work cut out for us filling those shoes.

The City is working with the Chamber of Commerce on an Economic Forum this February. The idea is to bring local and regional business leaders together for the first time in the Post-COVID world and discuss challenges and opportunities for both the local and regional economy. With the integration of Economic Development and Arts and Culture under the new Community Services department, and with our local economic indicators all trending in a positive direction (even compared to numbers from before the COVID dip), there are a lot of reasons to be positive about economic growth in New West. But there is still nervousness around affordability and with the chaos down south and in Ottawa, we are looking at uncertainty in the future. The conversations at the forum about how we can better support and future-proof local businesses should be a positive one, and should help us set a course for EcDev work for the rest of the term.

I am also excited to see where the Youth Climate Leadership Team will be taking us in 2025. This new program brings a group of local folks between 15 and 24 years old to work on a project of project s of their own choosing with City support, with the goals of giving youth some leadership experience, and moving the needle on climate action in the City. There have been two meetings so far, and the group is deep into the forming and visioning stages, with a plan to come to Council before the beginning of summer with project proposals.

We will also be striking a Vision Zero task force this spring to shift the mindset around road safety in the city. I don’t expect there will be a lot of public-facing results from this task force right up front, as the first phase of work involves bringing partners and stakeholders together (engineering, police, fire, and provincial agencies involved in transportation and public health) to understand who is doing what, who holds jurisdiction where, and who is collecting what data. This aligns with the multidisciplinary and data-driven approach that makes Vision Zero different than the traditional models of road safety. I’m excited about this work!

And then there are ongoing programs that are ramping up in 2025: continued implementation of the Active Transportation Network Plan that hopes to bring mobility lanes to all major destinations and within 400m of every home in New West; full staffing and activation of the Crises Response Pilot Project; continued work with the development community, senior governments and the non-profit community to address our Housing Needs Report; and more.

It’s going to be a busy year, and let’s hope the political distractions (federal elections, American instability, social media enshittification, etc.) don’t distract from the value of this good work, and our ability to meaningfully engage the community in a positive and proactive way about the work.

Taxes – 2024

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

We are getting into the 2025 budget cycle in New West Council. We have already done some preliminary fee and charges setting work, but the workshops to discuss utility and tax rates for 2024 start in earnest in late November. It has been a while since I wrote a piece on this page directly about property taxes. There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings about how property taxes work, and I have written a tonne over the years (since even before I was and elected person) to address some of these. As mot of you are new, It is worth repeating some, as zombie ideas pervade the talk of taxes in New Westminster.

Maybe the easiest thing to do is link to those various pieces, but with a caveat: There may be some errors in how I understood the system before I was elected, so don’t pull up an 11-year-old blog post and say “the mayor is lying”. We all learn over time, and I’m happy to see examples of where I had something wrong, this stuff is actually more complicated than people think. Also, the numbers have changed since 2012 (check the dates on some of these posts), but the essential mechanism and comparisons haven’t really (more on that later).

Here’s a long bit about how Mill Rates work and why they are a bad way to compare between municipalities: https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2013/01/on-assessments-and-mil-rates.html

A couple of years later, I compared tax charges on a “typical house” here: https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2013/01/what-is-mil-worth.html

And then added utility charges: https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2013/01/what-about-utilities.html

Shortly after I was elected, I wrote this comparison: https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2015/04/talking-taxes-pt-1.html

I also compared how regional property taxes have changed over time here: https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2016/02/more-taxes-with-colour.html

And there was also a fun conversation about how tax increases relate to property value increases, with a surprising coda at the end: https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2020/07/taxes-2020-part-2.html

I do think it is worthwhile doing an update on our regional comparators. I have repeatedly emphasized this isn’t a competition, because a race to the bottom is rarely a good way to get positive governance results for a community. However, if we are anomalous and doing something so different than our cohort, that’s a good sign we need to check on ourselves, because communities have different scales and priorities, but similar challenges. The general feeling in New Westminster that we are a high-tax municipality is a myth that deserves analysis.

Cities report their numbers in different ways in their public reports, and some make it very difficult to find their actual budget spreadsheets. Fortunately, we are all required to report our finances to the Provincial Government in a consistent way, and the province puts those stats out for public review here: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/governments/local-governments/facts-framework/statistics/tax-rates-tax-burden and all of the data below is pulled form Schedule 707 spreadsheets. Feel free to check my math!

Here is how the property tax burden per resident compares across the 21 municipalities on Metro Vancouver:

You will note that Schedule 707 separates property taxes paid by residents (charged to households) and those paid by other property classes (industrial and commercial, for the most part). The overall tax revenue (from all property types – shown in orange) collected in New Westminster per capita is $1,264 which puts us slightly below the regional average of $1,319 and rans us as the 7th lowest of 21 municipalities. The property tax paid by residential property owners only (shown in blue) is $820 per capita, which puts us a little above the regional average of $785, though we are still the 8th lowest of 21 municipalities.

Overall, we are pretty close to the middle and overall slightly below the middle when it comes to tax burden on our residents.

As the province provides these numbers back through time, we can go back as far as 2005 and see New West has always been in about this position relative to our regional cohort, though it varies a bit most years. Graphically, I have drawn this up to show how we have changed since the last “Wayne Wright” budget of 2014 and today, a good 10 year run to spot trends.

Note the y-axis here isn’t the relative tax level, it just ranks every municipality from 1st (Surrey) with the lowest taxes to 21st (West Van) with the highest taxes every year for the last 10 years. New West has gone from the 10th lowest to the 8th lowest over that time, trading places a few times with Delta and Langley Township, while Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, and Vancouver have passed us going the other way.

When you add all the non-residential taxes to this, it gets a bit messier, as industrial land and residential land change value at different rates and again, cities have different priorities and opportunities when it comes to balancing resident needs and those of businesses. Here, New Westminster goes form 13th lowest to 7th lowest over the last decade. Note Anmore goes from being one of the highest taxed municipalities in the resident-only chart to one of the lowest here – they simply don’t have the business or industrial tax revenue to reduce the burden on taxpayers. And don’t ask me what is happening in Lions Bay.

There are a LOT of factors that play into these comparisons – whether a City is higher growth or lower growth, the timing of when Cities bring in major new operational costs like a new recreation centre, or how the city manages its capital reserves. Some cities have casinos which help reduce tax burden, we have an electrical utility which does the same. So direct comparisons are not easy to make, or even particularly useful, but it is good to have some data to back up discussions about relative tax loads and to spot trends over time. Of course one might argue that all Metro Vancouver property taxes are “too high”, but I encourage you to see how Toronto, Calgary or Seattle compare, and you might be surprised.

Halfway

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The half way mark in this Council term arrived yesterday, and an interesting two years it has been.

People often ask me if it what I expected, and my honest answer is not really. The job is different than the Councillor job, and there is no doubt we are in a different political environment now than we were two years ago. Folks who followed my path here (Hi Mom!) know that I got into this work without a “politics” background, but a background of working and volunteering in the community. When your mindset to problem solving has always been what works best practically (follow the evidence) and where does the community want to go here (follow the community), the shift to include how will this be torqued for political speaking points (follow the meme) takes learning a new set of skills, and a tremendous amount of patience. Not being a trained political lobbyist, this is a steep learning curve.

That said, there are many successes to celebrate from the last two years, and more clarity on the challenges facing us in the next two. In my mind, there are three big news stories in the first half of the term:

Changing Legislation. The provincial government took some bold action on the overlapping housing crises that have been plaguing our region for a decade or more. There was a lot of talk about this, and some pitched political battles between a few local governments and the province. I didn’t stay out of the fray. I said at the time, and continue to believe, that big changes had to happen, and to my Mayor cohort who were gnashing teeth and rending garments, my response was mostly to say “you really should have seen this coming”.

The path we were on was not sustainable, and as radical as the changes proposed seemed at the time, they are not immediate shifts, but long-term system changes that will take a decade or more to demonstrate their value. I am still concerned that the changes they emphasize the wrong tool (“the market”) to solve a problem caused by overreliance on that same tool. None of these changes will make a substantial change unless we have senior governments significantly increase their investment in building non-market housing. And I continue to push to province on our need for investment in schools, child care, and other infrastructure the needs to come with new housing.

Like in other Cities, the sudden legislative changes caused significant work load challenges for staff. Unexpected and foundational shifts in our OCP and Zoning bylaws are not easy to implement, and our new Housing Division did incredible work, met our regulatory deadlines, but also set a path to a new OCP that fits in our community. We were also fortunate to have secured Housing Accelerator Fund support that overlapped with this work, and allowed us to staff up and bring in additional resources to get the job done.

Opening təməsew̓txʷ. No doubt the opening of the single largest capital investment the City has ever made is big news. The doubling of aquatic and recreation space is an important investment, as our population has almost doubled since the CGP was opened in 1972. As expected with a state-of-the-art facility (filter and water management technology that is first in Canada, being the first Zero Carbon certified aquatic facility) of its scale, there were a few technical teething problems, but they are being managed under warranty, and have not taken away from the popularity of the facility. To find out it was listed by the Prix Versailles as a 2024 Laureate is unexpected and something the City of New Westminster should be proud of.

The big decisions about təməsew̓txʷ were made by the previous Council (including the critical “Go-or-No” decision during the uncertainty of summer 2020 that almost certainly saved the City a hundred million dollars), but the opening of the pool means that a myriad of operational decisions, and finding room in the budget for the new staff compliment, is something this Council oversaw. And now with the Parks and Recreation Comprehensive Plan being developed to envision the next decade of recreation investments, it is an exciting time for asset renewal in the City.

One Man Down: Jaimie McEvoy having a serious heart attack and missing a big portion of this year was also something the framed how Council operated, and the work that the rest of Council was able to get done. It also created some procedural uncertainty around what we do when a Member of Council needs to take a medical leave longer than a few days – believe it or not, we didn’t have procedures around this, nor does the Community Charter, or (as best we can tell) any other local government in BC. We are glad Jaimie is now able to transition back into the job and provide his voice to Council, and do those many other things in the community that keep us all grounded.

Halftime is also a goodtime to measure how we are doing in the goals we set for ourselves as a Council. Fortunately, we have two recent reports to Council on this. At the end of September, we received a report called “Council Strategic Priorities Plan Quarterly Status Update” which outlined staff’s assessment of where progress is on the 5 Strategic Priorities and the 49 action categories, using a traffic light model. The majority of items are “green”, indicating we are on track and meeting our performance indicators. Sixteen are “yellow” – meaning at least one performance indicator is falling behind and there are concerns to address. There are seven items that are “red”, indicating we are not on track, and there are concerns about our ability to achieve them.

The biggest challenge in the “red” category is simply resources: staff time and the ability to finance more staff time. There are also some senior government regulatory and funding issues we need to be more effective in advocating toward. However, progress on track or near track for 86% of our objectives is an excellent measure.

The bigger question isn’t how staff feel we are doing, but how the community feels about it, and the good news here is found in our recently-completed Ipsos Survey of the community. This was discussed in Workshop last week, and you can read it all here.

These kind of things always work better graphically, but the short story is that 88% of New West residents find the quality of life in new Westminster Good or Very good, 77% are Satisfied or Very Satisfied with the level of service they receive from the City, and 78% think they get Good of Very Good value for their tax dollar in New Westminster.

On Council Strategic Priorities, most residents feel are doing a good job on most of the priorities:

Meeting the City’s housing need is the only area where the majority feel we are not meeting community expectations, but traffic safety also comes in lower than most. It is perhaps no surprise that housing affordability, homelessness, and traffic are the biggest issues in the community in the extended survey questions. We know this, we can feel it when we talk to folks, but it is good to have come confirmation that what we hear in the bubble is connected to what is happening in the community. With all due respect to Facebook comments and partisan jabs, it is valuable to have actual random survey data that connects with the community and gets a defensible “mood of the room”. If I can summarize: we are doing well, mostly on target, but most certainly have some work to do. That is a good half-way mark check in.

The one thing we are not doing as well as I would like to celebrating our wins. There has been great foundational work this term – region-leading work – that hardly gets the fanfare it deserves, because it is hard stuff to “cut a ribbon” in front of. Our new Code of Conduct Bylaw and functional Ethics Commissioner; bringing the Electrical Utility and Climate Action together into a new Department of Energy and Climate; amalgamating various service areas into a new Department of Community Services; changes that fast-track Childcare and Affordable Housing approvals; our provincially-recognized and lauded Community Advisory Assembly model. This is progress that builds us for future success.

No resting on laurels, but I do feel proud of the work we have done to date, especially considering significant political headwinds and a surprises like the new provincial housing regulations. On to year three!

Council – Sept 23, 2024

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

September 23rd is one of the most important days in the calendar (Happy Birthday Mom!), but for New Westminster Council it was another day at the office. Not just another day, but a relatively low-key return to Council of Jaimie McEvoy, which is a great thing for us as an organization, and for the community. The Agenda was fairly short, and started with us moving the following item On Consent:

Budget 2025: Fees and Rates Review, Amendment Bylaws
We received memos last meeting on the annual fee adjustments, and discussed them then. Staff has now taken that work and drafted bylaws to implement the changes. These are those 7 Bylaws. Council gave them all three readings today.

The following items were Removed from Consent for discussion:

2024 Capital and Operating Quarterly Performance Report
This is our regular quarterly update on the capital and operational budgets. We are making a relatively small ($0.7M) adjustment to our annual Capital budget to $199.8M, but are not changing the multi-year budget (are just moving anticipated expenditures across years). There are lots of details in these reports about everything from the last phase of work (street front improvements on East 6th Ave) for təməsew̓txʷ starting this fall to where we are in our $4.5Million pavement management plan for the year. Our annual operating budget is trending a bit high in both revenue and expenses, but well within 1% of budget.

Construction Noise Bylaw Exemption Request: New Westminster Interceptor – Columbia Street Sewer Maintenance Project
Camera inspection of sewers generally has to happen at night when sewer levels are low, and we are granting a construction noise Bylaw exemption so this work can happen at night.

Council Strategic Priorities Plan Quarterly Status Update
This is the first term where Council is actively tracking progress on our Strategic Plan on an annual basis. The red-yellow-green stoplight model is a good visual of where progress is being made, and where we are falling short. The overall result is demonstrably that we are getting the work done, though have much more to do. Our major challenges are staffing and workload (which we knew was going to be a challenge from day 1, and managing the work load surprise of the Provincial Housing regulations.
We had a short debate at Council about whether these reports should be annual or semiannual, and council decided the more frequent option was useful.

Interim Density Bonus Policy and Revised Interim Development Review Framework
The introduction of Bill 46 (along with Bills 44 and 47) has thrown a bit of a curveball into how we finance infrastructure related to growth in every municipality in BC. Though the bills are now enacted, the Province has provided cities the ability to use an “interim approach” for pending applications while we get all of our updates done – they don’t want all housing approvals to stop while cities figure out how to make the new regime work. This report provides a proposed “interim approach” for the City to use until last 2025 when a more permanent regime aligned with Bill 46 will be brought in.

Quick recap: Cities used to collect Development Cost Charges and Voluntary Amenity Contributions from development to pay for infrastructure needs required to support population growth, under the philosophy that “growth pays for growth”. The VACs are no longer permitted in the new regulations, though we will still be able to apply Density Bonusing (DB), and have a new tool called Amenity Cost Contributions (ACCs). There is planning, engineering, costing and finance work to do to inform these approaches, so this interim approach will give staff the time they need to get there.

In short, we are going to apply a Density Bonus charge of $50.sq.ft for most development above existing entitlements. For this short period of time until the more permanent financing model is completed, all funds collected by DB will go into a reserve fund earmarked for land acquisition for future City projects (Parks, community amenities, etc.). Developers could also have this charge waived if they provide non-market (“affordable”) housing that meets the standards of our existing Inclusionary Zoning policy.

The debate that arose at Council was whether the City should continue to provide DB waivers to Secured Market Rental (or “PBR -Purpose Built Rental”) development. This is a significant part of how the City has managed to encourage Secured Market Rental to get built in the City, as it fundamentally shifts the economics of Secured Market Rental to make it viable even where strata condos may not be. In a split vote, Council decided to change this policy, which will have some repercussions for how the City develops that I simply cannot predict now. More to come.

Metro 2050 Type 3 Amendment Application: City of Surrey (7880 128 Street)
Cities hoping to amend the Regional Growth Strategy can apply to Metro Vancouver to do so, and some of those applications (“Type 3”) amendment. Asking all 20 municipalities in Metro to comment is part of this process. Staff recommended against this application for a variety of reasons, mostly around erosion of viable industrial lands and potential transportation and GHG impacts.

Honestly, I could go either way on this application. Though it meets many Metro needs around integrating commercial space with other uses, and meets several Metro2025 goals, the uses are as in demand as the industrial use it is displacing, and there will be a significant increase in trees and green space, and there is little anticipated impact on the regional water and sewer networks. In general, I am reluctant to oppose local zoning requests unless there is a clear and notable regional impact (like an earlier Surrey Proposal to expand heavy industrial land into greenspace outside the Urban Containment Boundary), and this doesn’t meet that threshold for me.

In the end, Council decided to defer the decision and ask Surrey if they want to provide us a presentation or more detail than exists in the reports received by Council. We will see this again next meeting, presumably.

Report Back on Council Resolution to Develop a City-Wide Public Toilet Strategy
The topic of Public Toilets is never boring. I’ll extract straight from the report here, because I can’t say it any better:

“Access to public toilets is a human rights, dignity and public health issue, and is essential to facilitating independence for seniors and people living with disabilities and underlying health conditions. It is also often the only option for people who are unhoused, who otherwise must use public and private spaces, which negatively impacts overall community health and wellbeing.”

The community needs better access to public toilets, including the ones we already operate and very likely some new ones we need to invest in building. They are not cheap to build or operate (and as we recently learned) are not without community concern. So we are taking a holistic view to how we enhance the service we have, and will ask the community and subject matter experts in gerontology and disabilities, and come back with some recommendations for us to do better in meeting this vital need.

That all said, Public Toilets are a challenge in most of North America, and I have (believe it or not) read a couple of books that delve into why this is. It’s a long complex history rooted in ableism, patriarchy and austerity, and if you are interested, here’s a really great summary with lots of links for a little bathroom reading

We then had a single Bylaw for Adoption:

2025 Permissive Property Tax Exemption Bylaw No. 8474, 2024
There are some properties in New Westminster whose exemption from property taxes is permissive (not statutory), and this bylaw lists the properties proposed to be exempted in 2025. This bylaw was adopted by Council.

Labour Day ’24

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The days are getting shorter, the evenings are starting to cool off, the PNE rains have come and gone. Though the Equinox is three weeks away yet, most of us are looking back at the summer that was, while everything we put off until “after the break” is starting to loom large in our calendars for September. Labour Day always arrives with a mix of feelings: summer’s last hurrah, excitement of a new school year and a new recreation schedule, imminent pumpkin spice.

Labour Day is not just another day off, it is a day off won by working people organizing and asserting their rights. It is a celebration of battles won, a reminder of the quality of life granted to all working people because of 100+ years of work and sacrifice and solidarity though organized labour. It is also a call to assure that the rights won and economic prosperity driven by fair wages are not lost to the imaginary economies of neoliberal austerity.

Workers continue to build this City, this Province, and this Country. At the same time, right-wing politicians at every level are working to protect the record profits of multinationals at the expense of working people. They may talk a long yarn about “affordability”, but they are conspicuously silent when we discuss the erosion of real wages, or how austerity hurts the very social fabric that makes a society livable. They speak about supporting workers, but their votes tell a different story.

In New Westminster, our community is served every day by the professionalism and dedication of members of CUPE, the IBEW, the NWPOA and the IAFF. In the broader sense, our community is also served every day by the Teamsters who are right now fighting the rail multinationals to protect their hard-earned workplace rights and the safety of not only their workers, but all in their community. Our community is also served every day by the ATU members fighting right now to assure reliable and publicly-operated para-transit service remains available to the most vulnerable people in our community.

I was proud to spend some time up at Edmonds Park today showing solidarity with my friends in the Labour Movement: the leaders at every level, and the folks who show up every day and quietly build community while they provide for their family. The fight goes on. Not just on Labour Day, but every day.