Metro Vancouver residents will find out this week how local mayors want to raise taxes to pay for transit improvements.
It will lead to an extremely short honeymoon period for newly-elected mayors and councillors. The unhappiness with elected officials will come when hard-hit taxpayers find out just how much more of their money mayors want to go towards TransLink.
Most people favour improvements to transit, but they want someone else to pay for them. There won’t be any happiness if a car tax is proposed. Nor will there be a lot of cheering for a higher provincial sales tax, or other new taxes to fund an ambitious transit plan that mayors unveiled last spring.
The Mayors Council has decided which tax it favours, but won’t say what it is until Thursday. Its proposal will go to a TransLink referendum, to be held in the spring.
Current TransLink revenue is far short of paying for any of the improvements the mayors are calling for.
A car tax was part of the plan to pay for TransLink when it was first set up in 1998. When the TransLink board, which at that time was made up of elected officials, tried to proceed with it, it was met with howls of outrage from taxpayers. Many of them lived in areas like Surrey, Langley and Maple Ridge, where transit service was minimal when compared to that in the core urban area of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster.
The car tax became such a political football that no one wanted to touch it. The NDP government, facing a provincial election, wouldn’t approve it — even though it had granted TransLink the power to impose it. The BC Liberals, smelling power, also decried it.
TransLink has thus received most of its additional money since that time by raising property taxes, boosting the gas tax to 17 cents a litre and jacking up bus fares, which are among the most expensive in North America.
It cannot expand services without some new sources of revenue. However, reliance on the car tax is problematic, as many areas of Metro Vancouver remain badly served by transit, particularly communities south of the Fraser, along with Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows.
Many suburban drivers ask why they should pay a tax on cars they must own to get around. Meanwhile, Vancouver residents can easily do without cars, and in fact more and more of them are choosing to do just that.
A boost to the provincial sales tax is fairer, and regional road tolling, which apparently requires years of study to implement, would also bring a much-needed element of fairness to the transportation challenges which face everyone, whether they drive or use transit.
Mayors were hoping for provincial carbon tax revenue, but that request was quickly denied by Transportation Minister Todd Stone. Indeed, the revenue from that tax is used to reduce other taxes such as income tax, so giving some of it to TransLink would mean boosting income taxes.
Given the abysmal transit service in Langley, it is unlikely that many people here will back any new taxes to pay for improvements that will largely benefit other areas.