Skip to content

LETTER: Langley man shakes his head at TransLink and Mayors’ Council decision making

TransLink can’t provide Langley with better transit but can hike the CEO salary, local man writes.
18076158_web1_TransLink_BC_bus
BC TransLink bus (TransLink/Twitter)

Dear Editor,

Is it just me or has our mayor and his pals at TransLink gone insane? Look, first co-chair Jack Froese and crew on TransLink Mayors’ Council vote in favour to continue on down the road of maybe one day building an out of date, poor technology SkyTrain to nowhere (Fleetwood).

We can’t afford to get it to Langley so we will just spend $1.6 billion to get it to Fleetwood. I mean really? What is wrong with this picture? The mayors (not all of them) want to spend our future budgets trying to finish it to Langley, so Metro Vancouver won’t have any money left over for transit for the next 10 to 20 years. Wow dumb.

We pay about 17 cents per litre of gas to TransLink (the highest tax’d area in North America). We pay about three per cent on our property tax to these clowns, and we pay when we park, developers pay and charge us higher prices for condos, etc. etc., and what do we get for it? An out of date SkyTrain we can’t afford, a SkyTrain that is so feeble it can’t run 24 hours a day, a SkyTrain to nowhere. If it smells like a dumb idea, it is a dumb idea.

We can’t even afford the $4 million to get night service buses to run the SkyTrain route when it is not operational.

We still don’t have any bus service to Gloucester in northeast Langley (in the Metro area) that employs thousands and thousands of people. We need a SkyTrain to Fleetwood? I am in shock at how stupid all this is.

Now the cherry on top of this crazy scam sits what was just announced. Our mayor, and his good time buddies on the mayors’ council and the TransLink’s board just voted to give the “talking heads” (TransLink execs) a big fat pay raise.

Kevin Desmond already makes more than the guy who is currently running our country.

Kevin Desmond is in charge of a business that runs a deficit and needs handouts from all forms of government.

Am I missing something here?

If other CEO’s couldn’t turn a profit on a business, they would be fired, not made into one of North America’s highest paid Transit talking heads.

So here is our mayor (his name is Jack, if you haven’t seen him around, that’s because I believe he is making a lot of money going to meetings in Burnaby and New Westminster, and not doing a great job here in the Township of Langley) IMO he thinks it’s okay to try and build a SkyTrain to nowhere for a price we can’t afford. He is asking provincial and federal powers for more handouts. Meanwhile he is dishing out raises to people that are doing a horrible job.

This is all, of course, just my opinions, but I mean really? Does all this make any sense to anyone?

Scott Thompson, Langley