Vancouver’s police officer plan could lead to higher property taxes
Posted November 29, 2022 1:44 pm.
Last Updated November 29, 2022 1:54 pm.
The mayor of Vancouver’s plan to hire an additional 100 police officers could contribute to higher property taxes for homeowners.
The draft budget suggests a property tax increase of five per cent to help make up the money needed. That means property taxes could rise to more than seven per cent once you factor in the new officers and 20 civilian staff — which is what the Vancouver Police Board has proposed.
The new council is getting that information from staff, during preliminary budget discussions at city hall.
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This proposal is despite previous suggestions from Ken Sim and his ABC party that the money would come from “reprioritizing” funding for certain budget items, and not increases to taxes.
Staff have told council there’s not much to trim.
“We did through the pandemic. We went back to all of our departments and asked them to cut back discretionary spend, as many vacancies as they could without significantly impacting service levels. So that is sort of the level that the money of the departments are at,” explained Chief Financial Officer with the City of Vancouver, Patrice Impey.
“There’s always work we can do around continuous process improvement and being more efficient. So, that needs to happen in the background. But for the big changes, it’s determining what services we would reduce the level of, or stop doing,” Impey continued.
Despite this, it seems Sim is still trying to figure out how to make this work.
“We have an affordability issue here, we have businesses that are struggling just to make ends meet right now. This doesn’t put us on the right path and so we have to think, look at this problem differently and see what our options are,” the mayor said.
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Last week, Vancouver city council voted to allocate up to $16 million dollars to hire the 100 new police officers and 100 mental health nurses Sim has promised. Starting in 2023, $8 million will be transferred to both the Vancouver Police Department and Vancouver Coastal Health to begin the process.
There’s still time for adjustments to the plan, as this is the draft budget phase. The final document is set to be approved in March.
– With files from Greg Bowman
