(Note: This has been updated in the first paragraph in bold to reflect the events at council.)
At its special Monday meeting, West Vancouver decided to shelve its errant, flawed report on sewerage tax increases and refer it to staff, its advisory committee and eventually (with committee member Coun. Linda Watt’s prodding, clearly catching the committee chair mayor by surprise) council and the committee in a Committee of the Whole gathering to solve in time for a regular council meeting at some point.
As I earlier wrote, the public was presented a report with several math problems and bad data that would have led to a faulty tax hike, were it not for the work of the volunteer Finance and Revenue Advisory Committee, which wrote a withering report on the problems.
At council Monday, I spoke about the process, the treatment of its committee, and the need for an apology that never materialized. Here are my remarks:
“I’m not here to relitigate the specific figures in this report — that work has already been done by people far better positioned to do it than I am. I want to talk about something more fundamental: how this process unfolded, how your own advisory committee was treated within it, and what this Council owes residents in response.
Start with the process. This year’s rate-setting came to Council four months earlier than in any previous year — before Metro Vancouver’s final levy figures were even in hand, and before the financial impact of the Acciona settlement was known. In prior years, this Council waited for that Metro Vancouver information before setting rates. This year, it didn’t. That decision asked residents to accept a bylaw built on numbers that weren’t yet final.
Now consider how your own Finance and Revenue Advisory Committee was brought into this process. This is a body you appointed specifically to provide financial oversight on exactly this kind of decision. And by the timeline in the record, that committee wasn’t meaningfully engaged before this report went to the public — it was handed a completed report and asked to react to it after the fact. It found millions of dollars of anomalies. That is not consultation. That is damage control dressed up as due diligence. A committee of qualified volunteers should be reviewing the assumptions and the methodology before a report goes out the door, not auditing the wreckage afterward and hoping Council reads what they send back.
And when that committee did its job — when it came back with serious, substantive concerns about how this report was constructed — what has followed today? No public acknowledgment. No apology. No moment where this Council stood up and said, plainly, that the process fell short of what residents deserve. When the people you yourselves appointed to check this work raise the alarm, in writing, why is silence an adequate response? It’s a second failure sitting on top of the first.
That brings me to what I’m actually asking for, and it isn’t complicated. First: acknowledge, publicly, that this process moved too fast and consulted too little — with your own committee so residents could understand, so you could understand. Second: apologize for that, plainly and without qualification. And third: commit, before this bylaw comes back for a vote, to exercise proper governance, as the committee is a committee of council, not a staff advisory unit, to take the responsibility as a group to work with the committee to straighten away this rate change, so the public can clearly see its impact.
Good government isn’t measured by whether it makes mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes; that’s why there are erasers on pencils. Good government is measured by what it does the moment those mistakes are found. Right now, residents are still waiting to see this Council do that.”