On Monday, West Vancouver Council tried to deal with the proposed 2027 sewerage rates. This ought to have been a routine thing, but wasn’t.
Like me, anyone who saw this meeting (video here) will never get those two hours of their lives back. But it was a clear example, at the most crucial time for residents to determine their electoral choices, why change is needed at Municipal Hall.
(Some inside-baseball background: The meeting was termed a “Committee of the Whole” session that was supposed to have included Council, staff and the volunteer Finance and Revenue Advisory Committee (FRAC). But it wasn’t.
It was simply a regular meeting of Council, because an August 24 directive by Council to municipal staff to meet the FRAC was disregarded. This is a serious breach of protocol. There is obvious tension between municipal staff and a committee of experts looking at their work, and as a result the two sides were kept apart. “Scheduling” issues was the excuse put forward by a municipal official.
So what we had was really a regular Council meeting, more lightly chaired, without FRAC formally participating.)
The much more important background: Earlier this summer, days before the sewerage rate proposal was being presented to Council for approval, a last-minute committee review turned up errors and inconsistencies in the financial presentation that potentially would have cost residents millions of dollars. It was obvious Council hadn’t detected the errors, but nearly presented the proposal and quite possibly would have passed it.
Now, this issue with the numbers could have been sorted out if, after its August 24 meeting, staff had met the committee. But as I said earlier, it didn’t. So the premise of Monday’s meeting to join hands and fix the mess was false.
To get the two sides together, Council had to stop the Committee of the Whole meeting in mid-agenda, hold a regular Council meeting-within-a-meeting (a Committee of the Whole can’t direct anything) and again agree that the two sides should finally meet. When, who knows? But it took two hours to get back to its August 24 original plan.
Then it resumed the so-called Committee of the Whole meeting, again without the Committee of the Whole.
The upshot is that we won’t know before the October 17 election what the bill will be. We can only hope it is grounded in proper calculation.
I am a candidate for mayor and I spoke to the meeting (edits are in brackets). Here are my remarks:
“A mayor and council ask the public for one thing: the money to carry out their decisions. In return, the public is owed numbers it can trust, an explanation of how they were reached, and accountability when they’re wrong. On the sewer rates, they have fallen short on all three, yet there is no public apology for a document and process that could have cost residents millions of dollars.
I want to thank the public members of the Finance and Revenue Advisory Committee. They did exactly what an independent committee should do: they checked the arithmetic on behalf of taxpayers. Yet these public members have had to fight to be heard. Council wanted a watchdog, but it doesn’t appear to want it to bark.
On August 24, Council directed staff to report back from a meeting with that committee. That meeting has not happened. What the committee received instead was a memo. And again today, no explanation for why that direction wasn’t followed.
The problems are significant: The headline increase residents were given was wrong, and the corrected figure from staff still doesn’t match the committee’s. The comparison used to show how much advance planning had saved actually mixed two different ways of counting. And the headline leaves out the (North Shore Wastewater Treatment) plant levy, which is where much of the real increase sits. A resident reading the report can’t tell what their total sewer bill is going up by.
The issue of reserves raises more questions. Interest that should have been credited was missed and fixed only after an audit, yet never communicated to the public properly. The reserves also appear to be far larger than their own stated targets, and nobody has explained why residents are paying into them at that scale.
And we are being asked to set rates while Metro Vancouver’s final numbers, and the effect of the (fired original contractor) Acciona settlement, are still unknown. The final vote will land after the election, so the next council inherits a report that hasn’t been corrected.
To be clear: this is not an argument against paying legitimate sewer costs. It is an argument for getting the numbers right first.
Council should pursue four things now. One: reissue the report with a single, plain table showing the local charge, the Metro charge, the plant levy, and the total impact on a household.
Two: sit down with the committee and settle the disagreements over the figures before any final vote.
Three: show the interest assumptions and explain how the reserve targets were set.
Four: bring back the final Metro Vancouver numbers, including the (original, fired contractor) Acciona settlement (with Metro Vancouver), before anything is approved.
Get the numbers right. Show taxpayers the whole bill. Then let the next Council decide.”