BC mayors to meet in search of a new deal for communities
Posted May 9, 2012 7:52 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Your city is being forced to provide an increasing number of government services, yet it receives less than 10 per cent of your taxes. That’s why mayors from across the province are meeting next week in search of a better deal for our communities.
Eighty-six of them will be looking at how to do a better job delivering core services like garbage collection and policing, with the focus on how to more equitably share the financial burdens between the various levels of government.
“Basically, we get eight cents on the tax dollar; senior levels of government get the remaining 92 cents and the list of infrastructure and other services that we have to provide is ever expanding,” says Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie.
“We really need to come up with a better formula for how we finance the cities as well as the other levels of government,” he argues.
The three-day confab is dubbed the inaugural BC Mayors Caucus and happens in Penticton from May 16th to 18th.
“It’s probably overdue that we had such a set of discussions. So, certain mayors from around the province took it upon themselves to organize this meeting,” adds Brodie.
A couple of concerns that will be common to all the mayors is transportation financing, be it TransLink or BC Transit, as well as the new RCMP contract.
