Vancouver mayor defends proposed 8.2 per cent property tax hike in next year’s budget

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Vancouver’s mayor is defending plans to hike property taxes more than eight per cent next year in order to hire more police officers and firefighters.

The City of Vancouver released a draft of the 2020 budget stating that half of the funds from property taxes will go to City services while rest will fund regional services, schools, and transit.

“We want to add more police. Over decades, there’s been a loss of on the beat police officers and this is one thing that council wants to do, while at the same time, more firefighters,” Mayor Kennedy Stewart explains. “We are trying to reduce the amount of time that police would take to get to an incident and that comes from having more officers.”

The budget includes hiring 25 new police officers and 30 new firefighters.

RELATED: Vancouver utility and property tax increases slated for 2019

Stewart blames the loss of front-line workers over the years for the increase.

“There’s usually a small increase in taxes for the city and so, those are the choices that people elected us to make,” he says. “The biggest cost for us is always labour. We have over ten thousand folks working at the city and people’s wages always go up slightly more than inflation. The best thing we can do is be transparent in our choices, so everybody can see exactly where their tax dollars are going.”


The plan, to be reviewed during a special council meeting on December 3, would see the average homeowner paying an extra $150 annually and business properties taxed $270.

Stewart says fixed costs have to be tempered with new service gaps needing to be filled.

“You’ll see that most of it is on core services and then, a few policy directions like City Plan for example. We’ve initiated a brand new process –a city-wide planning process to figure out where we want to go over the next 40 years. We’d like those to be free, but of course, that costs money,” he says, adding proposed tax hikes are still lower than what many other Metro Vancouver cities are charging.

If the budget passes, the overall budget will increase by 7.3 per cent in 2020 with a total of $1.62 billion.

Vancouver’s final budget will likely be approved on December 10.

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