THE MEGACITY QUESTION

Article 1

From The Vancouver Sun

Monday, January 8, 2001

First of a series by Scott Simpson

Megacity Juggernaut Looms Over Local Squabbles

As Canadian Municipalities lose their identifies in Megacities, The GVRD dinosaur limps toward the future.

The megacity juggernaut is on a roll.

It flattened dozens of municipal governments in the vicinity of Winnipeg, then Halifax and Toronto, merging them into regionalized supercities that promise less government, lower taxes and better service.

On Jan. 1, 2001, powered by an Ontario government bill - the wonderfully titled Fewer Municipal Politicians Act - the juggernaut arrived in Ottawa, Hamilton and Sudbury and hundreds of other municipalities in Canada's most populous region.

When the beast finally pauses to draw a breath after doing its thing with Montreal in 2002, more than 400 Canadian municipalities will be nothing but historical footnotes and Greater Vancouver will be the largest urban area in Canada that is still composed of a loose-linked jumble of independent local governments.

Some believe Greater Vancouver is better off the way it is.

Under the umbrella of the Greater Vancouver Regional District, municipalities cooperate in delivering services such as water but still run their own police departments and snow-plow crews.

It's a structure that relies on consensus - but critics like Alan Artibise can find plenty of examples to demonstrate that it's not a structure that will resolve chronic problems, or see us safely through hard times.

"Most of the time the GVRD works very well, because people can agree on things,"said Artibise, a former University of B.C. urban planning professor who now serves as director of the Public Policy Research Center at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.

"But when they can't agree.... it's like a contract - you don't write a contract for good times, you write a contract for bad times. The problem is that when we have bad times, what we do is just ignore the issue."

For example, in the near future, food is expected to push its way to the top of civic agendas around the world.

In Toronto, there is a civic committee that deals specifically with issues related to securing and maintaining the local food supply.

In Greater Vancouver, by contrast, we have no food committee and we can't even reach consensus on transit and transportation improvements that are necessary to make sure we don't choke our agricultural areas with smog.

Experts argue that cash-poor members of the GVRD meet local needs at the expense of the region.

Artibise says the recent uproar over TransLink, the regional transit authority that is supposed to provide leadership on transportation issues, shows the dozy amalgam of 20 municipalities that make up the GVRD needs an overhaul.

"British Columbia's most important metropolitan region - indeed, the province's economic engine and face to the country and the world - requires a revamped, comprehensive and directly accountable regional government if it is to thrive in the coming decades.

"As it stands, it is not exaggeration to say that Greater Vancouver is living on borrowed time and - sooner or later - must reorganize itself into an effective city region to face the challenges of global competitiveness".

He's also concerned about a lack of accountability.

Members of the GVRD board of directors are unelected, even though they deal with the most acute problems facing the region - air and water quality, sewage disposal, growth, transit and transportation.

That means the group of politicians who must keep the region on track are accountable not to the GVRD as a whole but to their own municipalities.

As well, he argues, virtually no one living in the region could give you a clear account of the GVRD's mandate.

I think Achilles heel of the current arrangement is the accountability issue.

"The first and most important thing about government is that citizens understand how it works and who the hell is responsible."

Jim Lightbody, a political science professor at the University of Alberta, agrees.

"I've been to GVRD meetings," Lightbody says. "I've watched how the regional plan does not hold up where municipalities are desperate for assessment."

For example, in order to increase its tax revenues, the city of Coquitlam recently voted to allow a casino to be built in the city's main business park - even though council was warned the project would aggravate local traffic problems and could discourage other businesses from setting up shop there.

The city took the action because it has virtually no money in its savings accounts, and desperately needs capital for projects like a new skating rink.

"When municipalities are desperate, how it works is that they scratch each other's backs. You vote for me. I'll vote for you, we'll break the regional plan, "Lightbody said. "They're not being mean. They are not necessarily corrupt. They are there to safeguard the interests of their voters. That is their mandate. There is no one to speak for the region."

Lightbody says the transportation issue demonstrates that the GVRD has raised buck-passing to an art form.

For example, on a recent visit to Surrey, where his daughter lives, Lightbody got an earful about her frustration with traffic congestion on the Port Mann Bridge.

"I said to her, "why don't you phone and complain about it?"

She is a very determined cuss, So she phoned Surrey engineering. They blamed the GVRD. She call the GVRD. They blamed the provincial highways ministry."

When she call the highways ministry, he said, she was told it was up to Surrey to initiate any road projects that would improve traffic flow on the bridge. "They said Surrey wouldn't get it started. It was a very practical lesson in what was going on, or not going on. Everyone has a say. No one is responsible."

Tony Dorcey, director of the University of B.C.'s School of Community and Regional Planning, said he could see cracks emerging in the regional structure as far back as the early 1970's in parallel with population growth and the need for more complex, community planning. "I think the model has worked reasonably well on issues they've had to address, like building a system for water supply and sewage service - big engineering projects done in the traditional vein, gaining economies of scale, "Dorcey said.

"There were good arguments for those projects and they went ahead and did it. It was an organization that was fine for its time. I has not evolved to the much more challenging issues of today - growth management, sustainability, whatever you want to put on it."

For example, the ink was scarcely dry on the GVRD's vaunted Livable Region Strategy before municipalities such as Richmond began demanding exemptions that would allow it greater population density - even though such exemptions were clearly against the region's collective interest.

Dorcey predicts such conflicts will continue, and says the GVRD is not equipped to deal with them. "There is going, increasingly, to be issues where municipalities will have different priorities. It will be tougher to get a consensus."

Moura Quayle, dean of agricultural sciences at UBC, said the GVRD's weaknesses were never more evident than during the recent debate over TransLink's proposed vehicle levy.

Quayle has been watching the TransLink fight with interest because it relates to air quality and the ability of the Fraser Valley's agriculture industry to continue as the main provider of the food for the GVRD and the rest of the province.

The vehicle levy seeks to collect money directly from Greater Vancouver motorists and use it to maintain and improve transit and transportation services in the region.

That objective was supported in numerous opinion polls taken before the GVRD, and its regional transit authority TransLink, began to talk about ways to collect the money.

But when the decision was made to introduce a vehicle levy, many politicians, including Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum became vehemently opposed.

No one, however, came up with a viable alternative.

Quayle said the angry tenor of the debate suggests many politicians, along with local motorists and the media, were ignoring the ultimate objective - maintaining or improving the region's failing air quality.

"I think what worries me about the transportation debate is that I'm not sure that we've got all of the issues on the table," Quayle said, "Can we actually look into the future and imagine that there is ever going to be enough space for the number of cars that we seem to want to put into our region? It's physically impossible, if you do the numbers."

Quayle believes that purely local issues should remain under the control of neighborhoods but observes that municipal borders within Greater Vancouver bear little relation to the area's geography and the importance of its common concerns.

"Landscape doesn't know political boundaries. We've got these rather arbitrary boundaries that we've placed on to the landscape. It's pretty obvious that we can't look at issues like transportation without considering more than just one municipality's piece of it."

Quayle thinks more power should be given to the regional government so it can tackle over arching issues such as air quality. But she wouldn't necessarily stop at the GVRD's eastern boundaries of Langley and Maple Ridge.

"We are neighbours with regional districts up the Fraser Valley and we are all in this together. It wasn't surprising to see some of those mayors out in the valley supporting the levy - because they can see the brown haze. They're beginning to get it."

TUESDAY: Two experts look at the Lower Mainland and come up with radically different ways to reorganize it.

Here are some of the biggest beefs about the GVRD:

The GVRD is Undemocratic

In the complex system used to weight votes on the GVRD board of directions, tiny villages such as Lions Bay and Anmore have power and influence that are grossly out of proportion to their population.

For example, Lions Bay's 1,350 residents have precisely as much voting muscle on the GVRD board as Port Moody's 25,000.

Population also determines the number of GVRD directors to which a municipality is entitled.

Lions Bay has one, giving the Howe Sound community a degree of representation equivalent to that enjoyed by each 100,000 residents of Vancouver.

- That's incredible in this day and age." Artibise says. "We wouldn't stand for it in any other kind of organization. If the city of Vancouver had one Member of Parliament and Lions Bay had one, we'd go berserk.

"For some reason we accept it at the local government level.

"I think it's because the media, and others such as myself, have never been able to engage the public and get them to understand what the heck is going on here. The bureaucracy is running our region and that's a pretty dangerous way to do things."

Economic Planning

Simply put, there isn't any.

Artibise says economic planning was an afterthought when the GVRD developed its vaunted Livable Region Strategy early in the last decade.

It is supposed to be Greater Vancouver's comprehensive plan for orderly growth and development, a strategy for maintaining quality of life in the region by managing everything from green space to suburban parking lots.

The strategy has lots to say about how employment should be dispersed through the region, but Artibise says municipal self-interest wins out over regional needs when it comes to making it happen.

That is because many local municipalities are jealous of the property tax revenues that their business and commercial residents generate, and are loath to share them with their neighbours.

"Take Burnaby, for example. It's very well off. It has managed itself very efficiently for decades - and it will be damned if it wants to share any of that with other communities, "Artibise said. "When the livable region strategy was being developed, it was only at the urging of myself and a few others that they finally put on a seminar on economic development.

"I'm saying this has to be one of the fundamental issues that governments face these days at a city-state level. The GVRD does no economic planning, period. "It's incredible."

Transit and Transportation

Greater Vancouver lobbied for decades to persuade the provincial government to surrender control of transit to the region.

It finally got that authority two years ago - just after it became evident that fixing the region's traffic gridlock would cost at least $13 billion over the next 20 years. Now, members cannot agree on how to collect the money to pay for the improvements. A plan to collect a levy from each motorist has virtually no public or political support.

Some politicians, such as Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum, are threatening to take their cities out of TransLink because of the levy.

"We will be leaving," said McCallum, who says TransLink is dominated by politicians from Vancouver and Burnaby who do not have the region's interests at heart.

"The people that are in control, instead of being the fabric to keep the region together, are the wedge drivers that are breaking it apart.

"That's fine. Be that way. But leave us along, because we are going to operate as Surrey."

Others are using the situation as evidence that the regional transit authority, TransLink, should expand its board of directors and give each municipality, irrespective of its size, an equal vote.

The only thing they can all agree on is that they do not want to take any action that would cost them votes in their own municipalities. Fearing a voter backlash in the next municipal election, they ar adamant that they will not use property taxes to collect the money to pay for TransLink, even though an addendum on local tax bills is the obvious and most cost-effective solution.

Water Quality

There are occasions each year when Greater Vancouver's water quality does not meed Health Canada guidelines, and incidences of gastrointestinal illness rise.

Five year ago, the GVRD came up with a billion dollar program to address the situation. Some municipalities objected to the cost and the program was subsequently watered down and delayed - notwithstanding the risks to public health.

Water Pollution

It took a direct order from the B.C. environment ministry, and threats by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to impose $1-million-a-day fines, before the GVRD agreed to build a secondary sewage treatment plant on Annacis Island.

Meanwhile, the single biggest sewage plant in the region, at Iona continues to dump billions of litres of nearly raw sewage into the Strait of Georgia every year.

As well, the GVRD proposes that within 50 years it will replace local outfalls that have been dumping raw sewage for a century into the Fraser River and Burrard Inlet from Burnaby, New Westminster and Vancouver.

Again, the issue is cost, with local municipalities claiming they deserve the final say on how quickly any upgrades will proceed.

Local Interests Come First

Sometimes, municipal politicians pay little more than lip service to the interest of the larger region.

The city of Coquitlam is considering a proposal for a subdivision that would sit in a geographically isolated area on the east side of the Coquitlam River.

The only way to access the property would be to put a bridge across the river, destroying sensitive fish and wildlife habitat in the process.

The provincial and federal governments are both warning they will reject other bridge construction projects if this one goes through - on the grounds that degradation of the Coquitlam River must be minimized. That would effectively rob residents of Port Coquitlam and Port Moody an opportunity to connect to each other by a regional road north of the Lougheed Highway and would deny the GVRD the opportunity to widen the highway in the future, since both projects would also require crossings of the Coquitlam River.

Scott Simpson