qathet Regional District directors will recommend that the regional board direct staff to produce a report showing provincial and federal government downloading.
At the July 3 finance committee meeting, directors reviewed a motion from Electoral Area B director Mark Gisborne for the regional board to direct staff to produce a report to provide the board with information pertaining to the impact various changes at senior levels of government have had on qRD operations and budgets over the past five years.
“I’m sure many of us have been hearing from members of the public about the increase in property taxation and we have also been hearing from our own staff about the ever-increasing burden of provincial and federal government downloading for a variety of services,” said Gisborne. “It’s hard to put a dollar figure on those downloading costs. Another elected official sent me a copy of the City of Kamloops staff report, which outlines everything from social downloading to the carbon tax, and some of the numbers they have in Kamloops are quite eye-opening.
“As we all know, we’re a regional district, so comparing a city to a regional district is like comparing apples to oranges, but if we are going to push back on the province, or ask for more money, if we have a staff report that says you’re downloading costs us X, that will really help our case. We can explain to the public when they ask why their taxes are going up, we can point to how much of this is actually being dumped from the province.”
Electoral Area A director Jason Lennox asked if staff could provide an opinion on how much work this might involve.
“I understand the intent,” said Lennox. “I have the same questions about financial downloading and it is hard to quantify. I’m wondering how our staff would tackle this.”
Chief administrative office Al Radke said the board would not get such a report next month, but he said it’s a valuable report. He added that staff already do have a lot of the report items itemized. It took the Kamloops staff three months to produce a report so Radke said he would not expect anything short of that.
City of Powell River alternate director Trina Isakson asked if the intention was also to include changes in legislation where local governments have additional requirements for work.
Gisborne said Kamloops had put forward that some of the downloading was additional work in addition to financial downloading.
Electoral Area D director Sandy McCormick said she had some reservations about this motion. She asked how far back the reporting period would go.
“I remember the public complaining about federal and provincial downloading when I was a newspaper reporter 40 years ago,” said McCormick. “What is new is all the additional requirements where we are required to do additional work.
“I don’t know where you draw the line. This is going to be a lot of work for staff. I don’t support sending staff for this kind of research. It’s not aimed at providing a service or a benefit for the communities. It’s simply an analysis, and what do we do with that information? We can do a lot of that research on our own.”
Electoral Area E director and finance committee chair Andrew Fall said the motion stipulated going back five years, in response to McCormick’s question about how far back the reporting period would be.
Gisborne said one of the reasons he would like this information is he presumes that the downloading is different for each local government.
“One of the reasons why I think this is important is we heard that staff have already itemized a lot of these things,” said Gisborne. “What we as a board can do is not just push back politically, but there might be some services that the province continues to download and we as a board might look at that in the future and state the cost of a service is becoming incredibly onerous, and maybe we should cut back on that service or change that service because of what the province keeps dumping on us.”
Fall said it did seem like valuable information but he had concerns about adding on to staff workload. He asked if it would be incremental if it was done as part of the regional district’s budgetary process.
Radke said that was a practical method.
Directors voted unanimously to request the regional board direct staff to write the report on downloading.
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