Don’t hold out much hope that the olive branch being offered by Transportation Minister Todd Stone to Metro’s mayors will bear much fruit.
But first: Premier Christy Clark appears to be backing off her plans to hold a referendum on TransLink funding originally promised to coincide with next November’s municipal elections. “I know the mayors have been saying they need more time,” she said. Actually that puts the resistance she has been facing rather mildly.
Meanwhile Vancouver has been digging in its heels on the referendum and pointing to the example of Denver, a city which ended up taking two runs to get its transit referendum passed. Because of an unfocused, poorly organized and poorly funded first run (does that sound familiar?) there was a seven-year break to allow them to gather their forces and succeed.
The final ballot question (published this week by The Globe and Mail) weighed in at 300 words, which may be the longest single sentence ever reproduced by our national daily paper.
So, we can now turn our attention back to just how TransLink is governed. That’s what the olive branch is all about.
I realize that for most transit users, if their bus arrives on time and they can squeeze their way in, there’s not much else to be concerned about.
But the question of governance has been more than a minor annoyance for the mayors for the past six years, ever since then-Liberal transportation minister Kevin Falcon stripped them of their powers over transit and turned it over to an appointed “professional” board most closely controlled in terms of composition by Victoria.
At the time the TransLink board, made up of a number of the region’s mayors and councillors, was in a difficult debate over a demand by Victoria. The province said that the Canada Line, tied to the 2010 Winter Olympics, should be placed at the head of the region’s priority list and push back to second spot the long promised Evergreen Line for the area’s northeast.
It took three votes to agree on the Canada Line as a part of a complex plan for infrastructure development and funding. Meanwhile Falcon continued throughout to loudly stamp his foot in frustration denouncing what could be considered the board’s careful consideration over a divisive matter as a “disaster circus” and “dysfunctional” and bound up in their own petty parochial interests.
Falcon won the public relations war on that one. He convinced many who were willing to pay attention and those who have subsequently turned their minds to the matter that the TransLink board could not agree on anything. Nor could they come up with any funding proposals.
None of this was accurate but when Falcon brought in sweeping legislation to effectively neuter the local mayors many observers said it was about time.
When the dust settled though, he had removed the authority to govern by local officials and left the region with the financial accountability for the transportation system. Any budget overruns would have to come from Metro’s property taxpayers. And, to no one’s surprise, the mayors have been resentful of that move ever since.
Before the last provincial election, the TransLink Mayor’s Council commissioned an outside consultant’s report on TransLink’s governance structure that compared it with similar structures in “leader regions” around the world.
The $74,000 report was released in March.
The report concluded the governance structure is “unique in the world and not in a good way, in that the governance arrangements in other ‘leader’ regions, while showing a considerable diversity, have common features to ensure accountability, effectiveness and efficiency in decision-making and service delivery that are not found in Metro Vancouver.”
Instead of a discussion on TransLink’s governance, as a result of that report, what we got was an ill-thought out commitment from the premier for a referendum on funding which now appears to be going sideways.
That brings us to today’s standoff on the funding referendum and the continued intransigence on the part of mayors who want their authority over the region’s transportation infrastructure returned.
At this point they are in a most cynical mood believing what Stone will offer on governance will be minor tinkering rather than a significant fix.
