Referendum: Editorials – Ladner, Yaffe and Cayo

Peter Ladner in Business in Vancouver:

There’s far more good news than bad in TransLink numbers

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 … Look at the CEO’s outrageous salary, shout anti-TransLink critics. It’s $468,000, up 7% in 2013 (they don’t mention it will go down this year). They point out that it’s more than transit CEOs in Seattle, Portland, Toronto or Montreal make, but they rarely mention that it’s less than CEO salaries at the Vancouver Airport Authority, BC Hydro and BC Ferries and just over half of Port Metro Vancouver’s CEO’s $857,000 pay.

The vein-bulging outrage at TransLink’s CEO’s pay overlooks three key points. First, executive salaries weren’t mentioned as an issue in the latest independent audit of TransLink. Second, TransLink is almost alone in North America – and the envy of regions around the world – for the range of its responsibilities, which include financing, planning, operating and maintaining roads, bridges, buses, trains, light rail and cycling infrastructure. That makes comparisons difficult. But most important, TransLink is a political eunuch, with no one person responsible for defending it from the cloud of accusations coming at it from the provincial government, the public, the Mayors’ Council, anti-tax zealots and its customers because of the unaccountable governance structure forced on it by the provincial government.

No amount of money could hang onto the last two CEOs because of this.

TransLink’s biggest fault is its inability to get the message out about its almost unknown performance successes:

• A mode shift – out of cars into transit, walking and cycling – that is unmatched in North America. The number of trips by transit is up 80% since 2000.

• By far the highest per capita transit use among other cities our size in North America – three times more than Portland, the next highest city.

• The third-highest per capita transit use in North America, after only New York and Toronto.

• The lowest-operating-cost light rail network in the world, more than covering operating expenses from fare box revenues.

• The Canada Line built on time and on budget and beating revenue targets – projected to have 100,000 daily riders by 2013 but hitting 120,000 by 2011.

• An overall 7.4 out of 10 customer satisfaction rating in the last quarter.

Focusing on a few faults while ignoring these performance results is like berating someone who consistently wins the biggest races on the continent because they have dirty shorts.

For $0.34 a day per household, we can add to this success, or we can fixate on a few faults and plunge this region into a decade of congestion, pollution, increasing road deaths and injuries, declining public health and vastly higher public spending to accommodate more cars.

You’ll get to decide.

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Barbara Yaffe in the Vancouver Sun:

Transit referendum supporters facing uphill battle

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VANCOUVER — After canvassing friends about the upcoming transit referendum, I can report that not one of them plans to vote Yes to a tax hike.

They all say they care deeply about Vancouver and wish transportation here could be improved. But they believe they are already paying exorbitant taxes in a city where the cost of living is onerous.

In discussing the so-called congestion tax that would increase PST by 0.5 per cent starting in April, 2016, they cited poor bus service and complained about big salaries paid to top officials running agencies that deliver public services.

By no means are they a representative sample of the overall community. But, judging from their comments and my e-mailbag, I’d say the Yes proponents in the March-to-May mail-in vote are facing an uphill battle.

For starters, there is confusion about the plan. In the past it has been referred to as a 10-year plan that is part of a 30-year vision. People are not clear on what improvements would come when.

Further, details about revenue sources are complicated. There appears to be little understanding regarding how much of the $7.5-billion pricetag for the mayors’ transportation plan a regional congestion tax would cover. …

No polls are needed to know a lot of Lower Mainlanders feel taxed out. It is tough enough dealing with the high cost of housing and an unconscionably high Property Transfer Tax but, but on Jan. 1, increases kicked in for MSP premiums, ICBC rates and BC Hydro.

The B.C. government may boast about this province having among the lowest personal income taxes in Canada, but that is not true when MSP premiums are considered.

No other province imposes this extra levy to help cover health costs. In B.C., those premiums — netting $2.26 billion this year — pay 13 per cent of the health tab and cannot be disregarded just because the premiums are collected separately from personal income tax.

Many good reasons exist to improve transit and transportation services throughout Metro Vancouver. And if necessary, funds to do the job should take priority over other, less urgent expenditures.

But if the answer to every new need is to go to the taxpayers and seek more money, taxpayers will soon be entirely depleted of their cash.

The answer to our transportation needs rests in budgetary reallocation, not another tax hike.

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Don Cayo in the Vancouver Sun:

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A new tax or sharply higher old ones? 

TransLink foes’ pitch boils down to this odd choice

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A key recommendation of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s “Better Plan” to fund TransLink’s expansion plans boils down to this: Don’t give those wastrels a 0.5 per cent regional sales tax to raise their $2.5 billion; make them take it from excessive future increases on existing taxes instead.

This is a paraphrase, of course, so let me cite a supporting quote from No TransLink Tax: A Better Plan, a hybrid polemic/study that the CTF released Friday.

“Local government — Metro Vancouver, TransLink and the 21 Metro municipalities — will see an annual revenue growth rate of 4.8 per cent over the next decade. By earmarking just 0.5 per cent of that 4.8 per cent growth rate to transportation priorities, the TransLink Mayors could have generated enough revenue to spare us the sales tax.”

Which sounds like another way of saying TransLink and the regional municipalities should take the money they say they need to fund essential transit improvements from your left pants pocket instead of the right. This is fair enough, if that’s what you believe — although in my view, spelled out in previous columns, they’ve tapped out existing taxes and it’s time to diversify their revenue sources.

Mind you, it’s not easy to square this quotation or my paraphrase of it with the general tone of the CTF document, which is in large part a rant against what it characterizes as TransLink’s wasteful spending and incompetence.

It asserts, for example, “As [our] new independent accounting analysis of the TransLink Mayors’ spending plan reveals, they could have funded their wish list without a sales tax that will hurt struggling seniors and financially-squeezed families, already facing another expensive year of property tax, MSP, Hydro, ICBC, Ferries, EI, and CPP hikes.”

How struggling seniors and squeezed families will be hurt less by higher existing taxes than by a new tax that raises the same amount of money (and is paid in part by businesses and tourists) isn’t exactly clear. But I highlight this dichotomy in the document’s logic to illustrate how murky it is.

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Full column here.