"They (major projects) are getting too big, they're too expensive and they're, quite frankly, getting unsustainable," City of North Vancouver mayor Linda Buchanan
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The $2.83 billion cost overrun at Metro Vancouver’s North Shore wastewater treatment plant project landed like a bombshell that has prompted bigger questions about how the regional district handles such big projects and even how it’s governed.
At the very least, Metro needs to re-examine the pace and timing of major projects since it’s staring down even bigger bills for infrastructure projects, according to City of North Vancouver Mayor Linda Buchanan.
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“They are getting too big, they’re too expensive and they’re, quite frankly, getting unsustainable,” Buchanan said after a recent meeting of Metro’s board and its main infrastructure committees.
Buchanan made the remarks at the end of a marathon session in which the majority of Metro’s members repeatedly voted down attempts to spread out more of the cost overrun, relieving North Shore municipalities of some of the shock.
In the end, Metro’s board conceded just an additional $10 a household per year across Metro, reducing the bill for North Shore households to $590 a year for 30 years, not the $725 a year called for in Metro’s traditional cost-sharing formula for sewage projects.
Buchanan contended Metro has reached “an economic-growth crossroads” as its ability to pay for the infrastructure and costs can’t simply be passed on to taxpayers without considering their ability to pay.
A replacement for Metro’s Iona wastewater treatment plant, adjacent to YVR, promises to be the next big challenge. Metro’s estimate for that now stands at $9.9 billion.
To Buchanan, this means re-examining how many projects Metro is building at one time, looking again at its asset management plan and how to advance them in a sustainable way.
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Some municipal representatives outside Metro chambers, however, have raised the question whether it’s time to consider changing the governance structure of regional districts, to have direct election for its directors.
Regional districts exist to provide common services for member municipalities within their boundaries and representation for unincorporated communities.
Member municipalities appoint most of the directors from the ranks of their own elected mayors and councils to make decisions on behalf of the regional district, which is an outdated structure in the view of New Westminster Coun. Daniel Fontaine.
“(They’re) now undertaking these megaprojects with a governance model that was built in the 1960s to manage megaprojects in 2024,” Fontaine said. “I think there’s a disconnect between the lack of accountability and the lack of openness and transparency with this governing body.”
He joined with a group of three other municipal representatives, councillors Linda Annis of Surrey, Kash Heed from Richmond and Ahmed Yousef of Maple Ridge, calling for Metro directors to be directly elected.
Fontaine admitted elections wouldn’t be a panacea, but argued that under the existing structure directors appointed to Metro perhaps “lose perspective,” while collecting per diem compensation for attending meetings.
“(They’re) accountable to each other, to (Metro’s 41 directors), they’re not accountable to the public,” Fontaine said. “If they were elected directly and they had to be held accountable for decisions they were making, perhaps there would be a bit more financial discipline.”
New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone, who is one of New West’s representatives to Metro, is skeptical that elections would be “applying the right tool to solve the problems we have, frankly.”
“I’m not sure that anyone’s ever suggested that more elected officials is the best way to cut costs or that another layer of bureaucracy really increases transparency,” Johnstone said.
Johnstone said it would be more productive for municipalities to remain focused on fighting to get due consideration from the federal government when it comes to paying for some of the massive infrastructure projects Metro is building than “have another layer of (local government) fighting with another layer.”
Metro does need to build the North Shore and Iona wastewater treatment plants to accommodate growth. The necessity to do so now, however, is driven by federally legislated requirements for municipalities to provide secondary treatment of municipal sewage. Metro is the only jurisdiction on the West Coast providing only primary treatment, which it does at the existing Iona and Lions Gate plants.
On a positive note, Johnstone said Metro’s May 31 meeting did inch the regional district closer to adopting a single sewage area to allocate capital costs more evenly across the whole region.
Historically, Metro has managed water distribution as a single system within which it bills member municipalities the same wholesale rate for drinking water.
Sewage treatment, however, has been split between four areas: North Shore, which includes West Vancouver, the District of North Vancouver and City of North Vancouver; Vancouver, which includes the University of B.C. and parts of Burnaby and Richmond; and Lulu, which is most of Richmond, and the Fraser Valley, which is most other Metro municipalities.
Coun. Mike Klassen, one of the Vancouver ‘s Metro directors, said he’s also optimistic about the discussions the board has had about dealing with the North Shore treatment plant.
He added that the board at least agreed to phase in the additional $590 North Shore municipalities will have to pay over five years to soften the blow, which should also give it more time to figure out a single sewage area.
Klassen also said municipalities need to push senior levels of government to help build infrastructure dictated by their requirements.
“The amount of money that we would invest, in the billions of dollars, there’s only a limited amount of that kind of funding available,” Klassen said.
The federal and provincial governments kicked $405 million into the North Shore plant’s budget when it started with a $700-million price tag, but “the federal government has yet to deliver any funding in any substantive way,” Klassen said. “Property taxpayers simply cannot share the burden, even at a regional level across all the households of the region.”
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