Bob Ransford
Sun
If you are a property owner, at the beginning of last week you wrote a big cheque to pay your annual property taxes. You probably didn’t realize that about 10 per cent of the taxes you paid went to unelected government bodies that have no direct accountability to taxpayers.
One of those governments, the regional government known locally as the GVRD, is governed by an unelected board, it has unclear jurisdiction and is exercising authority unchecked in a way that could lead to untold impacts on the rights of property owners.
The Greater Vancouver region, with a population of more than two million people, is one of the country’s largest and most diverse metropolitan areas. The complexities of urban living and metropolitan growth management require regional planning.
Little can be achieved with a parochial approach to the big-picture decisions. Regional governments are a necessity.
Regional governments, with real authority over planning and land use, are best equipped to deal with the big-picture decisions that affect our ability to maintain a high quality of life in a fast-growing urban region.
But British Columbia’s brand of regional government is an undemocratic anachronism.
The GVRD, the largest regional district in the province, is a good example of an old concept in need of reform. Its biggest flaw is not that it has too much power, but rather that it is exercising too much power with too little authority and next to no accountability.
The GVRD merely coordinates region-wide services like the water supply, waste management and regional parks. Through a series of cooperative agreements and voluntary consensus-building mechanisms, it also pretends to manage and plan growth and development, as well as protect air quality and green spaces.
They pretend without having the full authority to do so and without the checks and balances that provide the proper level of accountability.
The fact is most probably hadn’t heard of the GVRD until now. You’ve never voted to elect its governing board. At the very least, you probably have never thought of the GVRD as yet another level of government capable of interfering in our daily lives. It is sad, but true.
Even sadder is the fact that the people you elected to your local municipal council are allowing an unelected, unaccountable regional government to usurp powers with next to no debate. Some local councillors are handing new powers to the regional district government on a silver platter.
Take Maple Ridge, for example.
Maple Ridge Council is about to surrender to the GVRD veto powers over land use regulation for more than 73 per cent of the land within Maple Ridge’s boundaries.
Maple Ridge council seems prepared to do this even though the GVRD has already informed Maple Ridge that any changes to the land within a new “green zone” Maple Ridge has drawn on its own map can only be made with the unanimous consent of the GVRD’s 21 member municipalities.
This is all playing out in what is described as the “spirit of cooperation” where each member municipality has a say in how the GVRD is run. Unfortunately, the provincial legislation that governs regional districts in this province is somewhat ambiguous when it comes to how that cooperation is supposed to work.
In the face of this ambiguity, the GVRD has been making up its own rules, as it interprets its own powers.
Earlier this year, the GVRD blocked Maple Ridge council’s decision to rezone a piece of property to make way for a new 78-unit townhouse development.
The GVRD interpreted the “green zone” in its regional plan as having supremacy over local decision making. The GVRD basically directed that the decision as to whether or not 78 new townhouses could be built on this land in Maple Ridge was now in the hands of the 21 GVRD member municipalities, any one of which could block the development.
How would Maple Ridge react to say, White Rock, vetoing a local Maple Ridge decision?
The old adage “once burned, twice shy” doesn’t seem to hold much water in Maple Ridge.
Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer and a director of the Urban Development Institute- Pacific Region. Contact him at: [email protected]
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
