City of Kamloops staff will be tallying up the costs of all responsibilities the municipality has shouldered in lieu of the province after council voted unanimously in favour of preparing the report.
Coun. Katie Neustaeter, who put forward the recommendation in a motion, told council Tuesday she has heard a lot of conversations — including around Union of B.C. Municipalities tables — about the province downloading its responsibilities to local governments, but she “struggled to know how to actually quantify that.”
That changed after hearing a December presentation from Kamloops Fire Rescue Chief Ken Uzeloc. He told a council committee city firefighters are attending a steadily increasing number of medical calls, often arriving on scene before ambulances.
“I think it sparked the concept in all of us that if we were to begin putting this on paper and actually capturing and quantifying those costs, it might be helpful to the province to see them reflected,” Neustaeter said.
“Although municipalities keep speaking about it, it’s a large level of conversation, sometimes it means more to see it in dollars and cents. And we know that we're absorbing a lot of the cost of responsibilities that are actually provincial in particular in nature.”
She noted a media interview in which the provincial minister of finance told reporters there won’t be a significant provincial increase in taxation this year — just days before council found out about the provisional 10.8 per cent municipal tax increase for Kamloops residents.
“I was terribly uncomfortable with the fact that we are picking up costs at the municipal level, while the province is able to say we don’t have to increase taxation — while we pick up the bill,” the councillor said.
Neustaeter’s motion will have staff compiling data which quantifies the financial impact of downloading from the province from 2019 to 2023.
The report will be sent to a future committee of the whole meeting, but the document is being prepared with the intent to send the numbers to provincial ministers. Other councillors also noted the report could be presented at UBCM.
Neustaeter noted the date range was set in consultation with city staff, who will also do the work to determine which items can be considered downloading — which the councillor said can be thought of as a “slippery slope of the offloading of responsibility.”
“When we say downloading, it isn't necessarily something that's written in black and white so that everyone can notice it. That is the whole point, is that it's erosion of responsibility that municipalities have to pick up and pay with property tax dollars that should be reinvested in our communities in other ways,” Neustaeter said.
CAO David Trawin said staff, including David Hallinan, the city's corporate services director, have been thinking about how to tackle this request since Neustaeter gave notice of motion at the last council meeting in December. He said staff will bring back some objective costs and direction back to council members.
Coun. Mike O’Reilly said he hopes the city is able to create a framework which can be updated on a regular basis as responsibilities continue to shift.
