A road trip to Port Coquitlam isn’t in the cards for New Westminster city council.
At Monday’s meeting, council considered a motion from Coun. Paul Minhas asking that the mayor request a meeting with elected officials and senior city staff from Port Coquitlam. The idea was to explore if any of Port Coquitlam’s “best practices” could be implemented locally, with a goal of limiting future property taxes while enhancing services.
Minhas’s motion stated the City of Port Coquitlam has consistently registered some of the lowest year-over-year property tax increases in Metro Vancouver for the past decade but has “proudly continued to expand core services” for its residents and businesses, while New Westminster experienced a “record high” level of property tax in 2023.
“It all starts at the top in the city hall,” Minhas said at Monday night’s meeting. “I believe Mayor Brad West and his council members have done a marvellous job of addressing the core services of his city.”
According to Minhas, Port Coquitlam has invested in libraries, free parking, infrastructure and amenities for its residents.
“And yet, year after year, they have maintained to keep the taxes very low. There are some lessons to be learned,” he said. “Rather than going on international trips, we can go visit our next door neighbour to learn what they're doing to meet the core needs of their residents and businesses.”
In a 4-2 vote, council defeated the motion.
Mayor Patrick Johnstone opposed the motion.
“I think that we need to have better conversations with our own professional staff around this instead of bothering Poco's staff with answering these questions for us,” he said.
Coun. Daniel Fontaine supported his fellow New West Progressives councillor’s motion, while councillors Ruby Campbell, Tasha Henderson and Nadine Nakagawa and Johnstone voted in opposition.
The discussion about the motion was peppered with thinly veiled digs at representatives from both civic parties – Minhas, a New West Progressives’ councillor, and Johnstone, a member of Community First New West.
Minhas did not explicitly name the mayor’s trip to Dubai for the COP28 conference, but the New West Progressives have criticized his trip abroad.
When stating their reasons for opposing the motion, both Johnstone and Campbell said there have been many opportunities for council members to question staff about this issue during council’s many discussions on the 2024 budget.
“If the mover of this motion (Minhas) had questions about municipal budget best practices, it would have been more appropriate for the councillor to ask our own city staff questions first,” Campbell said. “I haven't heard the councillor who moved this motion ask any questions to our finance staff about budgeting best practices here first. So I can't support this motion. It's not the approach that I would prefer, and it's certainly not an approach that I think supports the good work that our city finance staff have done.”
Fontaine said he wholeheartedly supported Minhas’s motion, calling it “very innovative, very creative.”
“And I agree with him that we don't need to conduct any international travel to learn a little bit more about things like focusing on our core services, so he raises some extremely good points on that,” he said. “And I think, if this motion is approved tonight what it would do is allow us to have a formal council- to-council dialogue and discussion and the ability for us to learn from the City of Port Coquitlam.”
While Port Coquitlam is smaller than New Westminster, Fontaine said it is “a treasure trove of amazing investments”, including new police, firefighters, bylaws and recreation staff, as well as new community facilities, including a community centre with a pool and three ice rinks.
“They're doing all of this, and they're doing it while they're keeping their taxes low compared to the rest of the region,” he said. “So it does strike me that we have an opportunity, being so close to Port Coquitlam, rather than getting on a plane and going somewhere and trying to learn lessons from other jurisdictions.”
Fontaine noted Burnaby’s 2024 property taxes are even lower than Port Coquitlam’s so it may worth having council look at what’s being done in Burnaby as well.
Building reserves
According to Campbell, “it is commonly known” that Port Coquitlam uses its surpluses to lower taxes each year.
“But the trade-off is, in 2022 Port Coquitlam had the smallest reserves of any Lower Mainland municipality that has a population of 5,000 people,” she stated. “So the reserves are being depleted. New Westminster's practice is to put surplus funds into reserves. This means we have reserves available to invest in our community, invest in critical infrastructure and have a safety net for when we do have an emergency.”
Osoyoos is hiking its property tax by 39 per cent this year, said Campbell.
“Until now, Osoyoos had always kept their low tax rates,” she said. “And now they're very desperate to help solve the major infrastructure problems that they're having because they haven't had tax increases.”
Johnstone said statistics posted on the province’s website show that Port Coquitlam and New Westminster have both done a “good job” keeping their tax increases below the regional average.
Noting that Minhas’s motion referenced “best practices,” Johnstone said council has talked at length over the past year-and-a-half about asset management. He said council has made it a priority to identify the value of the city’s assets and to make sure New Westminster has adequate financial support and reserves in order to make sure that those assets are sustainably funded and supported.
According to Johnstone, New Westminster has made a “significant increase” in its reserves over the last five years to support its asset management plan.
“It's a decision that's been made by this council, and I haven't heard a single member of this council say that was a bad idea or vote against that, in the year-and-a-half that we've been talking about this,” he said. “By comparison, Poco's … reserve money to back up their capital assets has not increased at all in the last five years. So that's the difference.”
Building up the City of New Westminster’s reserves is a policy decision that’s been made by made by this council, said Johnstone.
“We don't need to ask them (Port Coquitlam) why they made a different policy. I mean you're free to ask them why they made different policy decisions, but we've already had this discussion around this table, and our professional staff have led us to make a different decision about how we manage that,” he said. “So this is not a dig on Poco. Every city has different pressures and deals with different systems.”
In response to the New West Progressive councillors’ “glowing reviews” of Port Coquitlam’s infrastructure investments, Johnstone said that city has a $24 million capital plan this year, compared to a $140-million plan in New Westminster.
Fontaine said New Westminster is densifying and it needs to provide amenities for its growing population. While Poco has a new community centre that includes three ice rinks, he said New Westminster has two aging arenas.
“All Coun. Minhas is asking in this motion is keep our minds open,” he said. “We can learn from Poco. We can learn from Burnaby. We can learn from other cities. Why would we say 'vote no against this?”
