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Scary budget times ahead

If I were Mayor Ken or councillors McKeever, Lorriman or Wake, I might have looked out over the empty seats in Myrtle Philip a week ago Tuesday and thought to myself, “Nobody in town really gives a damn about the budget or the proposed property tax i
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If I were Mayor Ken or councillors McKeever, Lorriman or Wake, I might have looked out over the empty seats in Myrtle Philip a week ago Tuesday and thought to myself, “Nobody in town really gives a damn about the budget or the proposed property tax increase to fund it, so what the hell, let’s just go for it.” Fact was, I thought for a minute I’d read the notice erroneously and had accidentally stumbled into a muni staff meeting, not a public meeting. The few members of the non-media public who bothered to show up during Tuesday’s snow storm were outnumbered by council and staff.

The woeful turnout might have been the fault of the snow. For that matter, it might have been my fault. After the budget meeting in December I wrote, in no uncertain terms, that I’d think twice about wasting my time attending another one since everyone who actually gets a vote on the budget seems to have already made up their minds. And to be honest, nothing I heard on the last Tuesday in January made me rethink that conclusion. If anything, the defensive, even churlish way so many of the questions were handled — not necessarily answered, just handled — reinforced the notion that the wagons have been circled, the bunkers been built and the decisions cast in stone.

That’s not to say it was a waste of time. It wasn’t. What it was, quite unexpectedly, was a glimpse into the future. I used to think our Olympic-tinged future was simply scary It isn’t. What it is though is downright terrifying.

In his opening remarks, Mayor Ken said words to the effect that we’re in for budget problems for years to come. Whatever illusions we might have had about this year’s proposed six per cent property tax increase being a silver bullet, a one-shot deal, bitter medicine we’d only have to swallow once, vanished when Ms. Mombourquette led the assembled few through a barchart of projected cumulative budget shortfalls we’ll be facing in the years ahead.

The sobering reality is that this year’s tax increase — which, of course, becomes the new baseline for subsequent budgets — will be repeated next year… and the year after that… and the year after that. After which point, the picture becomes fuzzier.

Without going into a primer on the mathematical magic of compound interest, let’s just say the leg of the sustainability stool that is economic sustainability — at least personal economic sustainability as opposed to municipal economic sustainability — is about to take a shitkicking.

That’s just based on what we know.

What we don’t know is the details behind the apocalyptic — possibly apocryphal — hints that various people purporting to be in the know have been dropping about very scary economic items likely to arrive on our doorstep prior to that big party in 2010.

The question is: What are we going to do about it? Sorry, the question is: What are this mayor and council — or the next one for that matter — going to do about it? I’m pretty convinced all “we’re” going to do about it is bitch and moan.

There are two fundamental questions that need to be answered before we can begin to appreciate just how hard it’s going to be to answer the what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it question. The first is: Who’s in charge of this asylum? Based on a lot of what I’ve been hearing, the answer is: senior muni staff.

In the labyrinthine world of municipal government — all government — staff has the upper hand. They’re professionals; they know the ins and outs of their jobs; they don’t have to stand for election; they represent continuity. Councillors, on the other hand, are part-time, inexperienced when they first arrive, and, let’s not put too fine a polish on it, easily bamboozled by staff who know how things work. A strongly united, single-minded council might have a chance to move the machine but we have a pretty evenly divided council as many votes over the last two and a half years bear out.

That leaves the task up to a mayor with a strong vision of the future and a personality and willingness to lead staff. For all his fine points, Mayor Ken is not exercising that leadership. While praising their professionalism — unquestioned — and hard work, Ken is being too deferential to senior staff’s indifference to the political implications of their decisions.

Missing from the public meeting was a chart showing what had been trimmed from the budget to get the proposed tax increase down from 14.5 per cent — the number needed to maintain the status quo — to six per cent. One had been prepared but on staff’s recommendation was not presented. We don’t know what hard decisions were made, what programs or maintenance cut.

And we don’t know what else would have to be cut to keep the tax increase to the rate of inflation. We only know such cuts would threaten the resort with “catastrophic failure.” Furthermore, we’re not likely to know because Ken believes, and staff concurs, that working up those numbers would be a waste of time. That it might lead people to understand and approve of increasing taxes to the proposed level seems to be unimportant.

That indifference leads to the second, even more fundamental question: Can we afford to be the Whistler we aspire to be?

Repeatedly, Ken invoked Whistler 2020 as being the community’s collective vision of the kind of resort we want to become. Ostensibly, the financial decisions being made — but not communicated — are informed by that blueprint. But it’s important to remember two things about Whistler 2020. Embodying the many participants’ wish list of what we’d like to see Whistler become, it is fundamentally a vision of what we’re working toward. It is, necessarily, subject to changing inputs, not the least of which is the economic input.

More importantly, when Whistler 2020 was being hammered out, and in the subsequent, annual workshops, the focus was on what we want to become, not what we could afford to become. The implied assumption was always if we could afford it, as opposed to whatever the cost.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with a six per cent property tax increase this year. I expect it’s going to cost me more to live in a place like Whistler. But I have a big problem with a compounded six per cent increase into the foreseeable future so we can pretend to be something we’re moving toward but haven’t arrived at yet. It’s either time to revisit the roadmap of Whistler 2020 or time for someone in a leadership position to start making even harder decisions… maybe about whether our municipal government machine isn’t simply too big.