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Mixed progress on affordability front

Wages not keeping pace with inflation, but affordability program meeting targets

If you earn less than $26,000 a year, before taxes, you can’t afford to live and enjoy Whistler. If you’re a family of four, you need to be compensated in the neighbourhood of $60,000 — not including the cost of daycare.

For the average worker, that translates to earning the equivalent $12.40 an hour, working 40 hours a week. For the average family, two income earners need to pull in around $30 per hour.

It can, and has, been done for much cheaper, but according to Whistler 2020 monitoring, that is how much you need to be compensated in cash and/or benefits to live here and have the time and toys to actually enjoy what Whistler has to offer.

According to Dan Wilson, a Whistler 2020 monitoring coordinator for the Resort Municipality of Whistler, one of the main issues impacting the cost of living is that wages are not keeping pace with inflation, with the average Whistlerite earning less than $20,000 a year according to income tax assessments — a figure that has been stagnant for at least three years and has not kept pace with inflation. While the numbers don’t take the past year’s employee shortage and construction boom into account, he says the information they have collected includes 2006.

On Tuesday evening the Whistler Forum for Dialogue held a Dialogue Café to discuss the “The Rising Costs of Living in Whistler”. Presenters included Wilson, who helps to measure progress on the recommendations made in the Whistler 2020 sustainability plan, and Janet McDonald, the head of the Whistler Community Services Society (WCSS). Participants in the discussion included Mayor Ken Melamed, Councillors Gord McKeever and Ralph Forsyth, and Whistler 2020 coordinator Shannon Gordon. They mostly limited the discussion to elements of the Resident Affordability strategy within Whistler 2020, which does not including housing — a separate strategy in Whistler 2020.

According to McDonald, the Resident Affordability task force has made some progress in implementing the recommendations in Whistler 2020.

“The challenge is that affordability is such a big, complex issue and there are so many factors controlling it,” she said.

According to the latest monitoring report from 2006, the most recent action items include expanding the Re-Use-It Centre in Function Junction, better promoting the centre within the resort, and ensuring that people know that the money raised by the secondhand store go to other WCSS programs.

The addition of a new drop-off and purchase centre for building materials is late, but McDonald confirmed that it will happen in 2008 and will be located at the new municipal waste transfer station in the Callaghan Valley.

The task force is also continuing to look into the possibility of organizing bulk sales events for local families through local grocery stores, allowing them to purchase key items at the same prices they would get in Squamish and Vancouver — an initiative that will keep that money in town. The task force has met with local grocery stores, but no other action has been taken.

The task force will also put an affordability strategy for residents online, including tips on saving, reducing costs and budgeting, and links to programs like Kidsport that help subsidize sports registration and equipment for children in low income families.

Child care is one issue McDonald says is coming up again and again since the federal government cut its subsidies last year, but it is also challenging to resolve. It’s one of the issues that will be addressed next week at the Union of B.C. Municipalities (UBCM) annual meeting.

Also on the UBCM agenda is a discussion on raising the provincial minimum wage by 25 per cent from the current rate of $8. Most members of the panel agreed that the minimum wage is irrelevant in Whistler, especially with the current worker shortage, and the only people earning the minimum are the people that are also earning gratuities.

Wilson explained how Whistler 2020 measures affordability. Rather than take a comparative view of wages and costs, they used the same system as the Social Planning and Research Council of B.C. where a “basket of goods” for living in Whistler is costed out — including rent, groceries, transportation, utilities, recreation, entertainment, and other quality of life measures. The quality of life measures take into account things like free time, the ability to take vacations, and the ability to enjoy arts and culture.

That’s how Whistler 2020 came up with the $26,000 figure for individuals and the $60,000 figure for families. He said they refer to those figures as compensation rather than wages because many workers get benefits like ski passes, free meals and subsidized housing that defray their cost of living.

“This is not the ‘affordability basket’, which includes the basic cost of living, but goes over and above basic needs because our definition of success in this area would be for residents to do more than cover the costs of shelter and meals,” he said.

According to Wilson, making Whistler more affordable and enhancing the quality of life for locals is key to several other strategies, including retaining and attracting employees and improving the visitor experience. It’s also a driver for other plans in Whistler 2020, including resident housing, transportation, health and social development, and community sustainability. For example, a campaign to get people to buy local will keep more money in the community and increase affordability.

According to McDonald, the WCSS main recipients of emergency aid and food donations fall into two categories. The first is young people who are new to the resort, empty their bank accounts paying their first and last months’ rent and other set-up costs, and then experience delays in being able to work full time and earning their first paycheque. The other major recipients of WCSS aid are single parents, recently separated or divorced, that are having a hard time paying rent and providing for their children on a single salary.

Wilson says it’s challenging to measure what it would cost a single parent to afford the Whistler basket of goods because they make up such a small part of the sample of surveys.

Although housing was not included on the list of Whistler 2020’s action items on resident affordability, it’s an issue that came up repeatedly at the Dialogue Café.

Gord McKeever, who is council’s representative at the Whistler Housing Association, maintains that the biggest factors in affordability remain housing and transportation — both of which are in the process of being addressed by council.

“We’re going to see a 50 per cent growth in the number of employee restricted beds, from 4,000 to 6,000 in the next four years or so. Our transit costs are projected to go up 30 per cent in the same time,” he said. “At the UBCM we need to corner the Transportation Minister and get him to unfreeze the budget for B.C. Transit.”