By columnist André Carrel
The City’s four new secure bike shelters are a choice addition to the community’s bicycle infrastructure. The project’s reported cost of $223,650 for the 40 secure bike parking spots is captivating. At $5,591 per bike space the shelters’ costs are likely to exceed the value of almost any bicycles being sheltered.
This project makes for an interesting case study of public spending decisions. Without any mention of bicycle shelters in the Official Community Plan’s integrated and active transportation network community goal, the policies supporting Objective #3 (Improve safety of our transportation network for motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians), how would one go about a cost-benefit evaluation of this project?
One way to look at it would be to ask whether a $55,910 bike shelter at the city’s public works yard would have been among Council’s top priorities if the provincial grant used had been unconditional rather than designated to people getting more exercise. Another way is to ask if council would raise property taxes by $55,910 to construct a bike shelter at the public works yard. Such questions may be absurd, but in principle there is no difference, none at all, between a provincial grant and local property taxes. All government revenues, be that taxes from any source, property, consumption, or income, be that royalties on resource extraction, including the sale of logs from a community forest, are by definition public funds. The “grant” label does not convert government revenues into “free” money. Any and all decisions concerned with the expenditure of public funds, without regard to the source of the funds or the nature of the expenditure must always be based on compelling rationale.
Conditional grants offered by senior governments, federal or provincial, are a curse. They impose priorities on communities. That is not to say that the restricted source of revenue available to local governments is adequate; it most definitely is not. Citizens everywhere would be better served if local governments were guaranteed access to all sources of taxation, including resource, consumption, and income in addition to property. What a local share should amount to is a matter to be negotiated by senior governments and the Union of B.C. Municipalities.
Services provided by local governments – water, sewer, roads, fire, police, land use – may be alike throughout the province, but every municipality has to deal with conditions, circumstances, and realities unique to its location, topography, micro climate, and history. How can a council be accountable for spending decisions without the authority to determine spending priorities? To go back to the bike shelter project: Council is accountable for the efficiency and efficacy of the bike shelter project’s completion, but that is not the central question. The paramount question is whether a conditional provincial grant program allowing for the construction of 40 secure bike shelter spaces at $5,591 per space meets the needs of our community’s futile struggle to maintain its basic transportation infrastructure.
Conditional provincial grant programs place municipal council, not only in Terrace, in a position to either renounce an offer of public funds because the conditions attached to the grant do not meet local priorities, or to apply for the grant and spend the money – not to meet a local need, but because the money is available. Conditional grants place municipal councils in an impossible position: be responsible and say no to “free” money, or be a creative spendthrift!
This column first appeared in the Nov. 3 print edition of The Terrace Standard
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