Life in Whistler could soon get more expensive for the average homeowner.
On Nov. 29, the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) announced a proposed increase in property, utility taxes and fees for the upcoming 2023 budget.
Under the proposed budget, property taxes will increase by 8.3 per cent, while the RMOW is also proposing increases of three per cent for water, four per cent for solid waste, and five per cent for sewer fees.
In a Nov. 29 press release, the RMOW said the tax increase will help the municipality keep pace with rapidly rising inflation and rebuild financial reserves.
“It won’t be a surprise to anyone in the community that the cost of things are going up,” said director of finance Carlee Price.
“Everything—from wages, to contract renewals, to fuel, to chemicals—everything is costing more; so have our operating expenses to deliver the same level of service or above where they were last year.”
The proposed tax increase is one of the most significant in the municipality’s history, and will work out to a little under $100 per $1 million in assessed home value. In 2021, the average single-family home in Whistler went for $4.1 million, which would equate to roughly $400 in new taxes for homeowners.
“I think it’s really important that communities across Canada, around British Columbia and the world, take the economic realities they face very seriously,” said Mayor Jack Crompton in a presentation at the Dec. 1 budget open house.
“We’re in an interesting cycle right now. I don’t know if you know, but we’re over seven per cent inflation right now. That is a really challenging reality for our community, and you see it in the tax rate. You see it in how we’re considering how we move forward as a community.”
The additional taxation funding will go towards keeping municipal services at current levels, although some services run by the municipality, like the Meadow Park Sports Centre, will likely see some service cuts due to the ongoing labour shortage in the region.
In 2023, there will also be a review of all handbook employee staff compensation (municipal staff not covered by collective agreements), including benchmarking against comparable municipalities, such as North Vancouver, Coquitlam and Delta, the RMOW said.
In previous years, the finance department was able to carve the taxation increases down, instead opting to cut into reserves. According to Price, that is unlikely to happen in this budget, with the alternative to taxation increases being service cuts.
“We always have the option to cut services. We can close the library on Sundays. We could further reduce the operating hours of Meadow Park. We could not clear the Valley Trail in certain sections, we could reduce the frequency of snow clearing—there are tons of options available to us,” Price said.
“One of the reasons we do stakeholder engagement is to figure out what the community finds palatable. Anytime we’ve tried to make these changes in the past, it’s been unacceptable to the community.
“It’s critical that we keep the Whistler product high-quality, especially the tourist-facing pieces of it. So it’s always been a real struggle to identify the low-impact service cuts that don’t affect community members more negatively than, say, the $5 you might save on your tax bill.”
Property taxes make up half of the municipality’s funding; the other sources of revenue come from a mixture of utility taxes and fees (20 per cent) and grant funding sources (eight per cent). The remaining income comes from various fees, charges and grants.
Every department is receiving a boost in funding in the proposed budget, with the most significant percentage increase coming to Whistler council, which voted last term in favour of an 18-per-cent raise for councillors and a 20-per-cent raise for mayor, lifting the mayor’s salary cap. Council’s departmental budget rose from $447,686 to $624,900—a 40-per-cent increase.
RMOW cuts project spending by six per cent
The 2023 budget includes $29.7 million in new project spending, with $8.6 million carried over from the previous year, for a total of $38.3 million budgeted for project work in the coming year.
That is down considerably from the $45.7 million budgeted for projects last year, as the municipality aimed to cut project spending by six per cent.
According to Price, some project work is delayed as supply chain issues and labour shortages have led to projects falling behind on building timelines.
“We have constrained our project budget this year by six per cent, relative to last year, and some of that has to do with our confidence in our ability to deliver projects in the constrained environment that we’re seeing,” Price said.
“Supply chains are lengthened, it’s taking longer to proceed on products that are critical to projects, and then in some cases, the tradespeople who do the work are less available,” Price explained.
“So our throughput capacity on the project side is smaller than last year. We understand there’s work that needs to be done every single year. We’re just struggling to get them in motion and complete them on time.”
Some of the notable infrastructure projects slated for 2023 include upgrades at Alpha Lake ($720,000); Meadow Park building rejuvenation ($1,897,008); road upgrades ($1,785,000); and solid waste annual reconstruction ($940,000). Sewer upgrades are the largest line item in the budget at $3.4 million.
On top of this, Function Junction will receive $100,000 for highway intersection upgrades, bus stops will get a $95,000 upgrade, and in an attempt to improve permitting times, the planning department is receiving $495,000 for digital application software implementation and project management.
The cost of climate action
The 2023 budget also places a focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation work.
New in this year’s budget is the municipality identifying projects that work to achieve some of its Big Moves Strategies. Altogether, the RMOW estimates that $27 million will be spent on projects to help the municipality achieve its climate goals.
According to RMOW chief administrative officer Virginia Cullen, implementing more action on climate change was identified as a critical priority in the Whistler Sessions and Scenario Planning workshops.
“We identified the need to increase the profile, the weight they give to the environment in the community alongside the tourism economy. All those things feed into each other, and we cannot look at one without the others,” Cullen said in a presentation.
Cullen believes the municipality is in a better position than it was a year ago and better prepared for the unknown, as it has overcome the cyber attack and the most difficult days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re not quite in the reactive phase like we were in the middle of COVID, and also, with a cyber attack that affected us in 2021-22, we’re feeling much better in terms of our position to be able to deal with the unknown,” she said.
Cullen described how the municipality needs to continue working toward being prepared for the effects of climate change following the 2021 natural disasters that devastated much of the province.
“Given what we know or don’t know what we’ll be facing with climate change, if the lessons of Lytton and what happened in Fraser Valley this time last year are warnings to us, we need to make sure that we are prepared for what we don’t know is coming at us,” Cullen said.
The projects highlighted for helping achieve Big Moves include investments in the River of Golden Dreams ($347,245); Rainbow Park upgrades ($1,807,144); and wildfire mitigation measures ($351,044), which recently received a $10-million grant from the federal government.
“For the coming year, we’re focusing on visitor amenities, including the parks. You would have heard about the village washrooms last year. This year it’s all about parks, and we expect this to be the case for the next couple of years,” Price said.
For Crompton, the budget hits on a few key areas. “I think this is a budget that reflects a commitment to housing, climate, and balance. I think it takes inflation seriously. That’s what I’m reading as I look at it,” he said.
Whistler council will consider the budget guidelines on Dec. 20 and the Five-Year Financial Plan Bylaw on Jan. 10 for the first, second and third readings.
The public may comment online through Dec. 16.
Read more and submit feedback at whistler.ca/budget.
