[news] Chicken Little revisits RAV line

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Vancouver Sun	  February 14, 2004

Chicken Little revisits RAV line

The funding proposals for the transit plan have some laughably big holes in
them.

Pete McMartin

It was Thursday afternoon. It was sunny. Outside, taxpayers were blithely
enjoying the balmy present: Inside, the finance committee of the Greater
Vancouver Regional District was arguing over how impoverished those same
taxpayers deserved to be in the very near future. The choices before them
were (a) Mildly Indebted, (b) Substantially In Hock or (c) Zaire. I have
seen the future and it's written in red ink.

The committee was there to consider the financial implications of the
Greater Vancouver Transit Authority's 10-year Strategic Transportation Plan,
the ambitious, multi-billion remake of the Lower Mainland's transport
corridors.

The plan includes new buses, new SkyTrain cars, new arterial roads, new
bridges and a third SeaBus, and the extension of SkyTrain in the northeast,
but its best known and most expensive component is the RAV line, the rapid
transit line between Richmond and downtown Vancouver.

As has been the pattern for the RAV line, its TransLink masters have
practised a hurry-up offence to make their way through the various levels of
government, screaming, at each stop:

"The sky is falling! There's no time left! We need your approval yesterday
if we are going to get this thing built before the Olympics!"

They're an excitable bunch, the TransLink folk, always threatening us, like
the editors of the National Lampoon, with a variation of: "Buy this magazine
or we'll shoot this dog!" Urgency is their preferred form of extortion. Last
year, TransLink went to Vancouver city council for approval of the RAV line
and gave councillors two months to digest 15 technical reports and conduct
marathon public consultation meetings. Any longer, councillors were told,
would jeopardize the project.

When the GVTA then went looking for funding for RAV, they said they
absotively, posilutely had to have $450 million from the federal government.
A penny less, they said, would jeopardize the project.

When the feds came back, scoffing, and said they could have $300 million
take it or leave it, TransLink took it. Suddenly, RAV could be built with
only $300 million in federal funds.

Now, RAV has come to its latest roadblock. It needs the okay from the GVRD.
While the GVRD supports the plan in principle, its bureaucrats took a long
look at the GVTA's proposed financing of the plan and said, and I
paraphrase:

"You're kidding us, right?"

The funding was, as the GVRD planners saw it, mirage-like, a wish-list that
might never materialize. It centred on the GVTA's "promise" of federal funds
in the form of GST and fuel tax rebates.

Well, the GVRD planners rightly pointed out, we all know how reliable the
federal government's word has been, especially in the West. What if those
"promised" federal funds do not come through?

Well, according to the GVTA report:

"A lack of federal funding beyond 2007 would create a greater funding
challenge to implement all the programs identified in the ten year Outlook.
The funding gap would be $260 million in 2013 assuming the 2005 measures are
implemented."

In other words, we will be royally up the creek. We will have the RAV line
-- which will be a white elephant, I predict -- and not much else. Programs
like arterial road-building, new bridges, bike routes, SkyTrain car
replacement and bus procurement will have to be scrapped. Parking charges
will double and fares will increase at the rate of inflation. We will have
fatally wounded our long-range transportation plans so that we might have a
brand new, shiny RAV line for the Olympics.

"The remaining $112 million gap would have to be funded from regional
sources."

What would those regional sources be?

The taxpayers, in their various guises.

Seeing the thinness (and political danger) in this, the GVRD planners in
their report wrote, with hilarious understatement:

"This lack of certainty as to how financial obligations are to be met is
quite foreign to local government finance."

TransLink chair Doug McCallum chose to see this public service as
obstruction. McCallum, who, in his capacity as Surrey mayor, is forever
bleating about his fiscal frugality when it comes to his own constituents,
predicted, predictably, calamity.

"If the [GVRD] board does not ratify this plan," McCallum scowled, "the RAV
line will be gone. We no longer have anymore time."

It was then that Doug Miller, mayor of little Lions Bay, and sitting across
the boardroom table from McCallum, piped up.

"I'm glad to hear," he said, smiling bemusedly at the pouting McCallum,
"that the sky is falling again."

pmcmartin at png.canwest.com


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