Homeowners are now paying city utility bills. Renters will be paying too, indirectly. We all pay city utilities and taxes, so let’s drop Mayor Corrigan’s tacky tactic of stoking division between house owners and everyone else.
Burnaby First Coalition (BFC) is the municipal party uniting the growing, diverse opposition to the Mayor’s NDP-based Burnaby Citizen’s Association (BCA) one-party monopoly. BFC seeks fairness but observes that once again utility fees are going up while related services are going down.
First and worst of all is the latest cash grab: the 50 percent increase in utility fees on homes with a ‘suite’ – an increase of $304.30. Regardless of suite size and even if it is not rented.
Mayor Corrigan has said we need supersize condo towers in Burnaby to prevent urban sprawl covering Chilliwack farmland. Well, empty bedrooms create urban sprawl and inflate housing costs. So why not encourage efficient use of existing, built housing by encouraging suites? This would help address the problems of empty bedrooms and the shortage of affordable housing.
The fact is that houses are bigger but families are smaller than in the past. Plus we have ’empty nesters’. This means there are thousands of empty bedrooms.
The city website says the cash grab is needed “to cover the costs associated with additional water and sewer services for suites.” But people do not produce “extra” garbage or use “extra” water because they are not related to the homeowner.
So why does Council want to charge more for garbage and water in houses with suites? The mayor could well argue that sharing living space rather than building new buildings cuts into the profits of the development, real estate, and construction sectors. In short, that it could reduce profits for BCA donors and buddies. But council ought to put the interest of residents first.
Moreover, we encourage seniors to stay in their own homes because folks are healthier and happier, and this lowers public costs of special housing. Suites for caregivers can make this possible. Punishing them financially in not fair.
And while fees are up, utility services are also down. Take yard waste. Recall that Burnaby is supposed to be ‘green’. Plants are green. Yard waste is produced by plants that absorb carbon, release oxygen, provide homes for birds, beautify our neighborhoods, clean the air, control rainwater run-off and flooding, and – if edible – enhance local food security. These are all goals of the council.
But for the past few years the yard waste pick up has been drastically cut. We used to have seasonal weekly pick-up of all the yard waste that gardeners could bundle up and put out. Now we are restricting pick-up to one official container per week, every week. And even that one container is often not picked up. Weekly pick-up means we get yard waste removal in midwinter when there’s no yard waste.
But anyone who has trees and shrubs to prune, or grape vines and bean stalks to cut down will have far more than one container full seasonally, not every week. So gardeners spend a lot of unpaid time chopping branches into tiny pieces and stomping on the container to compress the load, while piles of uncollected yard waste remain for weeks and months.
Lastly, we will have garbage pick-up reduced to once every two weeks. This may be smart from an environmental and efficiency points of view, but shouldn’t reduce service result in lower fees? Oh and there’s an annual surtax of up to $360 for the garbage container.
BFC would review these cash grab tactics and make utility fees fair.
Janice Beecroft
Charter Lau
Heather Leung
Earl Pollitt
Helen Ward