Does Kelowna really need more empty parks?
Tuesday morning was a glorious time to be out and about in Kelowna parks, wonderfully sunny with the beginnings of another remarkably mild fall day enveloping the Central Okanagan.
Trees still laden with more green leaves than gold. Lawns so well-manicured they looked like golf courses. Okanagan Lake as blue as it ever is, as it always is in the softer light of autumn.
And here’s how many people I counted, total, enjoying some time over lunch in Strathcona Park, Kinsmen Park and BoyceGyro Park, all big gorgeous green spaces on the city’s waterfront. Twenty-seven. That’s 27 people out of 130,000 residents. Does the City of Kelowna have a serious shortage of parks? It does if you believe the city’s parks department.
And if they convince city councillors of this highly debatable fact, which is based on selective comparisons with other municipalities and completely arbitrary internal targets, expect to see another new tax pop up on your property tax bill in the next year or so.
A parcel tax to pay for the development of new parks is the financing option most likely to win council’s support to deal with the phantom crisis of inadequate parkland.
Across B.C., city and town councils are embracing parcel taxes to fund projects like road improvements, new recreation centres and other infrastructure upgrades.
Parcel taxes are popular with politicians because they provide new revenue outside the normal property tax stream.
In 2016, Lake Country council sent out a press release bragging about a zero per cent change in the tax rate, while conveniently neglecting to mention the town had that year imposed a $125 parcel tax on all 5,500 private properties to generate an extra $700,000 for roadworks.
Also last year, City of West Kelowna staff began talking up the need for a parcel tax to finance new park development. Now, Kelowna is eyeballing a parcel tax for similar purposes.
The problem with parcel taxes, as former Canadian Taxpayers Federation B.C. director Jordan Bateman noted, is they make you wonder what the heck municipal governments have been doing with their ever-increasing stream of regular property tax revenues.
“Where has all the money gone that we already send city hall? Why haven’t those continual tax increases been invested in infrastructure?”,” Bateman wrote in an opinion piece last year.
In Kelowna, municipal property taxes have increased 12 per cent in the past three years, triple the inflation rate.
Between 1984 and 2014, the average annual tax hike in Kelowna was 4.2 per cent, compared to the annual average inflation rate of 2.4 per cent for that period.
But somehow, always, it’s never enough in the eyes of city hall bureaucrats.
“It is apparent that park development has not progressed in line with the city’s aspirations,” declared a report from the city’s parks department presented to councillors on Monday morning.
That conclusion was reached — surprise — through reference to a formula and schedule for park development that was concocted by the city itself.
The city sets itself a target of 2.2 hectares of parkland for every 1,000 residents. It acquires that land sometimes through the purchase of private land, but also by basically forcing developers to hand over land for free through the subdivision process.
Based on its own formula, and the current population of 127,380, the city should have 280 hectares of parkland. It actually has 301 ha (not including vast tracts of regional district parkland), which which could be interpreted as a parks surplus, and a good news story.
But wait. About 40 per cent of the inventory is said to be “under-developed”, which means it lacks some of the amenities staff would like to stuff into the parks, and 13 per cent is “undeveloped” — ie. they’re in a natural state.
Hence the declaration of a serious “shortfall” in parkland, and a suggestion that a parcel tax be considered as a way of raising new money to create more parks.
The everyday, observable reality in Kelowna — especially outside the two summer months — is that you can go to any park anywhere and have oodles and oodles of elbow room. The entire park to yourself, in many cases.
A parks shortage is a fiction of the parks department. But the idea of boosting taxes is, once again, all too real.
Ron Seymour is a Daily Courier reporter. Email: ron.seymour@ok.bc.ca. Phone: 250-470-0750.