For second time since 2002, Salt Spring set to hold referendum on incorporation
Salt Spring Island residents will vote for the second time in 15 years on whether to incorporate as a city, a referendum that is splitting the idyllic island between those who believe it is time for the community to have more say in its governance and those who fear not only their island but all the Gulf Islands will become vulnerable to eventual development.
More than two-thirds of the residents voted down the chance to have their own mayor and council in 2002. They will vote again on Sept. 9.
The competing sides are lining up over how best to govern the island between the B.C. mainland and Vancouver Island that is home to many artists, musicians and artisans, and accessible only by ferry. Its population tops 10,000, a number that doubles in the summer, making it the largest community in B.C. that isn’t a municipality.
Yes Empowers Salt Spring Island — YESS! — are urging voters to allow islanders to determine how best to spend the $12 million they pay in taxes for delivery of services and to make decisions about land use.
“There are lots of emerging land use and service delivery questions and we need local decision-making as opposed to off-island decision-making,” said John Mcpherson, who is retired and has lived on Salt Spring since 1999. He is voting Yes.
“We don’t have a single authority,” he said. “We have a fragmented system. It takes years and years to get anything done.”
If Yes wins, voters in their first election will choose a mayor and council, who will replace the one elected representative to the Capital Regional District that governs some of the island’s services, and two trustees on the Islands Trust, which determines land use issues.
But No-side supporter Peter Lamb, retired and a 28-year resident of the island, said separation of services and land-use questions helps protect the island as was intended when the unique governance model for the main 13 Gulf Islands was set up more than 40 years ago.
“I like the island the way it is and I don’t want to risk it being changed by a concentration of authority,” he said. “It’s a friendly community, an active arts community, with great parks to hike in, and people come to the islands to enjoy that. I don’t want to jeopardize that by becoming an urban municipality.”
In the 1960s, a developer created a 1,200-lot subdivision around Magic Lake on Northern Pender Island — the largest subdivision in Canada at the time — which prompted the province in 1974 to pass the Islands Trust Act.
“It’s what stopped the development,” said Lamb. He said that since 1974, the population of Metro Vancouver has more than doubled and B.C.’s has quadrupled, while “the Trust area has absorbed just 15,000 new residents. The reason we have the island we have now is thanks to the Islands Trust.”
“There are probably 20 reasons why I’m voting against (incorporation),” said Jean Gelwicks. “But the main reason is the Islands Trust. When I first arrived here, I said, finally, here is a vision of how communities can govern themselves and still protect the environment.”
Lamb also said he worries about taxes going up because a new municipality would be responsible for the island’s roads.
“There’s a huge cost, a staggering cost,” he said.
Mcpherson and YESS! website organizer Suzanne Little, who voted No in 2002 but now is spearheading the Yes vote, said there has been a “misrepresentation” of the facts around incorporation and that the fear of rampant development is “misplaced” because taxpayers won’t elect pro-development candidates.
A 2013 governance study found by a margin of two-to-one that residents wanted more information about incorporation to address concerns about the current model, according to the YESS! website.
Mcpherson says the 2013 study that “compares apples to apples” found there would be a tax hike of $25 per year for homeowners and about $200 a year for the island’s 200 farms. The No side hasn’t yet provided a detailed breakdown of how taxes will go up, but are working on a website, said Lamb.
And he said the $33 million for roads would work out to only $65 to $200 a year in new taxes if spread out over 15 to 30 years.
Mcpherson said some costs, for instance for policing, will go up, but as a municipality, Salt Spring would be eligible for transition funding and have access to funds for infrastructure upgrades it doesn’t have under the current system. And taxpayers will no longer pay $540,000 a year to the Islands Trust.