Issues

The largest single item in the budget of most local governments is public safety: policing and fire protection. The City government is more concerned about protecting its turf than protecting its citizens.

POLICING:

• Policing costs are mostly paying for the RCMP contract and then sharing costs of the building and equipment and support services with the District.
• RCMP charges out the cost of the personnel assigned to the detachment and a portion of the costs of centralized services.
• The cost of the RCMP used to be divided between the City and District by population. ie. 40/60 to the City and District respectively.
• During the time I was on Council the RCMP switched to ‘activity based costing’.. which meant more than 50% would go to the City.
• All the City had to do was agree that North Vancouver was one community for the purposes of policing, and it would have avoided the additional cost.
• As it happened, they insisted on a separate contract and City taxpayers pay roughly $2 million per year more than they would had the costs been split on a per capita basis.

FIRE DEPARTMENTS (yes, there are two of them):

The City probably pays less than it should for fire protection, but its insistence on maintaining its own one-hall fire department is putting its citizens at risk unnecessarily.  (More to come… )