Surrey City Mayor Brenda Locke issued a public statement that claimed Surrey residents will face a one-time 55% tax increase if the Province of BC approves the continuation of the policing transition. However, the numbers presented by Mayor Locke received criticism from various councilors and Surrey Police Service.
According to the mayor, “A staff report presented to Surrey City Council last month sheds light on the immense cost of the police transition in Surrey. According to that report, the costs for the Surrey Police Service are estimated to be $235M more than maintaining the RCMP as Surrey’s Police of Jurisdiction over the next 5 years. To recover this funding gap in the upcoming year a one-time tax increase of 55% would be required, in addition to the normal tax rate set by Council.”
She said that a switch to the Surrey Police Service would create an untenable financial burden for Surrey taxpayers during these challenging economic times. It is also unreasonable to advance the City’s budget process any further without knowing which economic scenario the City will face.
Surrey First Councillor Linda Annis, however, called it “a scare tactic that continues to muddy the waters and reinforces the need for real, independent financial numbers around the choice of police services.”
“I have always wanted the real facts and frankly was shocked that the city identified more than 40 different assumptions that had to be made as it prepared its report on the cost of the transition,” noted Annis. “That’s a ridiculous number of assumptions and begs the question, just how much of the financial report can we take seriously, and that applies to the mayor’s 55 per cent tax increase statement.”
SPS Chief Constable Lipinski said, “I believe this assertion is, not only inaccurate, but intended to confuse residents and business owners.”
He said that he was am deeply concerned that “Mayor Locke continues to use financial assumptions to inflate the cost of Surrey’s transition to a municipal police service. The costs to terminate the transition and almost 400 employees (estimated at over $200M including sunk costs) are also not mentioned in the Mayor’s statement.”
“As previously stated by SPS, a number of financial assumptions were used in the City’s Plan to Retain the RCMP as the Police of Jurisdiction in Surrey in order to arrive at an inflated cost ($235M) of the transition over the next five years. These assumptions included a nine-month pause in the transition which has not been previously contemplated by any party, and an assertion that the transition would take another five years, which is also inconsistent with previous discussions with the three levels of government. It is also unclear why a municipality would ask its residents to pay for costs that would be incurred over a five-year period, in just one year,” Lipinski said.
