SURREY – The No side in the transit tax hike fight won a big victory despite the Yes side spending millions.
Metro Vancouver voters have resoundingly defeated a proposal to add a 0.5 per cent sales tax in the region to fund transit and transportation expansion.
The proposed Metro Vancouver Congestion Improvement Tax that would have funded $7.5 billion in upgrades over 10 years was rejected with 61.7 per cent of voters saying No and 38.3 per cent saying Yes, reported Surrey Leader newspaper.
The Yes side lost in every major city of the region – even in Vancouver where it got 49.1 per cent – and only won in sparsely populated areas like Belcarra and Bowen Island. (See breakdown of results by municipality below.)
The defeat leaves the region without an estimated $250 million in new revenue the tax would have brought to expand transit.
Surrey and Vancouver are expected to try to cobble together their own plan B strategies to build light rail in Surrey and a SkyTrain extension west along Broadway.
But the region will be without the funding required for a broad 25 per cent expansion of bus service, including many more frequent express bus routes that had been in the mayors’ plan, nor will it have money for increased SkyTrain, HandyDart, night bus or SeaBus service that was to have swiftly kicked in after a Yes vote.
No campaign head Jordan Bateman highlighted many voters’ unwillingness to pay more – especially to TransLink – and argued more money could be found if cities restrained their own spending and tax growth.
He successfully framed the campaign as a vote on TransLink, which he accused of mismanagement and which had come off major SkyTrain breakdowns and a failure to fully launch its new Compass card payment system on time.
