Irene's Comments on Victoria's 2025-2029 Budget

My wife, Irene, also shared her comments on the Victoria's 2025 Draft budget with the city. Some links:

• The engagement site
• The 2025-2029 Draft Financial Plan
• The 2025 Draft Budget Summary
• The October 24, 2025 Committee of the Whole Meeting

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Greetings,

I’m a taxpaying homeowner and senior in Victoria and, having extensively reviewed the materials attached to the October 24 COTW, I want to congratulate Council and Staff on the fact-based Financial Plan & Budget that you’ve drafted. I am in general support of the Plan and Budget, and I have some specific points I want to share with you.

Public Engagement Methodology

I really appreciate that you are not just relying on letters and meeting attendance (which allows certain voices to dominate), but have included scientifically valid surveys and in-person engagements with historically under-represented groups in the engagements. I was particularly struck by the IPSOS survey finding that 50% put Housing as their top priority, while only 28% put Public Safety as top priority. That is certainly a different perspective than one might get from traditional or social media!

Staff Presentation to Council on the Financial Plan

This presentation did a great job of explaining the context, rationale, and meaning behind the less obvious aspects of the Financial Plan and Budget. It made clear that this Council is dealing with a long accumulated load of deferred maintenance, new challenges due to climate change, and the unwillingness of past Councils to raise taxes enough to pay for the work that needed to be done.

My key takeaways are:

• Our capital assets need a lot of work that we know of and, frighteningly, we don’t even have accurate assessments to gauge our risk or tell us how much getting to an acceptable state is really going to cost.
• We’ve been using Reserves as bandaids to cover the gap
• Even with the proposed tax increases, the city needs to take on more debt to try and get out of this hole. This will make our debt service costs rather high, even without Crystal Pool. 

The proposed tax increase 

I’m sure that you’ll hear from many people talking about how the proposed tax increase is horrific. I do think that Victoria’s Business property taxes are high enough to be hurting our city. But Victoria’s residential tax rates are lower than anyplace I've lived. For my household, the 12.77% increase would be less per year than many people pay for a single tank of gas! And before you listen to people saying “but what about seniors on fixed incomes” just remember that seniors are allowed to defer their property taxes.

Don’t even bother trying to get the increase down a bit - the people who are upset about increases will still be mad, and you won’t collect enough to solve our problems. Honestly, I would support a much larger increase if I thought it was going to be money well spent.

Service Cuts & Operating Efficiencies

It’s very tempting, and often politically more expedient, to cut everything a little bit rather than choose winners and losers. But when you don’t make those choices, everything just ends up kind of crappy.

If I were you, a key place that I’d look for savings while also addressing the top priority stated in the public engagements, is to make the new OCP and associated Zoning very permissive, and get rid of parking minimums and most of the detailed rules, guidelines, and committees that result in staff and developers going back & forth for months and years on every project. Victoria’s most beloved heritage neighbourhoods were created without all these rules and reviews! If we suddenly get too much housing built you can tighten up the zoning later. And if some of the buildings are boring or ugly, that can be fixed by planting trees or adding murals.

What I hope Council does with the Financial Plan and Budget

 I hope that you lead with courage - implement the full recommended tax increase, take some debt to start digging Victoria out of the infrastructure hole we’re in, and make hard and sometimes unpopular choices about services and projects.

Thank you for all you do!