Vancouver council faces big budget and rezoning votes on Tuesday

Vancouver's city council will end the year as it began it: with complicated discussions about overall priorities and contentious public hearings for new housing. 

Council's last scheduled day of meetings takes place on Tuesday, with the morning (and potentially afternoon) devoted to a fourth session on its proposed budget for 2020. The evening session is devoted to a public hearing over a proposed new apartment in Kitsilano. 

But given the nature of both discussions — there are around 50 speakers scheduled for the public hearing — it's possible council will have to extend its 2019 calendar. 

"We do have reserve dates on Wednesday and Thursday, so we could keep going ... for the rest of the week," said Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung. 

Door number 1, 2 or 3?

The city's budget discussion will centre around the best way of lowering 2020 expenditures from the original proposal presented last month by staff. 

It would have meant an average 8.2 per cent property tax increase for homeowners, but a majority of councillors passed an amendment asking for three new draft budgets, requesting staff show the effects of tax increases of five, six or seven per cent. 

Coun. Christine Boyle said she generally supports the seven per cent proposal, which would slightly delay hiring for scheduled new jobs and reduce funding for the citywide plan but generally keep most previously approved priorities intact. 

"There are priorities that we have as a council have been passing throughout the year. This budget reflects them," she said. 

"So, I'm focused on making sure that we fund our climate emergency response to the degree that we need to ... I want to make sure that we're continuing to make critical investments in housing."

But Sarah Kirby-Yung, part of a group of NPA and Green councillors that worked to get the tax increase lowered in the first place, said the options laid out by staff weren't sufficient, because they didn't look at ways of significantly reducing a planned increase of 340 staff across various city departments next year. 

"It's incredibly frustrating," she said.

"I think that the spirit of the council sending it back to staff was really to look inwardly and say 'what could we do differently' ... so to not to get anything back from that in terms of internal savings, and additionally to get requests for adding more staff, it's really disappointing to me."

New rentals criticized by community

Regardless of whether council concludes its budget discussion, at 5 p.m. it will transition into its second day of a contentious public hearing for rezoning a church into an apartment. 

The proposed five-storey building at West Second Avenue and Larch would be entirely rental, with one-fifth of the units set at "moderate incomes," with monthly rents ranging from a studio for $950 to $2,000 for a three-bedroom unit.

It's part of the city's pilot program to promote private development of affordable new rental buildings, as it is lagging far below stated targets for rental construction.  

But opposition to the building in the immediate neighbourhood has been widespread, several people on the first day of the hearing complaining that the majority of units wouldn't be affordable and the apartment was out of place with the surrounding homes.

"Can you imagine the cars and traffic and parking nightmares?" said Sophie Dikeakos, owner of the longtime Sophie's Cosmic Café and a nearby homeowner. 

She also criticized the city for not forcing the developer to provide similar community services that the church previously did. 

"This is my community, and we all try our best to care for one another ... the developer has provided nothing back to the community at large."