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Old Posted Jan 31, 2008, 8:39 PM
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Support your cities: Overdue bill payments catching up

Overdue bill payments catching up
Gerry Klein, The StarPhoenix
Published: Thursday, January 31, 2008

For a city that spent much of the last two decades waiting for its ship to come in, Saskatoon seems wholly unprepared now that the day is here.

The cry arose in the city last year about the inadequacy of Saskatoon's surface infrastructure. Work to widen the Circle Drive Bridge delayed traffic across the river for months and council finally agreed that all its capital efforts from now on would be weighed against the need to construct a $300-million south bridge.

But it isn't just the roadways that were unprepared for what was coming our way.

A CMHC study indicated in June that three per cent of Saskatoon's apartment rental units were vacant. This rate looked healthy in comparison to the consistent vacancy rate of six per cent to 10 per cent in the 1990s, but no one saw what was coming down the pipe.

As senior city planner Randy Grauer said Wednesday, it was at midnight on Dec. 12 that solid evidence of the problem facing Saskatoon became clear. That's when CMHC, which had refused to release numbers sooner, released a new report that showed the vacancy rate had dropped precipitously, to 0.6 per cent.

The city fielded some 50 applications in 2007 to convert 1,500 rental units to condos. That's more than 10 times the annual conversion average of about 130 units.

Everyone was caught flat-footed. However, even had the city known the rental vacancy situation before council amended its conversion policy in November, that would have done little to ease the lives of people caught in the middle.

Saskatoon's rental rates have been among the lowest in Western Canada for a generation, driven by relatively low demand compared to the apartment supply. That slow return on investment dissuaded companies from building more rental units, along with the fact that apartment buildings are levied disproportionately higher property taxes in comparison to condos.

City Hall already provides developers with tax abatements for building downtown. Aside from that, however, it's difficult to see what the municipality could have done to provide more protection for people who continued to live in rental apartments rather than buy their own homes. Rents were so low that many people were lured into believing they would always remain so.

But if the city could do little to convince developers to build homes and apartments for people who had yet to move to Saskatoon, councillors did fail the public with their insistence for years that property taxes had to remain as close to frozen as possible. Particularly in the 1990s, councillors would talk about people on fixed incomes who'd lose their homes if taxes rose.

Saskatoon bragged for years that its residents paid the lowest, or among the lowest, municipal taxes in Canada, especially in the West. However, a series of reports released over the last few days illustrates that, not only is Saskatoon's property tax bill among the highest in comparison to competing cities in the West, the cost of housing and living is growing faster here than anywhere else in Canada.

Even with that growing pressure on taxes, Saskatoon remains ill-prepared to meet its immediate challenges. The city was considered one of the best places to work a few years ago, but that's no longer the case. Wages and benefits across Western Canada put Saskatoon at best in the middle of the pack.

Replacing civic workers attracted away to other jobs has become a major challenge.

And it's not just Saskatoon that was unprepared for its economic boom. Even after years of harping on the provincial government to invest in what was clearly becoming Saskatchewan's economic engine, the support from Regina remains grossly inadequate.

The government attitude has been that anything that Saskatoon gets must be replicated in the capital, but a recent report from the Canada West Foundation points out that Saskatoon has out-performed Regina consistently in attracting new residents and investment. The Big Cities and the Census report released this week lists Saskatoon as one of Canada's five fastest-growing cities in its category.

Even though Saskatoon has planned for that growth, it's not had the resources to put those plans into action. Even now it has to borrow on its future potential to get the money to catch up, because it's never had enough transfers from senior governments.

The lack of attention from higher levels of government has not only contributed to the problems Saskatoon residents face today, it has also damaged the economies of this province and Canada.

Last week Statistics Canada released the report Immigrants in the Hinterlands, illustrating how a federal policy to funnel new Canadians -- consisting mostly of family-class immigrants, not those with needed skills -- into Canada's largest cities has resulted in a generation of immigrants with a declining standard of living while cities such as Saskatoon face a dearth of skilled workers.

Politicians have consistently sacrificed the future for immediate gains. They refused to raise taxes when it was needed to invest in growth, they traded wise investments in order to treat two very different cities equally and they collected new immigrants in ridings they hoped would give them a lock on power.

The postponed bill payment has come due and it's people who are struggling to find a place to live or a way to get to work who are paying it.

Source

******

The article highlights many of the failings of past governments, and hopefully sends a message to those in power at the provincial and federal levels.

Increasing societal demands will continue to have a significant impact on policy development for municipal-provincial-national relations, the environmental agenda, and also how these separate but mutually inclusive subject areas relate and support one another.

If senior governments continue to balk at requests for more municipal infrastructure funding then Canada as a country will have much more to worry about beyond the increasing environmental pressures.
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