VOTE JOHN DACOMBE FOR COURTENAY COUNCIL

Why extending municipal boundaries is bad policy and doesn't create lower cost housing - but does create higher taxes

Extending municipal boundaries is bad for taxpayers, residents, and the environment. Sprawl means more depreciating assets that taxpayers are responsible for maintaining in perpetuity: roads, sewers, sidewalks, water lines.

The City has $25M booked in the Capital Plan just to extend sewers to parts of south Courtenay that were brought inside City limits in the last 20 years and still do not have sewer connections (something I will vote against). And at some point, Fraser and Comox Logging Roads will need expensive upgrades to support the subdivisions built in that area. That’s not developers paying for that. It’s you, the taxpayer. (And no, the property taxes from development in those areas will never cover these costs.)

And it doesn’t matter what city we are talking about - low density always means too low a tax base to pay for servicing associated infrastructure, with high density urban cores de facto subsidizing sprawl (click on the first visualization).

In essence, the more any city extends its boundaries outwards and increases sprawl, the worse long-term financial situation it places its taxpayers in.

Skeptical? Take a look at the direct correlation between the cities around here with the highest property taxes, based on mill rate – Nanaimo and Campbell River - and the cities with the biggest footprints and worst sprawl.

That’s why I’m against extending municipal boundaries: because taxpayers and the environment pay, and the only people who benefit are a few politically connected developers and land speculators.

And to anyone saying that “we need to extend City boundaries so we can build more homes!” take a look at a map: Courtenay has a massive footprint of undeveloped land already inside municipal boundaries.

So what are actual solutions? How do we create more affordable housing, both market and non-market?

One word: densification.

If an area already has existing municipal infrastructure, the cost is connecting services to the lot line, not extending services out into some old farm field. That means savings at the front end, but also less depreciating assets in the future.

The relatively new R-SSMUH (Small Scale Multi Unit Housing) zoning means more housing on lots that are already serviced. Sometimes - not always - that means significant savings for existing homeowners (It all depends on servicing capacity), but it almost always means savings for Courtenay taxpayers who don't have to subsidize new depreciating assets.

And townhouses, condominiums, and apartments on already serviced urban core lots need even less infrastructure per resident. When these are built on brownfield sites (think of the apartments next to Superstore), urban core empty land that was creating no revenue, housing zero residents, and generating nominal property taxes - but had services to the lot line - start generating revenues and taxes while also solving the housing shortage.

McMansions out in the country do the opposite.