Vancouver Park Board move, budget task force shine new light on mayor’s vision

A dramatic pledge to try and disband Vancouver’s park board and an upcoming report from a budget task force are painting a clearer picture of Mayor Ken Sim’s vision for the city, political analysts say.

Sim announced Wednesday the council would ask the province to amend the Vancouver Charter to abolish the elected park board, saying the current system was “broken” and that parks and facilities were suffering as a result. Sim promised to try and scrap the board in 2021, before promising instead to keep it in 2022.

The announcement came a week after the head of a budget task force commissioned by Sim gave a draft presentation to council highlighting the group’s findings, the text of which has since been obtained by Global News.

1:12 Vancouver budget task force appointed by Mayor Ken Sim

Sim struck the task force in April, pledging it would go through Vancouver’s budget with a “fine toothed comb” to find savings.

Central to the reports’ findings is a need to “refocus” the city’s role by defining a “core mandate.”

The city’s mandate has gradually expanded over time, and “Council should develop a policy that defines its core mandate, to provide ‘guardrails’ for council decisions,” while developing a policy for how to handle ‘out-of-mandate’ matters, according to the report.

It also proposes a finance committee to oversee the budget process and stickhandle grant applications, and a review of the city’s capital fund asset portfolio to determine what assets the city should own or manage based on its core mandate.

5:10 Vancouver park board chair on motion to eliminate board

It points to housing and childcare services as files that need more funding from senior levels of government.

“It’s actually asking to define what is the role of council and what are they supposed to be doing,” former city councillor George Affleck said of the task force’s recommendations.

“Like no nukes for example in the 1970s, or when I was on council, millions of dollars to sue about oil … The things that city hall and the park board get up to that are really far outside their mandate is really out of control.”

The approach hinges on streamlining systems to find efficiencies, he said, potentially making the bureaucracy easier to navigate with fewer moving parts.

UBC political scientist Stewart Prest said Sim’s approach appears to focus on increasing centralization, something he said could increase efficiency — but come with tradeoffs.

“Everybody is working in service of the same overall direction laid out by council — but it can also lead to top-down decision making, and even new barriers to effective action where everything has to run through a centre, through a council that simply runs out of bandwidth,” he said.

2:29 Vancouver starts process to abolish elected park board

The concept of “refocusing” the city’s mandate could represent the groundwork for getting the government “out of the business” of providing social services, addressing issues in the Downtown Eastside, or addressing environmental issues.

Whether it is successful, he said, will hinge on whether Sim’s entrepreneurial approach to governing can balance “trimming the fat” with keeping important parts of democratic governance.

“Government is not the private sector — it has a different role, a different mandate to deliver services to the population, to engage in consultations wherever appropriate to understand what does the population actually need,” he said.

“And sometimes that just takes additional resources.”

Sim’s motion to abolish the park board heads to council next week, but will still require the province to sign off on any amendments to the Vancouver Charter.

The Mayor’s Budget Task Force is expected to make its final report public next month.