Surrey city council voted Monday to send a plan to reverse the city’s police transition to the province’s minister of public safety.
The plan is based, in part, on a municipal report released last week that estimated scrapping the transition from the RCMP to the Surrey Police Service (SPS) would save $235.4 million over five years.
Mayor Brenda Locke was elected in October on a promise to reverse the controversial transition, and her Surrey Connect slate holds a majority on council.
With Monday’s council vote, the plan is slated to be sent to Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth by Dec. 15. Scrapping the transition requires provincial approval and Farnworth is expected to make a decision early in the new year.
The 88-page report concluded completing the transition to the municipal force would cost just under $1.2 billion between 2023 and 2027, while retaining the RCMP would cost $924.8 million.
Speaking with Global News on Monday, Surrey Police Chief Norm Lipinski said the SPS was not consulted for the report and disputed its findings.
“We disagree with some of the numbers that have been put forward. We don’t believe that it’s going to cost $235 million over five years. We believe half of that — it should be around $99 million is what we are told by our financial people,” he said.
“There’s a lot of assumptions that we disagree with.”
The SPS said it disputes the city’s assumption that between a quarter and a half of its officers would agree to transfer to the RCMP, noting that a survey by the Surrey Police Union found 94 per cent of respondents said they weren’t interested.
It also argued that the city’s report did not factor in more than $100 million in sunk SPS costs, including IT infrastructure, and that it incorrectly assumed the full transition to the SPS would take five years.
According to the SPS and Surrey Police Board, by the end of December, the “unrecoverable sunk costs” related to the transition are expected to reach $107 million. Terminating the transition by January next year will result in a projected investment loss of another $81.5 million, according to a financial backgrounder authored by both.
Lipinski said municipal staff also wrongly assumed the SPS would have trouble hiring the 419 officers it needs to fill out a full complement of staff.
“We are probably the only major Canadian city that has no problem recruiting. We have over 1,000 applicants for experienced officers and we have over 1,000 for brand new recruits, and that’s unheard of in Canadian policing,” he said.
“Recruiting up to the 734 police officers that’s required for Surrey is not a problem for us, and it’s not a problem for us to grow even after that.”
Locke previously told Global News she would not comment on the report until after it is dealt with at council on Monday.
Earlier this month council approved a related motion to create a joint project team led by two former senior RCMP officers, Peter German and Tonia Enger, to oversee the final transition plan.
During that meeting, council also received a report showing that if the SPS is scrapped, the Surrey RCMP would need 161 new members to maintain its funded staffing contingent of 734.