Metro Vancouver's outgoing board votes Friday on $914 household budget as mayors-elect push delay
The board's 1,190-page agenda includes a 2027 budget that puts the average household's regional services cost at $914, up about $17 from $897.
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Metro Vancouver's outgoing board meets Friday to vote on its 2027 budget and five-year financial plan, a 1,190-page agenda that would set the average household's regional services cost at $914, up from $897, an increase of about $17 a year.
The vote is facing growing calls for delay. Vancouver mayor-elect Pete Fry said he agreed with Surrey mayor-elect Doug McCallum that a pause makes sense. "I think mayor-elect McCallum is correct, it probably makes sense to delay this," Fry said Tuesday. "We have a brand-new council. We have new priorities." McCallum first raised the idea and has asked board chair Mike Hurley to cancel Friday's meeting.
New Westminster mayor-elect Daniel Fontaine called ratifying the budget in the dying days of the current board "incomprehensible." "It just doesn't seem, from a good governance perspective, that you would want people who are unelected or retired making decisions for which they would not have to be held politically accountable," Fontaine said.
The Business Council of B.C. has also asked that the garbage plan vote be postponed. The plan is a revised 10-year solid waste management plan that has been submitted for provincial approval and projects garbage disposal fees rising about five per cent a year. Denise Mullen, the council's director of environment, sustainability and Indigenous relations, said Metro "does it all: They make the policy, do all the planning, they are the regulator … the primary operator of the system and the price setter."
Paul Henderson, Metro Vancouver's general manager of solid waste services, described the garbage plan as the "culmination of a five-year process" and said annual increases of about five per cent are needed "to support critical infrastructure investments and address rising contract costs."
If the board votes on both items Friday, the new board can reconsider or rescind them under the process set out in Metro Vancouver's bylaws. It is unclear whether the incoming board would do so. Thirteen of the region's 21 municipalities chose new mayors in the mid-October election, including Vancouver, Surrey, Richmond, Coquitlam, Delta and both Langleys.
Earlier, about $364 million in operating budget savings were applied to the 2026 budget and five-year plan, which roughly halved the projected rate increase per household.
