Lower Mainland mayors are going squirrelly over TransLink’s plan to sell excess property and put that money toward the transit authority’s operating deficit. From the Globe and Mail:

“In municipal operations, you usually can’t fund operations by selling assets, by cannibalizing yourself,” said TransLink council chair Richard Walton, District of North Vancouver mayor. “When organizations in the private or public sector have to do this, it’s a bad sign.”

Of course, this is all premised on the idea that you actually believe TransLink has exhausted cuts within its $1.2 billion annual budget. Which they haven’t.

What we’re seeing here is political reindeer games—a desperate executive group trying, yet again, to bully mayors and provincial politicians into giving them another billion dollars in taxation tools by coming up with worst-case scenario cuts. First it was the announcement that they won’t offer bus service across the new Port Mann Bridge this fall. Then it was the taxi/HandiDart program. Now it’s selling some property. Tomorrow, no doubt, it will be cutting some popular bus route that will leave riders out of luck.

All this while they pay $27 million annually for a transit police force that has reduced crime at HALF the rate crime has fallen throughout the Lower Mainland—a force which will lose two-thirds of its workload the day the fare gates open on SkyTrain.

I can’t wait for the B.C. Government audit team to get in there and review this organization.

The one positive note in this story:

“This takes gas off the table as a future revenue source,” said Mr. Walton.

 GOOD! Seventeen cents per litre for this group is seventeen cents too much!