ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Gary Holman - Salt Spring Island Housing Issues

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

Gary Holman the CRD Director for Salt Spring Island gives his perspectives and makes some announcements  on the housing issues facing Salt Spring

Welcome to the Cheer.fm podcast, Ask Salt Spring Answered. After many Ask Salt Spring events, we sit down in our studio with Gail Baker's guest and review some of the key points discussed. Welcome to Episode 6 of Ask Salt Spring Answered. This time, Damian Inwood sits down with Gary Holman to talk about housing issues on Salt Spring. Okay, my name is Damian Inwood. I'm here with Gary Holman, the CRD director for Salt Spring Island, and we've just been sitting in the Ask Salt Spring session and had quite an interesting discussion. Once again, housing was a big issue, and there were a number of announcements that Gary told

us about decisions made by the CRD board, including one approving the borrowing of $85 million for a regional housing program. So tell me a bit about that, Gary. Thanks, Damien. Yes, three Salt Spring, or three issues dealt with by the board that have implications for Salt Spring. So the $85 million that the board approved a proposal

to take to take that question to municipal counselors and to voters so basically the board approved the beginning of a consent voter approval process so the 13 municipalities have to consent to that borrowing. And then in electoral areas, which include Salt Spring, there'll be an alternative approval process or otherwise known as a counter petition. And 11 out of 16 local governments in the CRD have to say yes to allow for that borrowing and the borrowing is intended to help fund affordable housing throughout the region it's the hope of the CRD just as we have in the past to get senior governments BC Housing and CMHC

specifically to partner with us, ideally match that funding. So this current proposal is, I guess, a second round of a very similar initiative undertaken last term by the CRD in that case put together a $120 million fund, $40 million which the CRD contributed through borrowing, and then CMHC and BC Housing matched that to put together a $120 million fund, which was spent on a number of projects throughout the region, including at least one on Salt Spring. That funding now has basically been fully committed, and so this $85 million is a second round of that approach,

but voters will have to agree to it. Okay, and from the $40 million, that was Croftonbrook that benefited from that right? Yeah Croftonbrook got I think about through that and another regional housing fund roughly four million dollars for Croftonbrook and then they got some additional funding directly from BC Housing that was the partner for that project and Crofton Brook was 56 units in two phases. Phase one is the existing Crofton Brook buildings there so phase two and three were funded through the regional housing first program and also funding from BC housing. Okay and just explain to me how that affects the

taxpayers and how the money gets paid back I guess you borrow 40 million and yeah and so the so the taxpayer cost is to pay for the carrying costs on that loan and so salt spring pays a portion of these borrowings and that portion is based on our assessed values as a share of total assessed values in the CRD. So that might be in the order of 2.5% to 3% would be our share of the carrying costs on those borrowings. Right. Okay.

But then if you spend $40 million through the CRD, where do you get the money back to repay the loan that you've borrowed? That's where the requisition comes in okay so there's an annual like the i think the i forget the the term of the loan might have been it's through the municipal finance authority where all local governments in british columbia borrow money from that municipal finance authority at very competitive rates. I think only the province has better rates. So the money bore there and then the carrying costs on that debt are covered by property taxes. And those property taxes are shared by all the local jurisdictions within the CRD based on their assessed values. Right. Okay. So, and I gather that this counter petition, as you called it, that's basically when people

who are opposed to it can put their names in. They sign a petition saying, we do not want this boring to happen or this service to be established. Yeah. Right. Okay. And is there, what's the, how many signatures do they have to get for that? Yeah. So it's, it's 10% of registered voters, which on Salt Spring is,

is around 950. So if 950, uh, voters on the voters list sign that petition, Salt Spring has said no. But the approval threshold for the borrowing is 11 out of 16 local governments have to say yes. So five can say no, and it can still pass. So Salt Spring could say no, and it could still pass. I strongly support it. When the counter petitions become available, there'll be public discussions about it in articles. I support it because we are not just Salt Spring, but the region as a whole are in a housing crisis. And this is one way in which, and a very important way, in which CRD can help alleviate that. So with the regional housing first, the previous program in the last term funded about 17 1800 units of affordable housing and that's a significant contribution so this time round costs have escalated the target for that regionalizing first were 2000 but we didn't reach that target

because costs were escalating through that period. So the 85 million, I believe, especially if we can get partners working with us, will fund more units, but it also in part has to deal with escalating costs. My point being, though, is that not only regionally, but Salt Spring can benefit significantly from this. So it's on us to get proposals in to that program and try and get some funding diverted here for affordable housing. Salt Spring has been reasonably successful at doing that. Right, and you mentioned the Drake Road project as being one that could benefit from this, right? Possibly.

So there's two projects on Drake Road. One is the five-acre property donated by the school district to the CRD. So the housing corporation actually owns that. We have leased that to BC Housing for 60 years. So BC Housing is doing the 28 units of supported housing. But in addition to that, there's more development potential on that five acre property that property could uh be one of the projects that's put forward for this second round of funding the other project is the dragonfly project which also was an agenda item

at the board meeting and we talk about separately that's an ownership project so it's not uh eligible for for uh that kind of funding the basically it's it's ownership so it's basically the owners of the units that will be funding that not taxpayers but it's uh aimed at employees really an important project the role that the crd is playing there and i can go into the second issue that we dealt with at the board. The board approved a staff recommendation to work with the Dragonfly proponents. It's a 30-unit proposal further down Drake Road. Work towards the establishment of a water utility, which because they're an ownership project, they need to establish a utility. They need either North Salt Spring or CRD to manage that, operate that utility.

North Salt Spring declined. CRD has agreed to work with them to establish a utility. So the proponents and ultimately the strata owners will pay for the new facility, pay to operate it. It's the CRD will be the operator. The design has to be the CRD specs, but it'll be a brand new system built to CRD specs and then the CRD takes it over and operates it as one of their utilities. Okay so eventually you would run it? Eventually CRD will run it, yeah. Okay all right. Now you also have approved a ban on construction waste at Heartland Road? Yeah that was the third

issue of significance to Salt Spring. Obviously, we're part of the regional waste function, and our garbage goes to Heartland. Construction waste comprises a very significant proportion of that, and in an effort to extend the lifespan of the landfill, we're hoping to extend its lifespan till 2100. We need to reduce the amount of waste that's going in there. Construction waste is a significant proportion of that. So the new initiative that the CRD board approved was to work towards bylaws and changing the fee structure, tipping fees and whatnot,

to ban construction materials. So ban wood and carpets, for example, and also revise the fee structure to penalize folks who put those kind of materials in their garbage, you're going to pay much more if that kind of banned waste is found. So there's a number of measures there that the board has approved. The actual bylaws will be finalized. They wouldn't come into effect until January of next year to give private households, businesses, haulers a time to adjust to the new regime. But the intent is to divert about 40,000 tons a year of construction waste going into the landfill, which will extend its life. And if we ever get to the point where that landfill is filled up,

unless we can eliminate waste entirely, that may be a possibility, but a long-term one, we're gonna have to find another landfill. So we want to avoid having to construct another landfill if at all possible. And would this affect people bringing these things to the transfer station on Salt Spring? That ban will apply, and transfer stations are going to have to be careful

about the materials they bring to Heartland. Now, separated waste, though, either brought by haulers or brought by businesses or households to the Heartland Depot, if they're separated out, I believe there's no charge for that because the intent is to recycle those materials, like the wood, for example. If it comes out from an older house, that wood is quite often old-growth material.

It can be quite valuable, and CRD staff believe that we can find alternative uses for them that uh that cover the costs of disposal um so yeah that's part of the incentive system is to you can't put it in the landfill but if you separate out your materials and you bring it uh to the heartland depot uh that's uh free of. Okay and we sort of morphed into a discussion on shipping liquid waste off off Salt Spring Island that was quite an interesting topic and I think you said that we spend around $600,000 a year shipping 97% water off the island. Yeah, when you put it that way, it does sound like a very good idea, and it's not. So it's been a bit of a struggle. Right now our liquid waste, so that's septic tanks, and it's also the sludge from the Ganges Seward Treatment Plant and the Malaview plant all go down to Burgoyne, disposed of in a large

underground tank. And then a larger truck, I think once or twice a week, take the material off island to actually to another waste treatment facility. Ultimately, it's compost that I believe in Ximena's. But yeah, the 97% of the volumes are water. So we need to try and find a way of reducing that volume and reducing our costs. The Liquid Waste Commission, which has now been disabled, dissolved, the liquid waste function will be one of the CRD services taken over by the LCC. So the LCC will be dealing with this issue. And in this summer, the commission, it's one of its last acts, was to approve an option study to look at ways to reduce the volumes of those materials and process it appropriately to reduce our costs so that a consultant's being chosen.

A report will be coming to the LCC sometime in the summer, and so the LCC then will make a recommendation about how to proceed. In my view, we'll see what the consultant says. Our best bet in the short term is to dewater that material, 97% water, and then we'd have to ship the residuals off, but obviously the volumes and the cost would be much lower. One of the reasons why we've had difficulties with that service is that back in 2010, 12, I forget the exact year. I wasn't director at the time. The CRD banned application of treated biosolids, even Class A biosolids, which the provincial government allows and which is done on other regional districts,

our regional district board, in their wisdom, banned application of biosolids, including composted material, to land. That was the intent. In fact, in 2008, voters approved a $2 million borrowing bylaw to do exactly that, to compost our liquid waste and apply it to non-food-growing lands like forest lands or quarries, landscaping, that sort of thing. But the board, as I say in their wisdom, banned that. And so that threw us back to square one in terms of alternatives, and we just fell back on basically turning Burgoyne into a transfer station, analogous to solid waste, where individuals and businesses, they take their garbage to transfer stations, and then that's put in a big truck and taken off island versus individuals trucking their materials off island. That's what we do with our liquid waste. Instead of individual homeowners sending their pumped out septic material to wherever on Vancouver Island, it's put into a big tank in Burgoyne.

And then a very large truck takes that material off. So there's some cost savings there, but it's still almost all water. I think you said that in your view the CRD staff would support composting if they were asked.

And I would support it. At this point they're not allowed to, right? But at this point the board has decided not to and they haven't really revisited that. Now they cracked open the door um because when the mclaughlin plant was built in victoria that large plant in victoria uh the residuals the sludge from that plant is now shipped to heartland where it's dried in another facility at Heartland and then those dried biosolids were shipped to the Lafarge cement plant where it's substituted for you know at at cost but Lafarge they have annual maintenance shutdowns and the plan was for those brief

periods of time we would apply it to the part of the landfill that had been closed and was being remediated. We're growing vegetation on it, trees on it, not the active part of the landfill. And the province was okay with that because it was a benefit, you know, it was used to promote growth on the rehabilitated part of the landfill.

Well, the forage ended up being shut down for much longer. So we started putting that material into the active part of the landfill. The province wrote us a letter and said, that is, we do not approve of this. You are going to have to find a beneficial use. In other regional districts, that beneficial use is often composting, but our board banned that. So the board decided, and it was a close vote, and I supported shipping the material to Nanaimo.

So we've come to an arrangement with actually a property owned by Lafarge. It's a quarry that they were probably in relation to their cement manufacturing. It's a quarry that they are rehabilitating, and so they will mix our liquid waste with sand, wood chips, and basically create a soil medium to remediate that. So the band, we've actually, the board has cracked the door open on that band by shipping the material out of region. In my view, I think we could use that material beneficially on Salt Spring. But in the meantime, until and unless the board lifts that band, we need to be looking at reducing the volumes that we're shipping off, which means dewatering.

Right. Okay, just to switch topics completely, I was quite interested when you were talking about Parks and Rec, which is going to be another LCC function, the rot in the walls of the pool and the fact that the electrics are completely shot because of chlorine, I gather. What's the cost on that? Do we have any idea how much it's going to cost to fix that?

Yeah, the electrical repairs, I think in the order of $300,000, and it's funded partly out of capital reserves, but also with community works funding. And yeah, the source of the problem there, and it's not uncommon, the chlorine in pools creates a very degrading atmosphere. And if you're not real careful on how you vent and all of that, you can create problems within your structure. structure so apparently the problem with the electrical systems is that they weren't uh separated off from the pool area and not properly vented and so that chlorine laden air moist air was getting into the you know the connections and all of that and and there was a lot of corrosion so we basically had to replace the system uh I take it the same thing has happened. Maybe it's a design flaw, improper venting. For whatever reasons, there is some rot, I think is the right word,

showing up in some of the walls, and so that's going to be another expensive item, which, again, capital reserves that are contributed to annually, the service puts money in capital reserves to deal with stuff like this, but also community works funds. I don't think we've had an assessment of the cost of that. But the broader issue there is that particularly parks and rec, we've got tennis courts that are going to need to be replaced eventually the centennial boardwalk we had an assessment of that done and over a period of time the consultant estimates there's a a nine hundred thousand dollar bill over

time that's going to have to be dealt with uh there the the the theme here is that there are a number of existing assets owned particularly by Parks and Rec that are aging and are going to need refurbishment or upgrading and eventually replacing. And so those chickens are, we are paying off debt, like we paid off the debt for the pool. So that's the good news. But the bad news is that the pool itself and other, particularly recreation assets, are degrading over time, and we have to spend money on them. So in my view, again, this will be debt-free, I think we should be considering as a community whether it's appropriate to borrow some money to refurbish some of these assets that have a long lifespan, like the Centennial Bar and Boardwalk's been there for decades. The pool now is a 10-, 15-year-old facility. But if we bring it up to snuff, it'll last for several other decades. If we've got no debt but we've got these degrading facilities,

maybe the community might consider a borrowing. That's something the LCC will have to consider. Right. And that would be obviously at a low cost because you'd only be paying the carrying fees, right? Yeah. you obviously at a low cost because you'd only be paying the carrying fees right yeah you you instead of a lump sum let's say to deal with those walls in the pool and there's a half million dollar bill uh so instead of paying that in one year which has a direct impact on requisition because our reserves aren't anywhere near that scale. So you can incur that cost in one year,

which means a huge requisition increase in one year, or you can spread the cost out over time, which is what borrowing does. And as long as the term of the loan is less than the life of the facility, it's justifiable. So the pool, we're debt free now yes there's some things we have to do on it but that facility will last for decades so that that debt was justifiable the library uh we um we will retire the library debt you know for the new

building in i think two years in26, it'll be retired. So that facility, we own the land already, paid off the debt on the land. That facility will be debt-free in a couple of years. It's in good shape. We do need to start bumping transfers to capital reserves, and I've started doing that. But again, there's a facility that will last for decades.

And if we had to borrow money, say, to replace a roof, say, in 20 years, that's justifiable because of the economic life of the facility greatly exceeds your borrowing. It would not be defensible to borrow money, say, over a 20-year period. It's paid off in 20 years, and you have to completely replace your facility in 10 years. So as long as the life of the facility greatly exceeds the borrowing term,

it's a justifiable expense. But in electoral areas, voters have to approve that. So you have to make your case to voters that this is worth doing. Right. And just to be clear, when you talk about a requisitioning increase, that's a sort of bureaucratic way of saying a tax increase. Yes. Yes, it requisitions four syllables instead of one. And yeah, maybe it's maybe a bit euphemistic. Yeah. I try to avoid the tax word whenever possible. All right. Well, thanks, Gary. Thanks for coming in and chatting today.

Thanks, Damien. Yeah.