As a city that covers 329 square kilometres, Prince George is comparable in size to Las Vegas, except when it comes to population.
The Nevada metropolis has eight times as many people as the 75,000 who live in the northern BC capital.
That density discrepancy also exists compared to other BC cities. Prince George has just 240 people per square kilometres, much less than that of Kamloops (320), Kelowna (680), Nanaimo (1,100) and Victoria (4,700)
But it wasn’t supposed to be that way.
This was a boom town through much of the 20th century and for four straight decades, from 1940 to 1980, the city doubled its people count every 10 years. Thinking it was going to be another Edmonton, with its blue-collar industrial base, Prince George city planners decided to go big in their projections for future growth.
From 1963 to 1974, the Prince George boundary was expanded 11 times to grow into a city of 61 sq. km, and in 1975, with one fell swoop, the city limits suddenly covered five times as much territory. With that came the need for all those new areas to be serviced with roads, sidewalks, gas pipelines, storm/sanitary sewers, power lines and street lighting.
The thought was, if they built it people will come, and every neighbourhood had its own school, abundant greenspaces and wide residential streets. But we overbuilt when it came to infrastructure.
“The city has a massive footprint, and not a lot of people,” said Kris Dalio, the city’s manager of finance and information technology services. “We’re the size of Las Vegas, and other cities, when they have this footprint, they have half a million people or more that pay for all this infrastructure. We have 75,000 people.
“We have $4.4 billion of replacement value of all the assets and it’s very expensive to maintain. When it comes to things that use up that geographic space, all of that stuff costs us more per person than it does cities of smaller size and higher density. We built for a city bigger than the people who actually ended up coming to stay here.”
In 1979, the city’s first official community plan predicted there would be 185,00 residents living in PG by 2012. Back in 1981, we had more people than Kelowna, Kamloops and Nanaimo. But the boom went bust in the late ‘80s and instead of exponential growth the Prince George population hasn’t changed much at all.
After years of stagnant growth, finally the city took down the sign at the intersection of Highway 16 and 97 that boasted Prince George had 81,000 residents. Was that just wishful thinking that we’d get that big, followed by the realization we weren’t going to get there any time soon? Perhaps.
The problem is the growth of our tax base hasn’t kept pace with our aging infrastructure and that means trouble ahead as the need to replace worn-out pavement and punctured pipes becomes more urgent.
It’s estimated there’s $90 million worth of worn-out infrastructure that will require replacement this year alone. The Prince George Aquatic Centre is the big-ticket item on that list and it will require $37 million in repairs to keep it operational, $14.88 million of which is already secured, with the city needing to borrow another $22.15 million council okayed through the alternate approval process.
“We’re at a critical stage where we had a lot of infrastructure built in a specific timeframe in the city’s history and a lot of it is coming due (for replacement),” said Dalio.
”I think a lot of people believe that being more rural, like we are , that it should be cheaper to maintain everything and cheaper to live here, but I find the reverse to be true. That space we all enjoy, being able to have a fence and yard, it’s actually a luxury and it’s because of our space that we have and how much more per person you’ve got to pay to keep it up, it’s a luxury.”
In January city council approved a $138.8 million tax levy in its 2024 budget and capital plan that resulted in a 6.78 per cent tax increase that took effect in July.
“We spend pretty much all of it,” said Dalio. “We’re a service industry so most of our budget (about two-thirds) is labour and it’s spent keeping people employed who deliver the service.”
Wednesday’s budget-themed town hall meeting at the Civic Centre stems from the city’s legal obligation to host a public engagement information session. Although it drew only 35 people, the interactive webcast was available that gave participants the opportunity to ask questions of high-level city staff and department managers in attendance.
A budget summary document graphic shown at that meeting identified the city’s top operational expenses. Topping the list was protective services (police and fire), which accounts for 36.7 per cent ($61.3 million) of the operational budget, more than double that of transportation (15.4 per cent - $25.8 million). Recreation and culture were next (14.8 per cent - $24.7 million) followed by central government operations (13.6 per cent - $22.7 million), debt servicing (7.7 per cent - $12.9 million) and public transit (4.7 per cent - $7.8 million).
By the time all city goods and services are paid for, public buildings are subsidized and city staff get their paycheques there’s not much wiggle room for discretionary spending. The city’s finance and audit committee will identify spending priorities and budgets for services that could be adjusted before the city council finalizes that document in budget deliberations Jan 20 and 22.
The city’s online budget public survey, available until Nov. 8, has a sliding tool feature that allows participants to determine how their tax assessment changes if they increase or decrease budget allotments for such services such the policing or snow removal.
“If you want to, you can put in the assessed value of your home and it will tell you what that dollar impact will be for your decisions and the idea is you would try to decide how to balance the city’s budget,” said Dalio.
City staff will present the capital plan and draft operating budget to the finance and audit committee on Dec. 4 and that will be debated by council at the Jan. 22 public meeting at city hall.
City staff will publish responses to those questions raised at Wednesday’s meeting on the city website’s Get Involved page.
