By Earl Rook, LCC chair, AND
Gary Holman, CRD director, LCC vice-chair
The Capital Regional District (CRD) Board approved its provisional budget for 2025, including that of the Salt Spring Island Local Community Commission (LCC), at its Oct. 30 meeting.
The provisional budget is prepared by CRD staff based on a number of factors, including inflation, negotiated wage and salary settlements and contractual obligations, CRD guidelines for capital and operating reserves, and direction by elected officials for new initiatives. The provisional budget, which is reviewed and approved by elected officials locally and regionally, provides the opportunity for public input before final approval in March 2025.
The full CRD provisional tax requisition for Salt Spring Island, including Capital Regional Hospital District (CRHD) and other regional, sub-regional and local services, is $9.2 million, a 13.2 per cent increase over 2024. The CRD requisition supports general administration, regional investments in affordable housing, new health facilities, parks, and emergency planning and communications, as well as sub-regional services such as building inspection. The above figures do not include user fees and charges for some services such as recreation facilities, nor for area specific water and sewer utilities (overseen by ratepayer elected commissions). These fees and charges are also increasing somewhat to address inflationary pressures and aging infrastructure. It should be noted that residential recycling costs are covered by provincial stewardship programs, Recycling BC fees on packaging and tipping fees from CRD’s Hartland Landfill.
The provisional CRD requisition for 2025 represents a cost for the “average” residence on Salt Spring (valued at just over $1 million in 2024) of $1,400, or about $117 per month, compared to $1,238 or $103 per month in 2024. This “average” residential cost is an estimated indicator only and subject to change with updated 2025 assessment values. Changes in assessed values do not result in property tax changes for individual properties unless changes in assessed values for such properties are much lower or greater than the overall average change.
The property tax-funded requisition for delegated LCC services (including parks and recreation, transportation and transit, liquid waste, economic development, the library and the arts, and grants in aid) is $4.996 million, a 12.49 per cent increase over 2024. The LCC requisition represents about half of the total CRD increase for Salt Spring.
This is another difficult budget year, due in part to continuing cost inflation. Salt Spring also has less influence on the regional costs allocated to it (primarily on the basis of our island’s share of assessed values) as part of the broader CRD budget. Major factors affecting regional costs include:
• negotiated wage and salary increases, staff turnover and reorganization. A new general manager position for the Electoral Area Services department is being established in order to improve senior staff support for all three electoral areas, as well as direct support for the Salt Spring LCC.
• significant increases for land banking and housing (including the new Rural Housing Program and financing costs of the now completed Regional Housing First Program, which funded the new Croftonbrook), regional trail investments (including designs for Salt Spring’s Salish Sea Trail), and general administration (including cyber security and accounting upgrades to support the approximately 200 services CRD delivers in the region).
• an increase for building inspection (a service shared by the three electoral areas), in large part reflecting lower building permit revenues.
• the CRHD requisition remains at 2024 levels. The CRHD recently contributed $3.7 million to the new Lady Minto emergency room.
Major factors affecting the proposed provisional requisition of the LCC on Salt Spring include:
• restoration of Sunday pool hours;
• initial costs associated with leasing the Phoenix School property for community use;
• increases in transfers to reserves to help address aging and proposed new infrastructure, including possible re-purposing of the Ganges fire hall property;
• costs passed down by BC Transit for our local transit system, which is also still recovering from the cumulative ridership and revenue impacts of Covid;
• increased costs to the library, as it continues to transition from a volunteer-run facility to a greater reliance on paid staff.
Summaries of the provisional CRD budget for 2025 will be available at the local administration office (121 McPhillips Ave.), at the library and online at getinvolved.crd.bc.ca/2025-financial-plan.
Please contact LCC chair Earl Rook (erook@crd.bc.ca) or CRD director Gary Holman (directorssi@crd.bc.ca) for any comments or questions on the budget.