After a year of transition, the White Rock Business Improvement Association now has a five-year mandate.
White Rock council voted Monday to establish Bylaw 1931 and designate a business improvement area, after the city clerk reported 11 per cent of commercial property owners had registered against it.
To prevent the bylaw, at least 50 per cent of owners within the designated area – 130, with parcels representing $97,611,551 of the assessed value of land and improvements – would have had to register opposition.
“This has not been met,” Tracey Arthur told council.
The bylaw passed with only Coun. Mary-Wade Anderson opposed. (Couns. Grant Meyer and Doug McLean were absent from the meeting.)
“I simply feel that it’s such a huge amount of money for this city to be giving to a society or a business to do with as it sees fit,” Anderson said, referring to the $300,000 levy – in each of the first three years, to rise by two per cent in the fourth and fifth years – collected by the city annually.
Anderson said that while she doesn’t object to BIAs, having one in White Rock has done little to improve the town centre or attract people to the city.
“I don’t think movies and other things will do the job that needs to be done,” she said.
Anderson’s words echoed concerns voiced earlier in the meeting, when council heard a delegation on the issue from business owner Norma Eaton.
Eaton, who has owned a hair salon on Foster Street for the past four years, said she is adamantly opposed to the BIA, and to being forced to pay membership to an association that has done nothing for her business.
It doesn’t protect consumers, it hasn’t stopped businesses from leaving the city for South Surrey and the levy associated with it is just one more cost business owners must explain to clients who question their rates, Eaton said.
The fact home-based business owners are not subject to the levy only compounds the frustration, Eaton said.
“They have a business licence like me… and yet you don’t include them,” she said. “There’s no sense to what you’re doing.”
City manager Peggy Clark said under the Community Charter, including home-based businesses is “not possible.”
BIA board chair Ginny Harrison added that the exclusion also extends to bed-and-breakfast operations.
In a delegation prior to the vote, Harrison told council BIA members – who approved a new board of directors at their annual general meeting in January – want the five-year mandate. It will provide stability and “really enable the BIA to make some serious plans,” she said.
The organization had been in transition after acrimony between two factions led to a B.C. Supreme Court judge dissolving all of the previous boards and calling for a new election.
That took place in March last year, after which council put the group on notice with a one-year renewal.
