Metro Vancouver's water bill is a governance problem, not a plumbing one
The pipes are fine. The org chart is leaking.
Your water bill went up nine per cent this year, and if you missed the decision being made, you are in excellent company: it was made by a board no one elected to make it, at a meeting no one attended, on the recommendation of a body that answers, on a good day, to itself.
This is not a scandal. The projects behind the increase — the treatment plant, the seismic mains, the reservoir program — are real, necessary and, by the standards of water infrastructure, competently run. The scandal-shaped thing is structural: a regional federation that spends billions through a board of council appointees, each accountable to a city council, none accountable for the whole.
The model had a logic when the region's shared plumbing was modest. It has not been modest for a generation. The board now makes some of the largest infrastructure decisions in the province behind a governance arrangement that political scientists politely call indirect and residents accurately call invisible.
The fixes are known and unexciting: direct election of the regional board, or provincial legislation that at least forces its budgets through the same public scrutiny a city's must survive. Every year the region declines to choose, the bills rise anyway — competently, necessarily, and without a single voter able to say she saw it happen.
