Park board fees set to increase due to zero per cent property tax increase

Controversy over Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s zero per cent property tax increase goal for 2026 is set to continue tonight as the city’s park board meets to approve its budget.

At issue are fee changes and new charges for Vancouver residents, as laid out in a Nov. 13 park board report that points to a requirement to find “revenue opportunities and cost savings of $11 million” in order to support the mayor’s plan.

If approved, the price of park board programs and services will go up by an average of five per cent in 2026. 

These increases will affect fees for skate rentals, swimming lessons, admission to parks like Bloedel Conservatory and VanDusen Botanical Garden and golf courses at McCleery, Fraserview and Langara, among other things.

Recommended parking fees are to increase by an average of two per cent across the system, and new paid parking pilots will be rolled out at select community centres, the Langara Golf Course and VanDusen’s special events.

These fee increases arrive amidst an atmosphere of conflict between the park board and the city.

In 2023, Sim announced an intention to dissolve the independently elected park board, and in early October the province announced that would only be possible with voter approval through an assent vote. On October 27, Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs Christine Boyle walked that back, stating on social media that the province wouldn’t be moving forward with the bill’s second reading.

But the tension continued over Sim’s “zero means zero” plan, which meant city departments had to source $120 million in cuts — with $15 million originally allocated to the park board. That number has now been reduced to $11 million, but the board also needs to make up an additional $8.9 million in revenue. 

Park board chair Laura Christensen critiqued these targets in an October briefing and at a Nov. 12 special council meeting on the budget, where more than 600 people signed up to speak. 

The “crux of the issue,” Christensen told Vancity Lookout, is that the zero per cent increase effectively means the city doesn’t want to put taxpayer money into parks and recreation. But what does that mean for residents? 

“We increase our revenues or we cut our spending. And by cutting spending, that's cutting services, essentially,” she says. “So we're at this balancing of — do we try to increase revenues and make more money, which is challenging. Or do we have to cut services and try to find and reduce spending, which has all sorts of problems with it.”

When asked about the park board reduction targets, Sim’s press secretary Taylor Verrall called the $11 million amount stated by the park board “very strange,” and added that there’s been a lot of “misinformation” floating around.

“Their budget’s not getting cut,” he said. “As things stand, if [the budget] gets approved, they’re set to get an increase, so I don’t know where that’s coming from.”

In a later email, he clarified that in the mayor’s proposed budget, which is “explicitly clear in its direction to protect core, frontline service levels in parks and recreation,” the park board would be receiving a $1.2 million funding increase.

Calling it an increase is disingenuous, counters Christensen, who says this number comes from a small increase to the park board expenditures, while their fixed costs have risen significantly.

 “They keep pointing to this and saying, ‘Look, we're giving the park board more money,’” she says. “What that doesn't say is that our fixed costs have gone up like six per cent, as they have all across the city, because we have to pay more for labour. We have to pay more for materials. There's inflation. Our fixed costs have gone up. We have more capital that we need to maintain. We've got the Oak Ridge Community Centre coming online, the Sunset Senior Centre. So we are maintaining significantly more assets that cost more money to maintain, and we've increased our revenues a huge amount.”

Park board commissioner Brennan Bastyovanszky says the board was told to grapple with a $15 million target (now $11 million) at an in-camera meeting, and the only reason it got out was because their independence from city council allowed them to raise the alarm.

“One of the unique features of having an elected park board is that we're the only department in the city that could raise the red flag that the cuts were going to impact services,” he says.

“They're not investing in parks at all, they're cutting 11 million and then forcing the people that use parks and rec the most to pay for that. All they've done is created an invisible tax that the users have to pay.”

For now, the park board has no recommendation to increase the amenity improvement fee, which started last year as a two-year pilot project. That’s an extra amount added on to services and admission prices like at Burrard Marina and the Stanley Park train to cover the upkeep and maintenance of aging facilities and attractions.

“The amenity improvement fee is there to ensure that when you're going golfing, as an example, a small portion of the green fee that you pay will get dedicated to maintaining and upgrading the green going forward,” says Bastyovanszky. “That's what the city hasn't done historically on any of our assets. That's why they're all crumbling.”

Bastyovanszky and the park board have been vocal in their criticism that it cannot keep the surplus funds it generates, which are instead absorbed into the city’s general revenue, “further constraining the Park Board’s ability to manage its own fiscal pressures.”

Fifteen years ago, the city took over the responsibility of maintaining park board assets “and then decided not to maintain them,” Bastyovanszky alleges. 

In September, Vancouver’s auditor general released a report which found that as of 2002, 72 per cent of the city’s recreation facilities were in “poor or very poor condition” and that the 46 facilities included in the audit had an infrastructure deficit of $33 million per year. (The Lookout covered underfunded recreation facilities in a previous story).

“This isn't what the public wants,” says Christensen, referencing what some speakers at the Nov. 12 and 13 meetings expressed about the zero increase plan. “The public is okay to pay more in taxes if it means that the services are going to be maintained.”

In the city’s 2026 budget engagement survey, 50 per cent of respondents said they supported an increase in residential and commercial property taxes to balance the budget, and 55 per cent of residents said they would be willing to pay increased user fees to maintain services.

Tonight’s meeting is at 6:30 p.m. in the boardroom at 2099 Beach Avenue in Stanley Park.