The West Kelowna Property Tax Cut That Bought Us $24

In March, council lowered the West Kelowna property tax increase for 2026 from a proposed 8.6 per cent to 6.638 per cent. For the average home, the last stretch of that reduction is worth roughly $24 a year. Two dollars a month. To get there, council cut funding for a bylaw enforcement officer and a parks position, and two of the people at the table said out loud that the pressure would simply land on whoever sits in those chairs next.

I am running for council, so you can discount this however you like. But I want to be precise about what I am objecting to, because it is not the $24 and it is not the two positions. It is that nobody was asked to put a number on the alternative. One of the three reasons I am running is that efficiency starts with training and measurement, not with cuts, and this budget is the clearest example I can point to.

What the West Kelowna property tax decision actually was

Staff brought forward an 8.6 per cent increase. Council pushed back, staff found savings, and the 2026 to 2030 Financial Plan was adopted at 6.638 per cent. The savings came from removing supplemental budget requests and from a full-time bylaw officer and a parks staff position that had been requested and were not funded.

I have run budgets where the difference between two numbers came down to one position, and I have made that call myself. Sometimes you make it and it is right. What makes it right is knowing what you are trading. That is the part I cannot find here.

The word nobody costed

Councillor Jason Friesen named it during the debate. “We have talked about not passing the burden on to the next council, but we are doing that. This is a deferral.” Mayor Gord Milsom said the requests were “probably going to come back next year so it is going to be additional pressures.”

So both of them understood the trade. What I cannot find anywhere in the public record is the number. If the bylaw officer and the parks position come back in the 2027 budget, they come back at 2027 wages, with a year of backlog attached, and possibly with whatever the untended problem grew into in the meantime. That figure exists. Somebody could have produced it in an afternoon.

Without it, the choice on the table was “save $24” against “spend $24.” Framed that way, of course council took the $24. Almost anyone would. The framing did the deciding, and every West Kelowna property tax bill that goes out next May carries the result of it.

A costed deferral turns that into a real question. Save $24 now against $40 or $60 or $110 later, plus a year of the thing not getting done. Council might still have voted exactly the same way. I am not claiming the outcome was wrong. I am claiming nobody in the room, or in the gallery, had what they needed to know whether it was.

Four days ago, the same gap showed up in a different room

On September 10, council adopted a five-year Community Safety and Well-Being Plan. Six themes, eight action areas, housing and mental health and public space design, coordination with Interior Health, BC Housing, the RCMP, SD23 and Westbank First Nation. Council will receive annual progress reports.

I think the plan is worth having. Most of what is in it is sensible and the problems it names are real ones. But read the measurement commitment. Progress is to be tracked using indicators and data from partner organizations, plus future surveys. That is the whole of it, as published.

There is no list of which indicators. No baseline for any of them as of September 2026. No target for any of them by 2031. No definition of what would count as the plan working, or not working.

Then there is the number underneath all of it. The draft plan went out for public response from July 17 to 31. The city received 24 survey responses.

West Kelowna has 40,093 residents. Twenty-four responses is six one-hundredths of one per cent of us. That is the moment where residents got to look at the finished plan and say yes or no, and two dozen of us did. For a five-year plan covering housing, policing, mental health and how our public spaces get designed.

Why this is not a complaint about staff

Getting people to answer a municipal survey in the last two weeks of July is close to impossible. I have run engagement campaigns and I have had turnouts I was embarrassed by. Nobody at city hall did anything wrong here, and there was earlier engagement that fed the draft, so this is not the only input the plan ever received.

But look at what happens next. The plan says progress will be tracked using indicators from partner organizations and future surveys. Future surveys. The same instrument that just produced 24 responses is the instrument we intend to measure five years of work with.

That is the part that actually matters, and it is the same failure as the $24. If your measurement tool returns a sample of two dozen, it cannot detect change. Say next year’s survey shows support up eight points. Did anything improve for anybody, or did three different people happen to fill out a form? At this sample size you cannot tell, and no amount of good faith in the reporting will fix it. You would be reading noise and calling it progress.

So the fix is not “do better surveys,” though that would help. The fix is that a five-year plan needs indicators that exist whether or not anyone fills out a form. RCMP call volumes. Shelter and housing wait times from BC Housing. Emergency department visits from Interior Health. Bylaw complaint counts, which the city already collects. Those numbers get produced anyway, by organizations already named as partners in the plan. They have real denominators and they do not depend on who was online in late July.

Set those as the baseline in year one, and the annual report becomes a document that can tell you something. Leave the measurement as “future surveys,” and in 2031 we will have five years of activity and no way to say whether any of it worked.

The part I will put my name on

Everything above is a criticism, so here is what goes with it.

Twenty-four responses is not a fact of life in a city of 40,093. It is a marketing outcome, and getting more people to respond without spending more to reach them is the work I have done for fifteen years.

Same audience, same money, different process. The rest of that record is on my work experience page, numbers and all, including the ones that took two tries.

I want to be straight about the limits here. Engagement is not a councillor’s job to execute. It is run by the communications department, and they know this community’s channels better than I do. What council actually controls is whether a response rate is treated as a target with a number attached, or as whatever happens to come in over two weeks in July. Set as a target, with the communications team given a real run at it, a few thousand responses on a five-year plan is not ambitious. It is normal.

So that is the commitment. Not that I will personally write the survey, but that I will not vote to adopt a five-year plan whose public review drew two dozen people without first asking what we did to reach the other 40,000, and whether we are willing to try again before we call it consulted.

Which is the same fix as the other two. Decide what the number has to be, in advance, and say it out loud.

A meeting for the sake of a meeting, or a report you can act on

Here is the question I would want answered before the first annual report comes back: what has to be in it?

Because there are two versions of that meeting. In the first one, staff present a slide deck describing activity. Partnerships convened. Working groups formed. Engagement conducted. Council thanks them, nobody can tell whether anything moved, and the item is closed. That version is not anybody’s fault. It is what you get when the reporting requirement was never specified.

In the second version, the report opens with the same eight indicators it opened with last year, each one with its 2026 number beside its current number, and a plain sentence about which ones moved and which ones did not. Ten minutes in, everyone in the room knows whether the plan is working. That version is only possible if the indicators and the baselines get set now, in the first year, before there is anything to be defensive about.

The difference between those two meetings is a decision somebody makes in the next few months. It costs nothing. It is not a new program or a new hire. It is writing down, in advance, what the report has to contain.

What I would ask for

Three things, none of which require new money.

One. Cost the deferral. Any budget motion that removes a funded item should carry a staff estimate of what re-adding it costs in the following year. Not a study. A line. If it turns out the deferral is cheap, that strengthens the case for deferring, and council should want that on the record too.

Two. Set the indicators in year one. Before the Community Safety and Well-Being Plan’s first annual report, council should adopt the specific indicators, their September 2026 baselines, and the format the report will use every year for five years. Lock the format so the reports are comparable.

Three. Publish the reporting requirement, not just the plan. Residents should be able to read what the annual report has to show before it is written. That is the difference between accountability and a summary.

Where I could be wrong

I am working from public documents and published reporting. It is entirely possible that staff produced a deferral cost that never made it into the coverage I can find, or that an indicator framework exists in an appendix I have not read. If either of those is true, I would rather be corrected than right, and I will say so here.

I am also not a policy specialist and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I have spent fifteen years doing is running operations, which mostly means finding the step where an organization spends money or time without knowing it, and then measuring it until the argument becomes boring. Most of what a municipality wastes is lost in processes nobody has measured, not in the services residents actually use.

The $24 and the progress report are the same problem. In both cases the city made a reasonable decision without producing the number that would tell anyone whether it was reasonable. That is fixable, it is cheap to fix, and it is most of why I am running.