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Mayors tussle with province to get new money

July 22nd, 2009 · 7 Comments

The vehicle levy, now known as the transportation improvement levy, is back on the table, for those who didn’t know.

Metro mayors, who have to decide by October whether to approve a substantially improved new transit system — on that Premier Gordon Campbell said they were going to build — are struggling to figure out ways to pay for it besides property taxes and fare hikes, as I report this morning in the Globe.

TransLink has done a public consultation that got 45,000 responses where they say people indicated they’re willing to pay a levy as long as they get improved transit. So the agency is now looking at a TIL of anywhere from $65 to $200, depending on the base rate they set and the fuel efficiency of the car.

But even that’s not enough to pay for the grand expansion, which would include the Evergreen line, an extension to the Expo line in Surrey, the start of the Millennium line extension in Vancouver and lots and lots of new buses and SkyTrain cars.

So there’s a whole lot of arm-wrestling going on right now over other mechanisms, as you can read.

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