Nearly half of registered voters in New Westminster have cast ballots in the mail-in transit referendum that wraps up Friday.
Metro Vancouver residents are being asked to vote on whether or not to support the Mayors’ Council on Regional Transportation request for a 0.5 per cent increase to the provincial sales tax to generate funding to expand the regional transit and transportation system. Elections B.C. must receive ballots by 8 p.m. on Friday, May 29.
As of May 27, Elections B.C. had screened 22,055 ballots from registered voters in New West, which is 47.9 per cent of registered voters in the city. That’s up from the 20,681 ballots (44.9 per cent) of registered voters whose ballots had been screened by May 20.
New Westminster continues to rank as one of the cities with the highest participation rates, currently trailing only Belcarra (57.5 per cent), the District of North Vancouver (50.5 per cent) and Lions Bay (49.4 per cent) and Delta (45.7 per cent).
“I am really pleased with the turnout in New Westminster,” Mayor Jonathan Cote told the Record recently. “It’s great to see that the community is engaged in this important referendum.”
Cote said he’s pleased New Westminster’s numbers are high, as the city has a strong vested interest in transportation issues.
“The results are already significantly higher than the last municipal election. I think we are pretty close to where the HST referendum was, too,” he said. “We are in the range of what we were expecting, 40 to 50 per cent would be a good turnout and a good participation from the region.”
Don Main, communications manager for Elections B.C., said the only real comparison in terms of turnout to the mail-in plebiscite was the referendum on the harmonized sales tax in 2011, which had a turnout of 52.66 per cent.
Only ballots returned by 8 p.m. on Friday will be counted, Main said, so if registered voters fear they may miss the deadline to get their ballot in by mail, they can return them to plebiscite service offices. The nearest office is at Lougheed Town Centre.
The “congestion tax” would be used to fund a wide range of transportation and transit initiatives, including a new Pattullo Bridge, upgrades to the major road network, increased capacity of Expo and Millennium SkyTrain lines, increased bus service, additional HandyDart services, and cycling and pedestrian improvements. Opponents of the tax have voiced concerns about TransLink’s governance and management of issues such as the Compass Card and executive salaries.
