BC Conservatives pledge relief for businesses impacted by Broadway Subway

BC Conservatives pledge financial relief for businesses impacted by Broadway Subway construction

Broadway Subway tunnel boring and construction on Arbutus Station at Cypress Street, as of April 18, 2024. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

If elected as the governing party in the October 2024 election, the Conservative Party of BC is promising to provide financial relief for businesses impacted by the years-long disruptive construction process of SkyTrain’s Millennium Line Broadway Extension reaching Arbutus.

“Building transit is important, but our small and medium-sized businesses shouldn’t have to suffer to get that done,” said BC Conservatives party leader John Rustad in a statement.

“By the time this project is done, these businesses will have had seven years of deceased sales due to this construction.”

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This follows the provincial government’s revelation this past spring that the project to build a six-km-long extension of the Millennium Line with six new stations will reach completion in Fall 2027. The tunnel boring process for the project took much longer than anticipated, resulting in the completion and opening date being pushed from initially late 2025 to early 2026, and then finally Fall 2027.

This extended construction timeline also means a much longer period of disruption for the businesses along the strip.

Major construction work on the project first began in Spring 2021.

Although the vast majority of the subway’s tunnels were built using twin tunnel boring machines, there has also been major construction at street level, specifically construction on the blocks where five of the stations on Broadway are located. This first began with the excavation and installation of the traffic decks over the station construction areas to enable the continuity of arterial vehicle traffic on Broadway.

Ahead of 2027, there will also be a similarly significant construction process to remove the traffic decks and restore the street.

The tunnel boring process combined with localized cut-and-cover construction for the stations was intended to reduce the impacts to businesses and vehicle traffic, compared to the particularly disruptive process of building the Canada Line’s cut-and-cover tunnel along the length of Cambie Street in the 2000s.

The BC Conservatives are specifically promising Broadway businesses impacted by subway construction with a tax break. If elected as the governing party, businesses situated along the Broadway corridor between Arbutus Street and Commercial Drive will be eligible for a 15% tax reduction until the completion of construction in 2027.

“Customers have had difficulty getting to businesses along Broadway due to the construction and that isn’t going to end anytime soon. Some businesses have seen half their normal customer volume and it is just too much for them,” said Neil Wyles, the executive director of Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Area.

Some affected businesses have already engaged in legal action against the provincial government and its contractors over their financial losses due to the area’s decreased accessibility as a direct result of construction, which has resulted in fewer customers and higher operating and delivery/transportation costs.

In 2022, the previous makeup of Vancouver City Council contemplated the possibility of providing impacted businesses with financial relief, and discussed financial assistance models such as the City of Montreal program that offers up to $40,000 per fiscal year per impacted business based on the actual revenue losses incurred.

However, there is also a concern that this could set a precedent for a wide range of public works projects on streets that impact businesses, which could greatly increase project costs.

As part of their campaign promises, the BC Conservatives have also pledged to provide TransLink with some short-term stop-gap funding over two years to avoid its fiscal cliff resulting in major service cuts starting in 2026. But this will be short of any more “billion-dollar bailouts” as part of a process to provide an in-depth audit of the public transit authority and create a “Back-on-Track Plan” for a new sustainable funding model to address “financial mismanagement, overcrowding, and capacity issues.”

Earlier this week, the Green Party of BC announced their idea to provide free public transit across the TransLink and BC Transit network, while also improving their services. But it is unclear how the $720 million annual cost would be paid, on top of TransLink’s $600 million annual financial shortfall starting in 2026.

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