Metro Vancouver Regional District to shrink board size, create new project oversight | Daily Hive

Metro Vancouver Regional District to shrink board size by 25%, create new oversight for major projects

Boardroom at the headquarters of Metro Vancouver Regional District at Metrotower III at Metropolis at Metrotown mall in Burnaby. (Turner Construction)

Metro Vancouver Regional District is seeking the approval of the Government of British Columbia to substantially reduce the size of its board of directors overseeing the regional government, potentially cutting the number of directors from 45 to 34 beginning in the next term.

The board of directors is comprised of select members of the region’s mayors and city councillors.

Today, the board approved the direction to cap representation at a maximum of three directors from each member municipality or jurisdiction. The regional government would continue using its weighted voting system, which gives larger municipalities greater voting power based on population.

The change would reduce the board’s membership by nearly 25 per cent while ensuring every member jurisdiction continues to have a seat at the table.

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“Metro Vancouver has taken a really thoughtful process for finding strong options for reducing the size of the Board and improving the organization’s governance,” said Mike Hurley, chair of the regional district’s board and the Mayor of Burnaby, in a statement today.

“The option that we are putting forward would ensure that all municipalities continue to have proportional representation at the table, but it also reduces Board size and helps with efficiency. We heard clearly through engagement that achieving meaningful change is important.”

The regional district asserts the smaller board could make discussions and decisions more efficient while allowing directors to place greater attention on regional priorities.

Without a cap, the board’s membership could continue growing as Metro Vancouver’s population increases and municipal governments become entitled to appoint additional director representatives. Under the new structure, it is estimated the board would not return to its current size of 45 directors until after 2050, when the region’s population reaches over four million people — up from more than three million today.

The change cannot be implemented by this regional government on its own. The regional district will ask the provincial government to amend either the B.C. Local Government Act or the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act, which governs the regional district’s structure.

That legislative process will require consultation by the provincial government and could take up to two years.

If approved for the regional district board, the same leaner representation structure would automatically apply to the boards overseeing the regional district’s drinking water, sewerage and drainage systems, and regional housing corporation.

Boardroom at the headquarters of Metro Vancouver Regional District at Metrotower III at Metropolis at Metrotown mall in Burnaby. (Turner Construction)

The smaller board structure emerged from an independent governance review completed by consulting firm Deloitte in May 2025.

The review recommended examining the board’s size and structure as part of broader efforts to improve accountability and decision-making. According to the regional district, it has now completed 24 of Deloitte’s 47 recommendations, while another 14 are underway.

Several board size options were presented for public and stakeholder consultation this past spring. The regional district consulted regional directors, other elected officials, municipal staff, provincial representatives, local First Nations, and members of the public.

The three-director cap was the most widely supported option during that process.

Delta city councillor Dylan Kruger, one of the City of Delta’s two board directors for the regional district, described the vote as a significant step toward restoring confidence in the regional body.

“I’m thankful that directors made the decision to support capping the number of board members that each municipality can appoint,” says Kruger.

“It’s clear that reform is needed at Metro Vancouver. We need to be more accountable and effective. This allows that work to begin in a real way.”

The move to shrink the board follows sustained media and public scrutiny of the regional district’s capital project costs and governance costs, including the payment of separate fees to directors for each meeting attended.

Kruger says he has advocated for a smaller board and a narrower scope for the regional district since joining the regional body. He has also supported changes including the elimination of international travel by directors and the end of the practice of paying multiple meeting fees when several regional meetings are held on the same day.

“Those reforms were important first steps, but modernizing the Board itself is the most significant structural change we can make,” said Kruger.

“At some point, we have to ask whether adding more directors improves decision-making or simply makes governance more cumbersome and less accountable. Today we said no to growing the size of the government.”

Headquarters office of Metro Vancouver Regional District at Metrotower III at Metropolis at Metrotown mall in Burnaby. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

A new oversight board for capital projects with a mix of professional experts and politicians

The regional district’s boards also agreed to pursue other major governance and operational changes.

This regional government has started the process of establishing a “Major Projects Oversight Board” to provide additional scrutiny of its largest and most complicated water and wastewater infrastructure projects.

The new oversight board for major capital projects would entail a mix of elected municipal officials as well as externally appointed members with professional and technical experience delivering major infrastructure.

This could be likened to a very light variation of TransLink’s governance model, which includes the TransLink board of directors made up of appointed members with professional and technical expertise, as well as the separate TransLink Mayors’ Council comprised of the mayors of each jurisdiction in the region, with some municipalities represented by a city councillor or other elected official instead of their mayor.

TransLink’s board oversees the organization’s technical direction, while the Mayors’ Council provides broader strategic direction, especially for long-term strategies. The Mayor’s Council allocates one seat per jurisdiction, but major decisions are similarly based on weighted votes, with more populated jurisdictions receiving more votes.

Although the structure has evolved over the years, the professional and technical component of TransLink’s governance was first introduced by the provincial government nearly two decades ago. The change followed concerns that the previous board, composed of select mayors and city councillors, had heavily politicized decision-making around the Canada Line project in the early 2000s.

In recent years, the City of Ottawa, which is responsible for building, operating, and maintaining the public transit system in its region, introduced new safeguards after the very costly and politically damaging issues with its highly problematic Confederation Line light rail transit (LRT) project — a 2019-built system that is prone to major and frequent breakdowns due to its technical design flaws. The City subsequently changed how it manages major capital projects by ranking them according to their size, complexity and risk, requiring reviews before they move to the next stage, and bringing in outside technical experts when projects use unfamiliar technology or run into serious problems.

As a part of the reforms, Ottawa’s municipal government also strengthened City Council’s oversight, tightened the broad powers previously given to the City’s senior staff, and introduced stricter record keeping and disclosure rules after a public inquiry found elected officials had not always received complete or timely information about major decisions from City staff.

May 2026 construction progress on the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant project in North Vancouver, as seen from Downtown Vancouver. (Darryl Brooks/Shutterstock)

north shore wastewater treatment plant construction january 29 2025

January 2025 construction progress on the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant. (Metro Vancouver Regional District)

Further details about Metro Vancouver Regional District’s new oversight board for major capital projects are expected to return to the board of directors for a decision in the coming months.

This new oversight board is a direct in response to the regional district’s major cost escalation pressures for sewerage treatment plant and drinking water infrastructure projects.

The estimated cost for finishing the beleaguered North Shoe Wastewater Treatment Plant has soared from about $700 million to $3.86 billion, while its targeted completion has been pushed to 2030 — a decade later than originally planned.

In June 2026, shortly after litigation ended with the North Shore plant’s fired contractor, the regional district announced its promised independent review of the project will now begin. The independent review team entails experts with experience in highly problematic projects, such as California’s high-speed rail line and the B.C. government’s new replacement George Massey Tunnel. The public report from this review team, explaining the factors leading to the cost escalation and delays, is expected to be ready in early 2027.

The push for greater professional scrutiny of major capital projects also appears to be in response to the concerns about the immense cost of the planned Iona Island Wastewater Treatment Plant replacement near Vancouver International Airport.

In October 2025, the regional district announced that the Iona plant’s cost had been cut by almost $4 billion — from nearly $10 billion to about $6 billion. The reduced cost is enabled by repurposing components of the existing plant at the site, and meeting the federal government’s minimum secondary treatment requirements — instead of pursuing tertiary treatment at this time. Construction on the project is underway.

By bringing elected officials together with outside directors who have technical experience delivering major infrastructure, the regional district is seeking to strengthen oversight before costs and schedules spiral further out of control.

Pivot to a single sewerage service area for the entire Metro Vancouver region

The regional district will also begin working toward consolidating its four existing sewerage service areas into a single regional area, similar to the way its drinking-water system is governed.

Consolidating the four sewerage areas could eventually spread the financial risks of major sewerage infrastructure projects more broadly across the region, although the details of any new cost-sharing arrangement have yet to be determined.

About 92 per cent of regional directors supported a staged transition toward a single sewerage area, provided the process is more fair and takes into account the potential effects on individual municipalities and ratepayers for the services received.

The move toward a single sewerage area appears to directly address years-long complaints from the City of North Vancouver, District of North Vancouver, and District of West Vancouver that their residents and businesses on the North Shore should not be forced to shoulder a disproportionately large share of the cost overruns — through higher annual fees — associated with the troubled North Shore plant.

Under the previous scheme, the North Shore sewerage service area would continue to see a higher increase in annual fees associated with the cost overruns for building the North Shore plant, compared to other sewerage service areas elsewhere in the region.

The regional district has faced intense scrutiny from the media and public over virtually every aspect of its operations and projects since it was revealed more than two years ago that the estimated cost of the North Shore plant had increased exponentially.

Map showing Metro Vancouver’s four separate sewerage service areas (Yellow: North Shore; Orange: Vancouver; Red: Lulu Island West; Green: Fraser). (Metro Vancouver Regional District)

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