There was no need to get Victoria council approval for a plan to pay homeless people $20 apiece to attend a public meeting on temporary housing options, Mayor Lisa Helps said Friday.
Coun. Chris Coleman said he had no idea the city planned to pay members of the homeless community a stipend to attend the meeting and Coun. Geoff Young said while he saw emails about the idea between the mayor and some councillors, he certainly doesn’t support it.
About 365 people were each paid $20 to attend the meeting Wednesday at Crystal Garden for a total of about $7,300. The suggestion to pay came from Don Evans, executive director of the Our Place downtown drop-in centre, and was agreed to by city staff.
“I do not feel it was a good use of funds,” Young said. “My thinking is we did not need that number of homeless people to represent that viewpoint and, in fact, the opinions that we needed were from people who had experience in attempting to provide housing in various ways. And there were some of those people there,” Young said.
He said most of the proposals he saw were ones that the city is already aware of and, in many cases, has rejected, including permitting campers longer hours in parks and supporting a permanent tent city.
Helps said city staff made the decision to pay, and the money came out of $350,000 council set aside for addressing homelessness. “If council was in the business of approving $7,000 decisions, we’d never get anything done.”
She equated the $20 payments to consulting fees. “We pay consultants all the time and usually we pay consultants $150 to $200 an hour. These are the least- expensive consultants we’ve ever hired and when they showed up they had already done their research.”
But Jordan Bateman, B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said paying one group of people a fee to attend a public meeting to advance their own self-interest doesn’t sit well with him.
“Public consultation is something that is very important and you want to get a mix of people in the room and a mix of people talking about these issues. But paying folks for their public consultation, but only paying one subset of folks, really seems unfair and it really flies in the face of treating everyone equally,” Bateman said. “It’s not as if they are invisible.”
It’s the fact that they are so visible that Victoria is talking about spending $50 million to build 367 housing units for homeless people, he said.
Evans said the idea was to hear from as many people as possible. “Whether it’s the person that’s living under the bridge or the person in the park or the doorway. If we wouldn’t have done something, we would have just got the usual people that would come and you wouldn’t hear from all the varieties of people that came that night.”
It was important for the housed and the homeless to work together, Helps said. “They sat around the table together, looked each other in the eye and said: How are we going to solve this problem together?”
Coleman said he understands the reasoning. “I think it’s open to abuse and that’s the concern that goes with it. The rationale that goes with it [is] our staff were all there on Wednesday night and they were paid to be there. Elected officials are there and, theoretically, we’re paid to be everywhere. There were people who are facing the trauma of homelessness who weren’t being paid, so there’s perceived inequity there. By the same token, there were a number of people out of the community who were there on their own time and weren’t being paid.”
The meeting was organized after Helps and Coun. Ben Isitt faced down an angry crowd in Topaz Park this summer. They were opposed to a council initiative that might have located a temporary tent city there.
Coun. Pam Madoff said the stipend was reasonable and prior council approval wasn’t necessary. “You’re asking folks who are very marginalized to come and participate and offer their insights,” she said.
“It’s a modest amount. It doesn’t require council’s approval when you add it all up.”
