By Bill Cleverley, Times ColonistJune 27, 2009

Victoria officials are wondering what to do with hundreds of kilometres of increasingly neglected boulevards.

There’s no shortage of ideas. Some people would like to see them used for vegetable gardens. Others would prefer to see benches or flowers, while still others would like to pave them over. But the city has neither the budget nor the policy to manage the requests.

By its own admission, the city does a poor job of maintaining its 300 kilometres of boulevards, which are increasingly turning into ratty little strips of neglected real estate.

The city stopped watering the boulevards in the late 1990s, and more recently, it’s stopped using pesticides to control weeds.

“We’ve got no water and we’ve got no pesticides. It’s hard to grow grass particularly with no water,” said David Speed, city parks general manager.

Yet even as maintenance has been reduced, costs have continued to rise.

The city spends more than $600,000 a year maintaining most of these strips of grass, which run alongside more than a third of Victoria’s properties.

The cost is largely offset by a boulevard tax paid by about 28 per cent of property owners who have boulevards in front of their properties. That maintenance — which costs $2.50 a square metre — can add up to anywhere between $30 and $575 a year.

Not surprisingly, residents have been opting out in droves, even though that’s not a particularly easy thing to do.

“Literally hundreds of blocks have opted out. It’s done on a block basis. It’s a particularly onerous process in that residents need to get two-thirds agreement on their block to opt out of the program,” said Speed.

Geographically, most of the boulevards in the tax program are in the older parts of the community. The city started building boulevards in 1907 and established the boulevard tax program to maintain them around the same time. The program’s undoing probably had its start in the 1950s, when, as new neighbourhoods were built, homeowners were simply expected to look after their boulevards.

“From what we can see, other than Oak Bay, there are no other municipalities that are engaged in the tax boulevard program. All other municipalities are leaving the maintenance of boulevards to their residents,” Speed said.

City parks staff are consulting with community associations and other groups and have posted an on-line questionnaire with the hope of making recommendations to council this fall about the boulevard taxation program and boulevard maintenance.

Options on the table include everything from dropping it all together to expanding it or setting improvement policies.

“We’re getting requests for anything from vegetable gardening [and] fruit trees to paving over boulevards to putting fixed structures on boulevards,” Speed said. “At this point, we’re largely just turning people away because we don’t have the capacity to manage those requests and we don’t have a policy in place.”

Coun. Philippe Lucas says the city should be able to increase the options for people tending to boulevards as long as they’re not putting anyone at risk.

But Rob Woodland, city director of legislative and regulatory services, said the city needs to protect itself by setting clear guidelines for what’s permitted and what’s not. “The person who trips and falls isn’t going to sue the homeowner because it isn’t his property. They’re going to sue the city,” Woodland said.

bcleverley@tc.canwest.com

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