Jobs, Growth & Your Tax Bill

Homeowners currently carry more than two-thirds of Nanaimo's property taxes. Every new business on the roll is a little bit less on everyone else's bill. The council's job is to make it easy to invest here, hard to lose the employment land we already have, and serious about the freight infrastructure that makes the next decade of industrial growth possible.

Main points

• Grow the business tax base so homeowners pay less. Industrial properties pay more than three times as much tax per dollar of assessed value as residential properties, but they are roughly four percent of the assessment roll. Every new business on the roll is a little bit less on everyone else's bill.
• Fix the permitting mess. Let staff approve routine applications, eliminate redundant design review on land that is already pre-zoned, and review applications in parallel instead of in series. The 2021 consultant review told council the system was broken. Five years later, it still is.
• Publish processing times in real time. The 2021 review recommended a public permitting dashboard. It does not exist. Public targets and public progress reports change behaviour.
• Find more industrial and commercial land, fast. Nanaimo is on track to run out of industrial land within twelve to fifteen years. The next council should identify the next decade of shovel-ready supply within this term.
• Don't let housing wipe out the business tax base. Provincial rules make it easier to convert commercial and light industrial land to housing. Hitting housing targets and protecting employment land both require deliberate, mapped decisions, not parcel-by-parcel drift.
• Extend the downtown tax break to ten years for mixed-use buildings that include non-market housing. Kamloops gives ten years; Nanaimo gives five. Match Kamloops, conditional on a non-market housing component.
• Create targeted tax breaks to attract good employers. A separate tool from the downtown program, aimed at advanced manufacturing, technology, and marine industry. Time-limited, outcome-measured, and published so residents can see what the City is getting.
• Start switching the City fleet to electric. A fiscal decision first. Light-duty replacements should default to electric unless operations require otherwise. The capital premium is recovered through fuel savings within four to seven years, and the longer-term protection is from the next oil price shock.
• Build the rail spur from Wellcox Yard to Duke Point. Five to eight kilometres of track connecting Vancouver Island's only rail-barge gateway to the deep-water container terminal at Duke Point that DP World is doubling in size. Federal funding through the Trade Diversification Corridors Fund is open. The Port wants the freight. The councillor's job is to drive the Official Community Plan amendments, the easements, the corporate vehicle, and the federal application.
• Permanently protect Wellcox Yard's freight function in the Official Community Plan. The downtown waterfront is under redevelopment pressure. Vancouver Island has one rail-freight gateway. Protect it explicitly, not conditionally.

Policy detail

Why this pillar matters: the tax base math

In 2025, residential properties carried 68.6% of Nanaimo's property tax base. Industrial properties carried 4.2%. Each industrial property pays roughly 3.2 times as much property tax per dollar of assessed value as each residential property. That multiplier is set by council each year, deliberately, to keep industrial taxation on its historical share. The implication is that the city's tax bill is not really determined by what homeowners pay. It is determined by how much industrial and commercial land is on the roll.

Nanaimo's industrial vacancy rate in 2025 was 0.74%. That is essentially zero. There is no industrial space available for businesses that want to expand or move to the city, and the residential share of the tax base has been growing for a decade because residential land has been added to the roll while industrial land has not. Each new house built on a piece of land that used to be industrial pays less property tax than the warehouse that used to be on it, and the revenue gap closes by raising rates on everyone else.

The implication for the next council is that protecting and growing the industrial and commercial tax base is a residential affordability measure. Every new business on the roll is a little bit less on everyone else's bill. Every industrial parcel converted to housing without a corresponding new industrial parcel coming online raises the next budget cycle's mill rate by a fraction of a percent. A few dozen of those conversions over a council term, and the residential mill rate goes up enough to be visible on the next year's bill.

Fixing the permitting system

The 2021 Neilson review told council the permitting system was broken. Five years later it still is. Average development permit timelines run roughly eight to fourteen months for routine applications that should take three to four. The Planning and Development department has fewer planners in 2026 than it had in 2021, despite the City adding roughly 130 positions in other departments. The system is not failing because anyone is doing a bad job. It is failing because council has not given staff the structural authority or the headcount to do the job at the pace the city actually requires.

Three concrete reforms can be delivered in a single council cycle.

First, delegate routine approvals to professional staff. Most development permits in Nanaimo are for projects on land that is already zoned for the proposed use. Council does not need to vote on a building permit for a warehouse on land that has been zoned industrial for thirty years. Delegating that approval authority to the planning and engineering staff who actually evaluate the technical merits removes weeks or months of council scheduling delay from each application and frees council meetings for the decisions that actually require political judgment.

Second, eliminate redundant design review. Land that has been pre-zoned through the Official Community Plan or the recent provincial transit-oriented designations has already had its design framework set. Requiring a second round of design review on that land at the project stage is duplicate work that adds three to six months to the timeline and rarely changes the outcome. A streamlined design review framework, scoped to projects that are not on pre-zoned land, is the cleaner model.

Third, review applications in parallel rather than in series. The current system has Planning, Engineering, Public Works, and Fire each picking up an application after the previous department finishes. A six-week review by each department becomes six months when sequenced. The same six-week reviews running concurrently take six weeks total. The information requirements do not change. The processing floor changes by a factor of four.

These reforms do not require provincial permission. They do not require additional staff in the short term. They require council to direct staff to change the workflow, and council to defend that change when individual applications produce political pressure to revert.

The fourth piece is transparency. The 2021 review recommended a public permitting dashboard showing average processing times, current queue lengths, and bottleneck departments. Five years later, that dashboard does not exist. Public targets and public progress reports change behaviour inside any organization. They give applicants a realistic expectation. They give council a basis for evaluating staff performance that does not rely on anecdote. The dashboard should be published within a year of the new council taking office, with the underlying data refreshed monthly.

Industrial land: find it, protect it, make it shovel-ready

The Industrial Land Strategy adopted in 2018 projected Nanaimo would run out of industrial land by 2041. That projection assumed the existing inventory would remain industrial. Since 2018, several industrial parcels have been rezoned to residential and the rate of new industrial supply has not kept pace with demand. The 2041 number is now closer to 2038. The next council will be making industrial land decisions in a city that is roughly twelve years from running out of the inventory that pays a disproportionate share of the bill.

Three commitments are required.

First, find the next ten years of industrial supply during this council term. The 2025 City Plan Review is the natural vehicle for an industrial land inventory exercise that identifies which parcels can be rezoned, which need servicing, and which are constrained by environmental, transportation, or jurisdictional issues that make them impractical. The output of that exercise should be a public list of shovel-ready industrial sites with utility servicing, transportation access, and rezoning all completed in advance, so that an employer who wants to move to or expand in Nanaimo can be siting equipment within twelve months instead of waiting four years.

Second, protect what already exists. The Wellcox Yard freight function (covered in detail below). The Duke Point industrial park. The Mostar Road and Boban Drive employment areas. The Norwell Drive light industrial corridor. These are the parcels that pay a disproportionate share of the city's bills. They need explicit Official Community Plan protection that prevents quiet conversion to residential under the new provincial rules.

Third, make the conversion pressure honest. Provincial Bill 47 and related housing legislation make it easier to build housing on land currently zoned commercial or light industrial. That is good for housing supply and bad for the tax base unless the City is deliberate about which parcels are protected and which are available for conversion. The next council should publish a clear map showing which employment land is available for housing conversion, which is permanently protected as employment, and what the trade-off is in either direction. Quiet, parcel-by-parcel conversion is what produces the 2041 industrial land cliff. Public, deliberate, mapped conversion lets the City hit its housing targets without losing the tax base that pays for the services those new homes need.

The downtown tax break and targeted employer incentives

The Downtown Revitalization Tax Exemption gives downtown developers a five-year property tax break on new mixed-use construction. The instrument has worked. Several projects in the South End and the downtown core have been built or are under construction because the tax break made the financing math work. Five years is the current term. Kamloops offers ten years on the equivalent program. Ten years is closer to the actual financing horizon for the kinds of mixed-use buildings the downtown plan calls for.

The next council should match Kamloops at ten years, conditional on the project including a non-market housing component negotiated with BC Housing or a non-profit housing operator. A tax break that produces market condominiums is a useful incentive, but it does not address the housing problem. A tax break that produces market condominiums plus non-market units alongside addresses both. The conditional structure makes the incentive do two jobs at once.

A separate employer-attraction tool is needed for advanced manufacturing, technology, and marine industry. The downtown tax break is geographically and structurally specific to mixed-use buildings in one part of the city. It does not help a marine equipment manufacturer looking at Duke Point, a technology employer looking at the Hospital and University area, or an advanced manufacturer looking at the Boban Drive employment corridor. A targeted tax break designed for those sectors, time-limited (typically three to five years), outcome-measured (jobs created, capital invested, payroll on the roll), and published transparently so residents can see what the City is getting for the foregone revenue, is a different instrument from the downtown program. Several BC cities have implemented these and publish case-by-case results. The next council should design an equivalent for Nanaimo, with the publication standard built in from the start so the program cannot drift into general corporate welfare without anyone noticing.

Fleet electrification: a fiscal decision first

Fuel costs in the City of Nanaimo's annual budget have risen at roughly twice the rate of general inflation over the past decade. The last ten years of international conflicts have made oil markets dangerously unpredictable, with single-month price swings of twenty to forty percent in 2022, 2024, and 2026. The City fleet currently runs roughly 320 vehicles. Light-duty replacements (sedans, half-tons, smaller utility vehicles) now have electric models available at a small premium over comparable internal combustion vehicles, with operating costs that are typically half. Medium-duty replacements (larger trucks, plows, specialized equipment) are still in transition.

The next council should commit to electrifying the fleet as it ages out, on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis, with the default assumption that any light-duty replacement will be electric unless a documented operational reason makes that impractical. The capital premium is recovered through fuel savings, typically within four to seven years. The longer-term protection is from the next oil price shock, which will arrive on a schedule the City does not control. This is a fiscal decision before it is an environmental one. The environmental benefits are real but they are second-order to the budget protection.

The charging infrastructure is the necessary corollary. The fleet electrification only delivers if the City has the depot charging capacity to support it. The 2025 capital budget had an early line for this. The next council should keep that line growing, rather than treating it as a discretionary item that can be cut when revenues are tight.

Build the rail spur from Wellcox Yard to Duke Point

Five to eight kilometres of track connecting Vancouver Island's only rail-barge gateway at Wellcox Yard to the deep-water container terminal at Duke Point that DP World is currently doubling in size. That is the infrastructure project that anchors the next decade of industrial activity in Nanaimo.

The case is straightforward. DP World is investing in a major expansion of the Duke Point Terminal, taking annual capacity to 280,000 twenty-foot equivalent containers. The freight currently moves to and from Duke Point by truck. Every container that moves by truck instead of rail puts heavy-truck traffic on the Island Highway, the Nanaimo Parkway, and Highway 19, with the wear, congestion, and emission costs that accompany it. Every container that moves by rail does not. The Wellcox-to-Duke-Point spur is the missing link that makes rail freight to and from the Island viable on a commercial scale.

Federal funding through the Trade Diversification Corridors Fund, announced in March 2026 with a $5 billion envelope, is the vehicle that makes the project financeable now in a way it has not been in the past. The Port of Nanaimo wants the freight. Industrial businesses around Duke Point want the access. Southern Railway of Vancouver Island, the corridor's current operator, has been clear in public statements that the spur is technically feasible and commercially viable.

What has been missing is municipal leadership. The councillor's job on this file is to drive the Official Community Plan amendments, the easements, the corporate vehicle that holds the asset, and the federal application that turns the project from conversation into construction. None of those steps require the next council to spend significant City money. They require the next council to put the project at the centre of the city's industrial strategy and to keep it there through the four-year term.

The economic case for the spur compounds with the targeted employer attraction strategy and the industrial land strategy. A serviced industrial parcel near Duke Point with rail access on both ends is a fundamentally different industrial offering than a serviced parcel on a truck-only highway. It expands the kinds of businesses that will look at Nanaimo seriously. The next decade of industrial growth in the city depends in significant part on getting this project built.

Protect the Wellcox Yard freight function

Wellcox Yard sits on Port Drive on Nanaimo's downtown waterfront. It is the only rail-barge transload facility on Vancouver Island and the only point of physical connection between the Island Rail Corridor and the mainland rail network. The yard's operational continuity is the precondition for everything else in the rail strategy. Without Wellcox Yard, the Duke Point spur connects to nothing. Without the barge ramp at Wellcox (purchased by Southern Railway of Vancouver Island from Seaspan in 2017), Vancouver Island's rail freight gateway closes.

The yard sits on a piece of waterfront land that is under significant redevelopment pressure. Several proposals over the past decade have suggested converting some or all of the yard to mixed-use residential or commercial development. Each proposal has been stopped, sometimes narrowly, by council votes that have not had clear precedent or guidelines behind them.

The next council should permanently protect the freight function of Wellcox Yard in the Official Community Plan. That means an explicit zoning and policy designation that keeps the yard operating as freight infrastructure for the next thirty years, regardless of which developer brings forward which proposal. Vancouver Island has one rail-freight gateway. Once it is gone, it does not come back. The protection is straightforward and low-cost, and it has to be done before rather than after the next significant development proposal arrives.