A letter to the editor in today’s 24 Hours Vancouver questions why I would claim moving the TransLink referendum to the spring will cost taxpayers millions. First the letter, from Wayne McQueen:

How can Jordan Bateman equate not hosting a referendum in November costing taxpayer’s millions, when the question for the Liberals’ promised referendum hasn’t even been developed? Will it be a simple ‘ yes’ or ‘ no’ question or will there be more choices, and that hasn’t been decided? Personally, I disagree with a referendum because anyone who doesn’t use public transit will vote ‘ no’ to any question of raising taxes to fund public transit. Maybe the misguided idea of a referendum should be just scrapped as a bad idea from the start.

Ignoring our philosophical difference on the importance of a referendum, here’s why we think moving the timeline is a poor, expensive decision.

Every municipality runs their own election in November 2014. The TransLink referendum can piggyback on that, allowing voters to cast a second ballot on whatever question the mayors finally come up with. This can be counted by individual municipalities and reported out to Elections B.C., who (with the changes coming to the local government elections this spring) will have more responsibility in local elections anyway.

Instead, the vote will be held in the spring of 2015. There was talk it could piggyback on the federal election, but that vote isn’t scheduled until October 19, 2015, and the feds are highly unlikely to tie TransLink to it anyway – and there is no way for the province to force Elections Canada to do so.

So it will be a standalone vote in spring 2015, and likely a mail-in ballot. The last mail-in ballot was the HST referendum, and Elections B.C. reports that it cost $8,067,395 to run, or $2.63 per registered voter. While that was province-wide, there will still be a lot of that overhead to pay, and postage costs – which, of course, are going up. More than half of B.C.’s population is in the Lower Mainland (2.3 million). At even $2 a head, you’d be talking more than $4.5 million. We believe it is reasonable to think that cost would have been cut in half