Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke received a standing ovation for her roughly 40-minute 2025 State of the City Address at the Sheraton Vancouver Guildford Hotel on Wednesday – a speech laden with capital projects, meeting challenges in schooling and healthcare, building up the city's transportation network and addressing other growth-related pressures.
This year's "cost-neutral" event was sold out (418 seats), at $150 apiece, as well as in combinations and sponsored tickets. Last year's sold out too, with tickets selling at $150 apiece and $1,650 for a table of 11. All told, 430 tickets were sold for that one.
"I often say Surrey is a house on fire," she said. "Surrey is just moving so fast, it's quite incredible."
In the past two decades, she noted, the city has grown by more than 250,000 residents.
Today 281,000 people are employed in Surrey. Forty-five per cent of its population is immigrants, with 233 ethnicities represented. Last year, more than 9,200 jobs were created in the private sector and 6,300 new dwellings were approved. Also last year Surrey added more than 76 kilometres of new and upgraded roads.
"Did you know more people live in Surrey city centre than in downtown Vancouver?" Locke asked her audience.
Yet with all this, she pointed out, Metro Vancouver's land regional blueprint, Metro 2050, "still treats Surrey as a suburb rather than the engine we are becoming."
She said a Surrey 2050 plan is in the works. "That will be our growth strategy," she said, "to set a clear target for housing, employment and land use, transit corridors and green spaces and it will do so through the lens of Surrey families, businesses and First Nations partners."
She also discussed the development of a Surrey Charter. "It is high time we have the legislative power to match the scale and ambition that we have."
Council last month passed its 2025 budget with "one of the lowest" general property tax increases in the region, at 2.8 per cent with a one per cent road levy and approved a $701 million capital plan for the next five years.
"That's the largest capital commitment in the city of Surrey's history," she said, which includes 36 projects, several of which she listed including recreational facilities like a 10,000-seat arena for the city centre just north of City Hall, an interactive art museum, a city centre block that will double the office and academic space that's currently in Surrey's downtown.
She also touched on the $310 million Newton community centre (190,000 square feet, with an Olympic-sized pool, gym, an a library three times the size of the current one) and a $25 million three-kilometre, 80-acre linear park on the south side of the Nicomekl River in South Surrey.
Locke said the City also wants to turn the Cloverdale fairgrounds into a year-round regional destination "hub."
"On this note we will be exploring opportunities to revitalize the Stetson Bowl and the amphitheatre as well as enshrine the old-town Cloverdale as an historic site."
She also discussed the need to address pressures on Surrey's public school system as well as access to proper health care. Surrey city council approved on Monday a motion Locke brought forward to hire a healthcare administrator to help the politicians fix a lack of healthcare services here.
