Stew Young’s
Record as Mayor
Core services · Fire, police & parks · 2017–2025

Chronically underfunded services

Young built a bigger city without funding enough capacity to serve it. Fire protection fell behind. Police budgets fell short of the City’s own staffing target. Parks staff were pulled away from their work to manage buildings. The next council inherited the gaps—and the bill for catching up.

Updated September 30, 2026

The staffing plan failed to deliver.

The February 2023 fire-chief report6 says council approved a five-year expansion in 2017, funded through annual 1% tax increases. By 2021, it was clear the volunteer target would not be met. In fall 2022, only 30 volunteers remained, about half the number needed for the planned Station 2 coverage.

At the review, Station 1’s minimum staffing was four firefighters, with little relief capacity. Stations 2 and 3 relied on volunteers responding from home, so their response depended on availability. The report also says the earlier plan had not accounted for the move toward towers of 18 storeys and above.

Young left office before the promised round-the-clock staffing was delivered. The growing city had outpaced its fire-service model.

Funding increased. It still fell short of the need.

The 2022 annual report2 records three new career positions that year, bringing the career complement to 20: 16 shift firefighters, three chief officers, and an emergency-program specialist. It also records council commissioning the independent master plan in the 2022 budget.

Young’s council did fund expansion and a review. The failure was that its service model still could not deliver the coverage it had promised. More positions on paper, or a plan awaiting review, did not provide South Langford with a guaranteed staffed response.

The chief’s report identifies pandemic disruption, living costs, and competition from career departments as pressures on volunteer recruitment. Those pressures explain why the model was failing. Adapting to that failure was a responsibility of the administration leading the city’s growth.

The next council had to pay for the catch-up.

The 2023 budget presentation3 identified staffing as the most significant immediate fire-service need. It proposed hiring nine additional career firefighters in each of 2023, 2024, and 2025. Nine positions cost approximately $915,000 annually; the partial-year 2023 cost was estimated at $456,000, equivalent to a 1.2% tax increase.

These were costs of delivering a core service to a growing city. Presenting subsequent tax increases as proof of waste ignores the staffing work the next council inherited. Read alongside Young’s use of reserves to hold down taxes, the fire-service gap shows why the low-tax reputation left out the cost of meeting those service needs.

The 2017 goal was finally delivered in 2025.

In August 20254, the City announced that Station 2 on Happy Valley Road was fully staffed around the clock. It credited the 2023 council decision to hire nine firefighters annually over three years. The goal identified in 2017 had taken eight years to deliver.

The fire chief said the added coverage would improve response times and overall emergency capacity. Those are basic requirements of a growing city, and residents should not have been left waiting years for them.

Police staffing fell short of the target.

Young’s council discussed a target of one RCMP officer for every 750 residents around 2021. But the financial plan it left behind budgeted just two additional officers for 2023. The February 2023 staffing report6 recorded an RCMP request for five—three more than the inherited plan funded—to move closer to that target.

Police staffing had increased from 38 authorized officers in 2017 to 61 in 2022. Yet the City estimated its ratio at one officer for every 813 residents, and the inherited plan largely maintained that level rather than reaching the 1:750 goal. The problem was the gap between the service target and the money committed to meet it.

The same report recorded crime rates and officer caseloads below provincial averages. Those figures do not establish a policing crisis. They do establish that the RCMP’s staffing request and the City’s own target went beyond what Young’s final financial plan provided.

Parks staff were stretched across another job.

The City had no dedicated facilities function until 2022. By February 2023, parks staff were managing more than 45,000 square feet of City property without a dedicated facilities coordinator. The staffing report6 says they were spending a combined 30-plus hours a week on building issues, undermining their ability to do their own work.

Staff requested a full-time coordinator with no existing funding for the position. They explicitly said this would free parks employees to address natural-area concerns raised by the public and allow proactive maintenance and long-term facilities planning. The city had accumulated buildings and responsibilities without providing the staff to manage them properly.

Even an approved bylaw system sat idle.

The same report6 says the City had been unable to roll out its Bylaw Enforcement Notice Adjudication System, approved more than 18 months earlier, because of insufficient administrative resources. Rising complaints and workloads required converting a three-day-a-week administrative position to full time.

Approving a system without providing enough staff to deliver it is another form of leaving the work unfinished. Residents were left with the consequences; the next council was left to consider the additional funding.

Growth needs services, not just approvals.

Young’s development record has to include the core services that failed to keep pace. The firefighters and volunteers were working within the resources and staffing model they had. Across fire protection, policing, parks and bylaw administration, growth created demands that the funded staffing did not meet. Keeping taxes low while those gaps accumulate leaves residents paying for the catch-up later.

Sources

  1. City of Langford, February 27, 2023 Committee of the Whole agendaPages 110–116: fire-chief report, previous plan, recruitment pressures, staffing and recommendations.
  2. City of Langford, 2022 annual reportPrinted page 26: career staffing, funded master plan and Station 2 preparation.
  3. City of Langford, 2023 budget presentationPrinted page 32: 27 additional firefighters, phased hiring, cost and initial tax impact.
  4. City of Langford, August 25, 2025 Station 2 announcementConfirms round-the-clock staffing after the 2023–2025 hiring program.
  5. City of Langford, RCMP member staffing reportPages 420–422: inherited financial plan, five-officer request, staffing targets and comparative crime data.
  6. City of Langford, 2023 staffing requestsPages 452–453: parks and facilities capacity; pages 457–458: bylaw administrative shortfall.