More swimmers, fewer jailbirds in Mission, stats dump shows

Most modern municipalities like to brag about their use of data, but few provide that data in formats that can be easily accessed by the public. Instead, most require residents (and journalists) to dig through documents, beg municipal staff, or file freedom of information requests to learn about how a municipality is performing.

Mission, though, just put it all online.

The city recently compiled and released a collection of dozens of statistics, with five years of simple, annual data on everything from cemetery burials to parking tickets to human resource grievances to demolition permits to local speed checks.

The firefighters

The figures show how Mission’s fire department has undergone a significant transition over the last five years.

In 2018, the city employed 13 full-time career firefighters and 92 “paid-on-call” firefighters—essentially part-timers who train regularly but typically hold other jobs in the community. (Most large municipalities across the Fraser Valley use such a model.) Last year, though, the city’s roster of full-time firefighters had grown to 22—a 70% increase over just five years. At the same time, the number of paid-on-call firefighters has dropped to 64.

Meanwhile, the activities of those fire and rescue crews has also increased.

In particular, the number of medical emergencies attended by fire/rescue crews has doubled in the last five years. In 2020, the department attended 932 medical emergencies. Last year, they responded to 2,293 such calls. Similar communities have seen comparable increases and the figures have been attributed to increasing numbers of drug overdoses.

Fire-related incidents have also increased markedly (from 818 in 2019 to 1,016 last year), though the number of full-on structure fires has seen a less obvious rise. Last year there were 28 such fires.

Fire investigations are also on the rise, with a record number (31) performed in 2023.

Finally, the number of “life safety inspections” and “life safety education hours” performed last year also reached a new high last year. The city allows the schools, businesses, and community groups to request visits from firefighters online.

The cops

The statistics also provide a look at the municipality’s crime-fighting (or, at least, crime-prevention and file-shifting) role.

Civilian staff employed by the city provides key services for the local RCMP detachment, and the figures hint at the amount of paperwork (and accused criminals) moving in and out of the local cop shop each year.

On the police side of the equation, the number of files processed has edged upwards over the last five years, with 15,912 files processed in 2023. The figure, however, has risen relatively slowly, given Mission’s growth.

And the RCMP detachment’s jail is actually less busy than five years ago. Last year 563 prisoners spent time locked up, compared to 657 five years prior.

Mission’s crime prevention office also had a relatively quiet year. Last year, the office fielded 367 enquiries and facilitated 165 interviews; in 2019, it received 1,729 enquiries and held 446 interviews or meetings.

On the roads, figures for the local crime prevention office suggest traffic enforcement is highly dependent on resources (including volunteers and non-police-officer employees). Last year, the office’s staff checked 8,000 vehicles for speeding. That’s half the number of speed checks conducted in 2022—but in line with figures from 2018. The office issued 144 warning letters.

Finally, Mission’s victim services staff helped 947 new clients. (Victim Services provides emotional support, information for people, assistance with paperwork, and safety planning). That is the highest number over the five-year period and a significant increase from 2019, when 601 people were assisted through the program.

Recreation

Over the last five years, Mission’s rec centre has undergone a transition thanks to the pandemic. Attendance at its gym has yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels. (Staff had previously noted that many people created their own home exercise routines during the pandemic.) But with few people having their own pools, visits to Mission’s water facilities have more than bounced back. Last year, Mission’s Leisure Centre pool recorded nearly 300,000 visits, a huge increase not just from the pandemic years, but from 2019, when about 211,000 visits were recorded.

The Leisure Centre’s Youth Lounge has also become far more popular, with the 25,000-plus visits last year marking a four-fold increase from 2019.

Although Mission has been growing at a rapid pace, its parkland has remained fixed. The municipality currently has 39 parks, the same number it had in 2020 (it added one park that year). It also has six kilometres of maintained urban spaces and 320 hectares of “natural open space,” the same as five years ago. Those numbers may change soon: the city has bought land on Emiry Street for a future multi-million-dollar “destination spray park.”

Development

Developmental statistics region-wide are not necessarily hard to find, but Mission’s report illustrates the staggering uptick in local home-building activity over five years.

In 2019 and again in 2020, the city issued building permits for around $70 million worth of residential activity. The totals in each of the last three years were more than double that amount, with $227 million worth of permits issued in 2022 alone. (Last year’s preliminary figure was lower, at around $143 million.)

Industrial and commercial building activity has fluctuated much more, and been much lower. The city issued $14.5 million of industrial and commercial permits in 2019, $27 million in 2020, $10 million in 2021, and $22.5 million in 2022. Last year, though, saw a new five-year high, with $32 million of industrial and commercial permits.

Business

On the filming, business, and tourism side of the ledger, Mission’s economic development office responded to 214 business enquiries in 2023. That’s a slightly higher number than the two previous years, but lower than the number of inquiries fielded in 2019 and 2020. The city’s visitor centre counted 4,455 people over the course of the year, a significant increase from 3,138 in 2022.

Film activity has dipped, though, with only 19 local productions setting up shop, compared to 22 in 2022 and 25 in 2021. The number of film enquiries fielded by city staff was also slightly lower than the two previous years.

The figures also show Mission’s trees and forests play a key role in its desirability for movie and TV crews. Since 2019, the city’s forestry department has issued 25 permits for commercial filming, including seven last year. They’ve also issued 17 permits over the last five years for the “collection of greens and trees” for the movie industry.

(We’ve previously reported on the uniqueness of Mission’s Community Forest.

The roads

Finally, it’s been a long, long time since Mission has been a one-stoplight town. The city now has 17 traffic lights, with the last new addition taking place in 2017. It also has 1,776 streetlights (up from 1,500 in 2022) and 6,663 street signs (up from 6,200 in 2022). All that signage and lighting is spread out over what the city’s website says are 600 lane kilometres of road. (A kilometre of two-lane road would count as two lane kilometres of road.)

Odds and ends

You can find other tidbits that are interesting, even if they don’t necessarily say much about Misison. For instance:

• Full burials at the city’s cemetery in 2023 were outnumbered by cremations by nearly three to one. (28 full burials compared to 75 cremations).

• There were four grievances filed by staff last year, compared to 11 the previous year.

• Bylaw officers issued 1,133 parking tickets last year compared to 342 the previous year. But 2019 saw 1,340 tickets issued.

• The city issued 367 dog licences last year, similar to 2022, but far fewer than the 1,019 licences issued in 2019.

• City vehicles drove an estimated 580,238 kilometres last year, the lowest number in at least five years.

You can read the entire document here.