Metro Vancouver will consider a motion next month to create a separate transit district as a utility — similar to what is done now for the region’s sewer and water services.

Pitt Meadows Mayor John Becker put forward a motion to the Metro board Friday, asking staff to review alternative governance structures for TransLink — including Metro’s utility model — to provide road and transit services across the region.

The move, which will be debated by the Metro board next month, could potentially give regional directors more control over TransLink operations and spending, as well as the ability to collect regional service taxes to pay for it.

“We need to reinvent how this process works,” Becker said after the meeting. “It strikes me that it is the mayors who are looked to, rightly or wrongly, by the residents of the region as the ones who are responsible for transit. The only other agency with the capacity to undertake this review is the (regional district).”

The motion comes a day after regional voters crushingly defeated a proposed 0.5 per cent sales tax increase, which would have generated $250 million annually for TransLink’s 10-year, $7.5-billion transportation expansion. Mayors argue the rejection, which was delivered by mail-in ballot as part of a regionwide plebiscite, was triggered not only by the public’s distaste for a new tax but its distrust of TransLink. They say service cuts are inevitable because there will be no new money for transit or even road maintenance.

“We will face, as I’ve mentioned earlier, a future that is more difficult, it certainly is going to be more congested until we have this long-term funding sorted out,” said TransLink interim CEO Doug Allen.

Without the sales tax, Allen said, TransLink will struggle to maintain the status quo, and will continue to shift buses from less-revenue-performing areas such as Port Coquitlam to crowded routes like Vancouver’s Broadway. It will also contemplate reducing frequency levels in some areas, meaning a 15-minute wait could grow to as much as an hour, as well as lower frequency on low-performing routes during weekends.

The effects of the plebiscite will likely be felt more acutely two years from now, when TransLink had estimated the first new batch of B-Line express buses would hit the region’s streets. The buses would have brought with them frequent all-day bus service — and peak service on busy routes — of at least every 15 minutes across the region.

Without them, TransLink warns there will be even more bus pass-ups, especially on busy routes like Vancouver’s Main, Fraser and Victoria and Broadway. On the latter bus route, half the trips originate outside Vancouver, leaving students heading to the University of B.C. waiting even longer to get a bus in the morning and afternoon.

Meanwhile, fast-growing Surrey — which has registered 9,500 new cars every year over the last decade — will likely see more drivers clog the streets because it won’t get the influx of B-Line express buses it had expected. (The first leg of Surrey’s light rail line wasn’t expected until seven years after the vote, and the rest five years later).