Advertisement 1

City taxes numbers game burning a hole through other issues in civic election

Article content

When Bill Dever went to appeal the 22 per cent hike in property taxes on his Varsity Estates condo earlier this year, he couldn’t beat city hall.

“The appeal was denied with no explanation why,” said Dever, 80, a former Calgary Catholic school board superintendent.

While Dever said he’s all for taxes going to maintaining city services and infrastructure and even its public art program, he wonders what the steady hits on his city tax bill over the years are funding.

Advertisement 2
Story continues below
Article content
Article content

“I don’t see any increase in services and there’s a consistent increase in spending,” he said. “The city doesn’t seem to have any sensitivity between the relationship between cost and benefit.”

But while Heather Turner says she knows the pound of flesh extracted from her Royal Oak home has increased more years than not, she waves it off as the understandable cost of living in Calgary.

“A lot of infrastructure’s getting built and the money’s got to come from somewhere,” said Turner who, with her husband, works but has no children.

But at the same time, the work-from-home travel agent understands her’s is not the typical view.

“It’s hard to equate rising property taxes when the value of your home’s been diminishing,” she said.

The sometimes-labyrinthine spread sheet of city taxes makes for both an easy target for non-incumbent politicians, as well as a source of handy counter-arguments from those who’ve been in power, said University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe.

“There’s a great deal of leeway candidates have when talking about taxes,” said Tombe.

What’s not in doubt is that the issue is top-of-mind among Calgarians during the current civic election campaign, with a Mainstreet Research poll conducted for Postmedia showing taxes and fees the biggest concern among 38 per cent of respondents.

Article content
Advertisement 3
Story continues below
Article content

That’s 25 points ahead of the nearest issue, public transit.

While mayoral candidate Bill Smith decries Calgary’s tax levels, Mayor Naheed Nenshi insists they’re the lowest residential levies of any major Canadian centre.

Tombe, who prefers to cite the mill rate, or taxes paid per $1,000 in assessed value, said that’s not exactly true.

Vancouver’s rate is $2.55489 compared to Calgary’s $6.50, though the West Coast city’s assessed values are extremely high, he said, but added, “Vancouver has lower per capita spending levels than Calgary, roughly 25 per cent lower.”

“But within Alberta, Calgary does have the lowest residential mill rate of any of the 18 cities,” said Tombe.

And Nenshi emphasizes the city’s share of that number – $3.963 or 55 per cent — while the remaining $2.537 is scooped by the province.

Such intricacies don’t carry much political value in a city hard hit by a stubborn oilpatch downturn, said Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt.

“That’s tied into the economy. The reason you saw an increase in tax take elsewhere are the problems in the downtown,” said Bratt of a city core hollowed out in both vacancy and ability to fill tax coffers.

Advertisement 4
Story continues below
Article content

“We still have relatively low property taxes, but it’s the continuous increases that rankle … people were willing to tolerate those increases when times were good.”

From 2013 through 2016, residential property taxes increases totaled 30.6 per cent, while this year, council used a one-time rebate to offset a 1.5 per cent hike.

According to city statistics, the tax tab on a median-assessed home in Calgary went from $1,556 in 2013 to $1,823 this year.

City hall’s detractors, says Tombe, can point to its average annual increase in spending since 2007 of nine per cent, compared to a combined increase of population growth and inflation of 3.7 per cent in those same years.

“If you held those spending increases to the rate of inflation and population growth, that spending would be $750 million smaller,” he said.

An even more stark concern, he said, is the city’s lofty non-residential rate — usually business tax — levels that in Calgary are very high.

That rate is 3.5 times higher than that paid by homeowners, compared to 2.8 times in Edmonton.

And with the demise of the city’s downtown, it’s a trend that threatens disaster for many smaller businesses that were faced with tax hikes of up to 300 per cent to pick up that slack, said Calgary Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman Zoe Addington.

Advertisement 5
Story continues below
Article content

“It’s just not sustainable. What we’re hearing from business is they just can’t do it,” she said.

Though the city has since capped those increases to a tolerable level, “of hopefully no more than five per cent, we haven’t heard what’ll happen for 2018 and the downtown core isn’t going to recover any time soon,” said Addington.

The chamber is pushing for a rollback of the ratio to 2.85 next year and 2 to 1 in a decade.

As she pounds the pavement to be re-elected in Ward 7, Coun. Druh Farrell said she’s been feeling the heat over tax hikes.

“People are concerned. It shows the flaw in the market assessment tax system,” she said.

With the opening up of the city charter, Calgary has an opportunity to move away from what she considers a regressive approach towards one with multiple sources of revenue.

But for the moment, says Farrell, in rejecting what she calls the clarion call of some election opponents, “it’s impossible to cut taxes and keep or increase services.”

BKaufmann@postmedia.com

on Twitter: @BillKaufmannjrn

Calgary residential property tax increases 2013-2017 (city and provincial portion combined)

Advertisement 6
Story continues below
Article content

2017: zero per cent property tax increase (Council approved a 1.5 per cent property tax increase but offset the jump with a one-time rebate to give citizens a tax freeze)

$51 rebate for the typical household  

$460,000 median assessed residential property value

2016: 6.1 per cent property tax jump 

$169.80 increase for the typical household

$480,000 median assessed residential property value

2015: 4.2 per cent property tax jump

$110 increase for the typical household

$475,000 median assessed residential property value

2014: 4.8 per cent property tax jump

$41 rebate for the typical household (due to $27.6 million in tax room from the province and one-time rebate of $52 million in tax room approved in 2013)

$430,000 median assessed residential property value

2013: 5.5 per cent property tax jump

$135 increase for the typical household

$410,000 median assessed residential property value

Article content
Comments
You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments.
Join the Conversation

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.

Latest National Stories
    This Week in Flyers