One of the items at the Monday April 29th Thunder
Bay City Council meeting was a discussion on tax policy and a move to bring it more
in line with provincial requirements.
Namely, the province has property tax ratio thresholds and in order to meet them
there needed to be a reduction in non-residential tax ratios as follows: Industrial
ratio from 2.925444 to 2.63, Multi-residential from 2.422438 to 2.0, and Commercial
from 2.137932 to 1.98. This has been a
process that has been underway since 1998 and partly as a result the share of the tax
levy paid by residential ratepayers has been rising over time while that of
non-residential has been declining.
In Thunder Bay at
present, nearly two-thirds of the tax levy is borne by residential ratepayers
while the other third is non-residential or essentially business property
taxation. In 1990, it was about a 50/50 split. It should be noted that the City
of Thunder Bay’s financial statements now report taxation revenue without
dividing it into residential and non-residential as used to be the case only a
few years ago. To get that information,
one now has to go onto the government of Ontario website and access the Financial
Information Returns provided by municipalities which can be quite a daunting task. This lack of transparency on the part of the
City of Thunder Bay in reporting these important numbers more directly is a
disappointment.
Of course, municipal
public finance can be a pretty arcane and complex issue– even for an economist
- and the discussion the other evening was actually more spirited and informative than
usual, all other things given.
Administration affirmed that the tax levy this year would remain the
same and the changes to the residential burden would be phased in but in the
end based on the short segment I observed they did not successfully allay the
concerns of councilors that residential taxes could rise even if the tax levy
stayed the same. Indeed, the emphasis
that the tax levy is going to remain the same this year did not deal with the concern
that taxes for residential will rise more than they otherwise might
in future. How can this be?
