The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Question: Is it fair to heap much or all of the blame for this year's big tax increase in Flin Flon on the provincial government's property assessment model, considering that city council could have always calculated its mill rate so as to avoid huge tax increases for many (or any tax increases for that matter)? Mayor Therien: I suppose the easiest way to answer this is to suggest you go to City Hall and ask for our 2010 budget to see if this gives you a better insight into this issue. What you will see is that your city did ask for an increase in expenditures from the previous year of about five per cent, your school board asked for no change to take advantage of the provincial Tax Incentive Grant (TIG), the net result is about a three per cent increase. After all has been said and done, you need to look at the HudBay grant-in-lieu amount. This reduces what the city uses for computing your tax notices. We set a mill rate to generate the amount we require and, in this case, we reduced the mill rate from 2009 as a result of the overall property assessment levels. However, at the end of the day, your city has to compute tax notices and the ONLY model we have to use is the assessment model. * * * Question: Is the city getting any federal stimulus money? If so, will the fact that all the money must be spent by March 31, 2011, cause problems? Is this not how the new water treatment plant is being funded? Mayor Therien: The answer to your question is yes, the city did receive federal stimulus funding in the amount of $4.4 million, with the amount matched by the province. This, of course, is for the water treatment plant. As you are aware, funding from a federal stimulus grant does need to be spent by March 31, 2011; however, our funding comes from a DIFFERENT stimulus fund. We have a contract signed by the appropriate government officials that gives us until 2015 to complete our project. When the deadline was announced, the first thing we did was check to see if that meant our project needed to be complete by the deadline, which we knew we could not meet. There were not a lot of projects that did not fall under the March 31, 2011 deadline, so we consider ourselves quite lucky. * * * Send your questions for Mayor Therien to The Reminder by phone at 687-3454, fax at 687-4473, e-mail at [email protected] or standard delivery at "Ask the Mayor," C/O The Reminder, 14 North Avenue, Flin Flon, MB, R8A 0T2. No names are required. Ask the Mayor runs Mondays.
