Mayor Cal Huntley wants potentially hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to stay in Flin Flon rather than flow into provincial coffers.
Huntley supports a call for Manitoba cities to be rebated their annual PST expenses.
“We don’t believe that we should be paying sales tax given that we’re tax funded,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense, it really doesn’t.”
Huntley said the PST was discussed when he and other civic officials from across the province met at the Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) Cities Caucus earlier this month.
Key issue
He said PST expenses are a key issue for the City of Flin Flon and that the AMM will lobby the province to enact the rebate.
Mark Kolt, chief administrative officer for the city, said he would be surprised if a PST rebate netted the municipality less than a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
Without an exact figure, Kolt added that the savings would be “very significant.”
Huntley said it was noted at the Cities Caucus meeting that savings from a rebate would be most significant when major capital projects are undertaken.
The AMM has unsuccessfully called for a municipal PST rebate in the past given that local governments already receive GST rebates from the federal government.
In other financial matters, Flin Flon city council voted last week to take out a temporary line of credit worth up to $750,000.
This does not mean the city is spending additional money, Huntley said, as the line of credit relates to “a cash flow issue” in which the city must front dollars before being refunded by upper government.
“It’s not unusual for this time of the year, but it’s a little bit more significant because we’re coming into the end of the water treatment plant property [work],” Huntley said, “and dollars that haven’t been paid by the government that we’ve had to front and different things like that, so it’s a cumulative effect.”
The line of credit expires in early May, at which time the city should be back into “normal operations,” Huntley said.
