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.
Jonathon Naylor Editor Flin Flon City Council is getting specific about a proposal to more evenly distribute municipal costs among homeowners. In a notice last week, council said it is considering charging each lot a uniform amount to cover the cost of firefighting and policing _ removing that expense from property tax bills. A charge of $567.21 for each lot would be required to pay for the fire department and RCMP, based on the 2012 budget, council stated in the notice, which appeared in The Reminder last Friday, Sept. 14. Council said the proposal would trim the general municipal levy by about 14 per cent 'and cost share the fire and police requirement on a more equitable basis.' 'Such an approach may potentially provide benefits in dealing with the City's financial situation, and lead to a more rational distribution of costs,' read the notice. Of course the proposal is hardly etched in stone. 'Some consideration will also be given...to a potential further lowering of the per lot charge, should contribution from outlying areas become a possibility,' read the notice. 'Another strong possibility is an adjustment to the commercial portioning rate to ensure that overall taxation of this class of property remains stable.' See 'Propos..' Pg . 6 Continued from pg. 1 Council invites the public to a meeting, to be held Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. at the City Hall Council Chambers, to discuss the matter further. The proposal is borne out of council's sense that there is too big a gap between taxes paid by residents in higher-end, more valuable homes and those in lower-end, less valuable homes. Indeed those with some of the nicer homes pay several thousand dollars a year in property taxes while smaller, older homes are charged a few hundred dollars or less. Previous talk of council's proposal sparked concerns that low-income residents _ who tend to live in lower-end homes or homes-turned-apartments _ would suffer. But not everyone agrees that is a serious concern. Indeed Greg East, owner of many older rental properties in Flin Flon, has endorsed the sort of proposal council is pondering. 'We are all collectively responsible for the costs incurred in running the City of Flin Flon,' he wrote in a letter to the editor earlier this year. Mayor George Fontaine has long been an advocate of more evenly distributing the tax burden amongst Flin Flonners. In 2010, while still a councillor, Fontaine told a resident with a higher-end home that he was 'paying far more than your share' of that year's tax increase. 'Because the assessment system works as it does, those people with newer, more valuable homes get taxed a whole lot higher,' he said at the time. 'A lot of people out there got taxed a whole lot less, so you're paying a higher rate than a lot of people, and probably a higher rate than you should be. Until they can figure out a way _ because that's the mechanism the city's stuck with right now _ until we can find a way to change the system (so) everybody pays for certain basic needs, that's how it works.' Council has long advocated for the right to implement a base tax _ as Creighton does under Saskatchewan law _ but the Manitoba government has rebuffed those efforts. Creighton charges all residents a minimum tax of $750 each year, with any additional charge based on the value of the property.
