Property taxes are hitting Flin Flonners with more disproportionate force than any other government levy.
Income taxes fall if you lose your job and start earning less money. Tax credits kick in if you decide to take on the financial commitment of a child. And seniors are enjoying more tax breaks in recognition of their fixed earnings.
But property taxes could care less about your finances. All the municipal taxman sees is a somewhat arbitrary estimate of how much your house is worth, to which he applies a uniform mill rate set by his city council.
In the case of Flin Flon, this system has produced astronomical tax hikes in, and in the several years leading up to, 2014. So much so that horror stories of annual increases of several hundreds of dollars have become all too familiar.
Some might argue that this isn’t that big of a problem. After all, aren’t we an affluent community?
When people make this case, they’re usually referring to our primary (and well-paying) employer, Hudbay.
But it’s a simplistic, if not insulting fallacy to use Hudbay as rationale to inflate taxes.
As of January Hudbay had a total Flin Flon-Snow Lake workforce of 1,377. The overall Flin Flon-Snow Lake area population is conservatively in the range of 9,500.
That means that roughly 85 out of every 100 people in this region do not work for Hudbay, at least as direct employees. Sure a lot of those people would be children and retirees, and some others would have good-paying jobs in other sectors, but you get the point.
In any event, you don’t have to be a low-income earner to legitimately fear ongoing tax (and now utility) increases.
You could be like the Willowvale area mother with whom I recently spoke. Her bank account was totally unprepared for the tripling of her taxes, to well over $3,000 a year now, in just a few years after she bought her home with her reasonable (but certainly not upper-class) salary.
People such as her often place all of the blame for their predicament on city council, but that is of course only part of the story.
Even though council lowered the mill rate this year, many Flin Flonners faced higher taxes because the assessed value of their homes, as determined by the provincial government, shot up.
Council would argue that assessments were the only reason taxes rose on many homes – an easy dodge.
But theoretically at least, council could have lowered the mill rate even further to more effectively offset the higher assessments.
That would have meant less spending and perhaps some difficult decisions. Obviously the tax increase was seen by our elected leaders as the lesser of two evils. It will be up to voters to decide if they were right.
What council must find disheartening is the fact that their policy to lessen the tax burden on high-end homes – the new special services levy – was thwarted by the fact that those homes saw assessment increases.
The end result: Flin Flon’s high-end tax rates remain notably higher than those of Creighton, Denare Beach and nearby cottage subdivisions. In the competition for housing starts in this area, Flin Flon starts with an unfortunate disadvantage.
Until recent years, taxes were basically a non-issue in Flin Flon elections, ranking far behind items such as economic development, infrastructure and crime.
That has changed. Don’t be surprised if these rising bills galvanize the voting public come October, producing a slate of candidates running on a low-tax, lower-spending platform.
I’m not saying they will have an easy time accomplishing that. But I am saying that their objective sounds awfully appealing to many Flin Flonners right about now.
Local Angle runs Fridays.
