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.
By Jonathon Naylor When it comes to changing the way Flin Flonners pay for police and fire protection, Mayor George Fontaine makes a compelling case. At a public forum last month, he fleshed out a proposal that would see the cost of police and firefighting removed from property tax bills and funded instead by a new homeowners' fee. That fee could amount to $567 per lot, per year, which is the figure you get when you take the police and firefighting budget and divide it by the number of taxable lots in our community. The net effect _ and indeed the goal _ is to boost what owners of low-end homes pay into city coffers. For most of city council, those homeowners are not handing over their fair share. Last year, nearly one in four Flin Flon homeowners paid less than $300 in taxes because their homes aren't worth too terribly much and are taxed accordingly. Those in nicer, more luxurious homes, meanwhile, pay several thousand dollars. Over the summer, when details of city council's proposal were still vague, I wrote an editorial outlining my concerns. I worried about the impact on low-income homeowners and renters who can ill afford what amounts to a tax hike. Fortunately, such concerns were not lost on Mayor Fontaine. At last month's forum, in response to a question from the crowd, he said nobody wants to see a busier food bank 'so we're going to study the system very carefully and see if it actually is going to affect anybody to that point.' He further stressed that the cost of the proposal would not be 'coming off the backs of the poor, as it might sound like' at first blush. Worth so little Just as importantly, Mayor Fontaine and council noted that plenty of residents' homes are worth so little that they are unable to claim the full $700 property tax rebate offered by the Manitoba government. This means that for many low-end homeowners, any increase stemming from a policing and firefighting fee would be covered in part by the rebate. Who doesn't think we deserve more money from the province, right? Still, it's not a painless plan. Calculations provided by the city show that homes valued between $35,000 and $45,000 would pay anywhere from $248 to $338 extra per year, even after the rebate is factored in. A $338 hike in a single year isn't peanuts. It's $28 more a month. For some, that could add up in a hurry, though there's probably no way to measure the potentially harmful impacts. What surprised me about council's proposal is that I personally would pay quite a bit more if it is implemented as originally described. I never thought of myself as a low-end homeowner, and I never thought I was somehow failing to pay my fair share to the City of Flin Flon. My taxes for 2012 are $1,515, or $815 after the (full) provincial rebate. Under this proposal I would pay $161 more, a 20 per cent jump.. And that's not including the $850-plus in yearly utility bills that I fear will go waaayyyy up once the new water treatment plant is operational. I'm not complaining. But I imagine others in my boat _ homeowners well above the $300-and-under property tax category often cited by city council _ will once they find out that they too dig deeper into their wallets under this proposal. Local Angle runs Fridays.
