Morinville residents will need another 236 doughnuts-worth of cash to cover their taxes next year as town council has chosen to hike taxes by four per cent.
Town council voted 5-2 in favour of passing its 2019 budget Dec. 11, with councillors Stephen Dafoe and Rebecca Balanko opposed.
In addition to previous cuts and adjustments, the budget now features a four-per-cent tax hike, up from three per cent in the draft budget.
That means Morinville homeowners will see their taxes rise by four per cent next year. Business owners will see a 14.4-per-cent hike under the town’s new split mill rate.
The owner of a typical $300,000 property will pay $83.67 more in municipal tax next year for a home and $301.21 more for a business or industrial site, town financial services director Shawna Jason said in an email. Add in utilities and the projected Homeland Housing and school tax hikes, and the average homeowner should expect to pay $4,498.36 in taxes and fees next year – about $196 more than they did this year, or about the price of 19.6 dozen Tim Hortons doughnuts.
Red ink remains
Council went into overtime with this budget, as third reading was supposed to happen Nov. 27. Despite cutting some $249,000 from it, the tax-supported operating budget was still about $777,000 in the hole when council resumed debate Dec. 11, most of which was related to the town’s rec-centre.Jason told council that the town would have to raise taxes by at least four per cent this year and by 3.5 per cent in 2020 in order to eliminate the deficit.
Although Dafoe suggested going with an interim budget to allow for more discussion in January, Mayor Barry Turner won 4-3 support (councillors Balanko, Nicole Boutestein, and Dafoe opposed) for his move to raise the tax rate to four per cent from three. Turner’s motion specifies that the cash raised by this additional one per cent hike (about $97,000) is to go into the town’s operating reserve, which gives council more control over how it’s used.
Turner acknowledged that four per cent was one of the higher tax hikes he’d seen in his 17 years on council. Still, a four per cent hike was “remarkable” considering that the town was starting up a $30-million rec-centre next year, and other communities had seen hikes of 10 per cent when starting similar projects.
“We’ve pared down the budget as much as we can,” he said, and he did not think it was time to start cutting services.
“We have a revenue problem at this point, and this motion will address that.”
Dafoe agreed that the town had a revenue problem, but said the town didn’t have to raise taxes to solve it – a fixed-term, non-compounding levy could work, for example.
Council voted 6-1 (Coun. Lawrence Giffin opposed) in support of Dafoe’s motion to discuss getting that extra one per cent in revenue through a rec-centre levy instead of taxes prior to setting the mill rate next spring.
Turner’s motion reduces the 2019 operating deficit to about $683,000 and 2020’s to about $38,000, Jason explained in an email. The town would cover next year’s deficit by emptying the general operating reserve and taking $335,419 from reserves earmarked for safety initiatives and water, sewer, and solid waste rate stabilization. The town would have $186,011 in all its operating reserves after, down from about $1.4 million this year. The 2020 deficit could be handled with a 3.5-per-cent tax hike that year.
The approved 2019 budget will soon be posted to morinville.ca.
