Morinville town council has deep-sixed a proposed change to how it taxes manufactured homes after being swamped by a tidal wave of opposition.
Town council voted unanimously June 23 against second reading of the taxation of designated manufactured homes bylaw.
The vote came after a nearly three-hour public hearing during which person after person lined up against the bill, which residents said treated manufactured home owners as second-class citizens.
Morinville has two manufactured home parks: Morinville Estates and Meadows of Morinville. In these parks, the park owners own the land, and the people in the homes own the homes. Both pay taxes to the town, resulting in about 100 tax accounts.
Town corporate services director Shawna Jason said manufactured homes represent 2.5 per cent of the town’s tax files and five per cent of its tax arrears. Collecting back-taxes from manufactured home owners is sometimes tough, as the town doesn’t always know who owns which home in a park and can’t always recover those taxes through tax sales.
The proposed bylaw aimed to address these issues by turning the park owners into tax collectors. Park owners would collect taxes from homeowners on the town's behalf and pay the town the taxes for their land and all the homes on it. Council heard this would streamline tax collection (as the town would just have to chase the two park owners for taxes instead of hundreds of homeowners) and reduce the risk of defaults (park owners would have a great incentive to ensure taxes got paid – the town could seize their parks if they didn’t).
A survey by administration of 102 Alberta communities with manufactured home parks found 22 per cent had or were implementing a law similar to the one proposed here.
Jason said this change would not affect the rights of homeowners or landowners, nor would it affect the taxes they paid.
“It was not our intent to make citizens feel like second-class citizens,” she said, referring to a comment made by many residents during the bylaw’s June 23 public hearing.
'Second-class citizens'
Said hearing drew roughly 13 speakers and 75 letters opposed to the bylaw.
Blair Turner, president of the Modular Housing Association Prairie Provinces, said council was trying to use a “loophole” in the Municipal Government Act to offload the job of tax collection onto manufactured home park owners.
“We believe developers are responsible to pay taxes and not to be tax collectors,” he said.
Maxwell Putnam of the Morinville & District Chamber of Commerce said governments are better able to collect taxes than to park owners as they have more legal powers available, such as the abilities to issue tax recovery liens and notices.
Turner and Morinville Estates property manager Shelley Smith said this bylaw would force park owners to set up their own tax collection systems, the costs for which would be passed onto homeowners. Smith and others said many people in these two manufactured home communities are seniors or live on fixed incomes, and would be unable to bear fees from this parallel tax collection system.
“If this bylaw passes, we’re going to suffer,” said Frank Farley, a senior who lives in the Meadows of Morinville.
“Quite frankly, this proposed bylaw has made us feel like second-class citizens in Morinville.”
Morinville Estates resident Carolyn Rowson said this bylaw portrayed manufactured home residents as “a bunch of crooks or trailer park trash.”
“We’re decent human beings and we deserve some respect.”
Coun. Stephen Dafoe said this bylaw seemed to be aimed at a very small number of unpaid tax accounts and downloaded the town’s responsibilities onto someone else – a practice council finds quite irritating whenever the province does it to them.
“I firmly believe the municipality is the tax collector, full stop,” he said.
Council should work to make life easier for businesses, and this does the opposite, said Coun. Sarah Hall. The province may have given the town the power to collect taxes this way, but “just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”
The bylaw's defeat at second reading means it will not be implemented.
