Morinville residents will have to pay about $93 more on their tax bills this year, town council learned last week, due in most part to an unexpected hike in provincial school taxes.
Town council voted 5-0 in favour of first reading for its 2013 property tax rate bylaw last week. Coun. Nicole Boutestein was absent.
Last December, council approved a budget that featured a two per cent tax hike, which worked out to about $38 to $40 more in taxes for the average property owner. That rate did not include the province’s school taxes or the Sturgeon Foundation’s levy, both of which the town predicted would rise just two per cent.
The actual rise in the school tax was 10.5 per cent for the average homeowner, said financial services director Andy Isbister, speaking to council. The province decided in its last budget to crank up school tax requisitions to cover 32 per cent of the cost of K-to-12 education, which means the town now has to come up with about $353,344 more than last year.
The average homeowner would pay about $69.64 more in school tax this year as a result under the proposed bylaw. Had the school tax increased by two per cent as predicted, homeowners would have paid about $20.90 more.
The Sturgeon Foundation’s levy also rose by about twice as much as expected, Isbister reported, adding about $0.49 to that part of the average tax bill.
“Council has no input into these requisition amounts,” Isbister emphasized. “We get the bills and have to pay them.”
The town’s portion of the tax bill was actually lower than expected, Isbister said, working out to about a 1.25 per cent hike ($22.91) for the average homeowner.
Council could raise this to two per cent as originally planned and put the extra money collected into a fund for future recreation projects (as Mayor Paul Krauskopf moved last December), Isbister said, but that would raise the total tax hike to about five per cent. “We didn’t feel that most residents would like that.”
Krauskopf agreed. “I certainly don’t want to create any hardship for the residents.” Council supported his amended motion to have administration look at how to use mill rates to support future recreation projects during its work on the multi-use recreation facility strategy, which is set to happen later this year.
The typical Morinville resident will pay about $2,618.53 in property taxes this year if this bylaw is approved, Isbister said, or about $93.05 (3.68 per cent) more than they did last year.
The school tax jump certainly puts a crimp in the town’s budget plans, Krauskopf said in an interview. Some communities have seen their school taxes jump 50 per cent as a result of the budget, he noted.
He personally thought that the province should let school boards go back to collecting their own taxes, instead of having municipalities do it for them. “That way, the taxpayer knows who’s collecting what and what the amount is.”
The tax rates come back for second reading later this month.
