Residents, business put heat on city hall over tax increases
When Bill Dever went to appeal the 22 per cent hike in property taxes on his Varsity Estates condo earlier this year, he couldn’t beat city hall.
“The appeal was denied with no explanation why,” said Dever, 80, a former Calgary Catholic school board superintendent.
While Dever said he’s all for taxes going to maintaining city services and infrastructure and even its public art program, he wonders what the steady hits on his city tax bill over the years are funding.
“I don’t see any increase in services and there’s a consistent increase in spending,” he said. “The city doesn’t seem to have any sensitivity between the relationship between cost and benefit.”
But while Heather Turner says she knows the pound of flesh extracted from her Royal Oak home has increased more years than not, she waves it off as the understandable cost of living in Calgary.
“A lot of infrastructure’s getting built and the money’s got to come from somewhere,” said Turner who, with her husband, works but has no children.
But at the same time, the workfrom-home travel agent understands her’s is not the typical view.
“It’s hard to equate rising property taxes when the value of your home’s been diminishing,” she said.
The sometimes-labyrinthine spread sheet of city taxes makes for both an easy target for non-incumbent politicians, as well as a source of handy counter-arguments from those who’ve been in power, said University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe.
“There’s a great deal of leeway candidates have when talking about taxes,” said Tombe.
What’s not in doubt is that the issue is top-of-mind among Calgarians during the current civic election campaign, with a Mainstreet Research poll conducted for Postmedia showing taxes and fees the biggest concern among 38 per cent of respondents.
That’s 25 points ahead of the nearest issue, public transit.
While mayoral candidate Bill Smith decries Calgary’s tax levels, Mayor Naheed Nenshi insists they’re the lowest residential levies of any major Canadian centre.
Tombe, who prefers to cite the mill rate, or taxes paid per $1,000 in assessed value, said that’s not exactly true.
Vancouver’s rate is $2.55489 compared to Calgary’s $6.50, though the West Coast city’s assessed values are extremely high, he said, but added, “Vancouver has lower per capita spending levels than Calgary, roughly 25 per cent lower.”
“But within Alberta, Calgary does have the lowest residential mill rate of any of the 18 cities,” said Tombe.
And Nenshi emphasizes the city’s share of that number — $3.963 or 55 per cent — while the remaining $2.537 is scooped by the province.
Such intricacies don’t carry much political value in a city hard hit by a stubborn oilpatch downturn, said Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt.
“That’s tied into the economy. The reason you saw an increase in tax take elsewhere are the problems in the downtown,” said Bratt of a city core hollowed out in both vacancy and ability to fill tax coffers.
“We still have relatively low property taxes, but it’s the continuous increases that rankle … people were willing to tolerate those increases when times were good.”
From 2013 through 2016, residential