Cap map now online
Interactive tool will better inform residential property owners about their tax bills
SYDNEY — Cape Breton residents curious about how the province's Capped Assessment Program affects their property taxes can discover the answers on an interactive map now available online.
The CAP visual information tool can be found by visiting the website of the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, which produced the map in partnership with the Nova Scotia Association of Realtors, the Investment Property Owners Association of Nova Scotia and the Association of Municipal Administrators.
The tool allows site visitors to quickly find the assessed value of every residential property in Nova Scotia, the tax bills issued under the CAP and the taxes that would be paid without the CAP. Users only have to hover over a specific property, which are all colour-coded to indicate whether the owner overpays or underpays, to access the relevant information. The tool even displays the median household incomes for specific neighbourhoods.
The release of the CAP map coincides with the first virtual meeting of the federation of municipalities since the Oct. 17 elections. The federation has passed annual resolutions over the past few years to have the program phased out.
The federation also plans to reconvene an all-party committee looking to study the removal of the CAP. The committee's work was put on hold in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a request by Progressive Conservative Party leader Tim Houston that no further action be taken until additional information was made available.
It's long been argued that the CAP results in an inequitable distribution of the residential property tax burden. But the results of an analytical study released in August suggest that despite anecdotal evidence that the Nova Scotia CAP impacts owners' decisions on whether or not to move, there is no conclusive evidence of behaviour change in any of the census, tax and construction data.
And the report, assembled by the Vancouver-based Mountain Math Software and Analytics firm, said the province's CAP has not been in place long enough to determine its long-term effects.
“While individual implementations of property assessment caps differ across jurisdictions, the experience from places with longerrunning property assessment caps are a point of caution that the Nova Scotia assessment cap may face increasing negative consequences on residential mobility in the future without meaningfully reducing involuntary moves,” stated the report.
Nova Scotia's CAP dates back to 2005 when the provincial government enacted legislation to place a limit, or cap, on how much residential property taxes could be increased annually with the intent of protecting homeowners from sudden and dramatic hikes in property assessment and the resulting tax increase.
The federation is calling for a 13-year phase out of the program. It has been suggested that if the cap system was eliminated the Cape Breton Regional Municipality would be able to lower its property tax rate by about 19.6 per cent and still bring in the same amount of taxation revenue.