St. Jacobs BIA wins rate increase

The St. Jacobs BIA’s plans to increase the tax on businesses in the core won approval this week from Woolwich council.

The core-area group wants to expand its role in promoting business activities in the village. To that end, it sought a threefold increase in the special tax levied on some 85 businesses.

To do that, the BIA (business improvement area) reached out to its members to back the plan, or at least not to object, which turned out to be the case: the township received just two objections, deputy clerk Jeff Smith told councillors meeting Tuesday night. That was well below the third of members opposed needed to scuttle the plan.

The BIA is a creation of the township, and its obligatory levy is applied by Woolwich tax collectors.

The impetus for the sudden 300 per cent increase – which is slated to come into effect next year – is the sale of St. Jacobs-based Mercedes Corp., which looked after marketing, promotion and downtown beautification, among other functions, for some 40 years. The company having been sold, it plans to back away from that role completely by 2019. Mercedes, which owns many of the retail locations in the village along with the St. Jacobs Farmers’ Market, St. Jacobs Factory Outlet mall, and surrounding properties, was sold last year to Schlegel Urban Development.

With Mercedes no longer paying a host of business-related expenditures – from garbage pickup to marketing – the current BIA levy doesn’t come close to covering the costs, the organization maintained.

When it was created in 2015, the BIA had an annual levy of $40,000. A two-per-cent annual increase means the group has a maxim take of $41,616 this year. The new plan boosts that to $120,000 for 2019, with inflationary increases thereafter. Business pay a special tax based on size and assessment, with a minimum annual fee of $300 and maximum of $3,000 set from the start. Under the new plan, those figures would rise to $1,000 and $5,000 respectively.