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Mayor calls for provincial tax reform

by Kyra Hoggan on 27 Jan 2010
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Mayor calls for provincial tax reform

Castlegar Mayor Lawrence Chernoff is publicly calling for province-wide tax reform in response to a range of issues facing B.C. municipalities, including Castlegar.

Chernoff said the systems by which taxes are collected and distributed were created based on obsolete criteria - what made sense decades, or even centuries, ago does not serve the modern province's needs.

Addressing problems in the New Millennium, he said, requires new taxation models created during the New Millennium.

"Population centres have shifted, demographic realities are different , the economic and educational arenas have evolved dramatically ... think back to even just 50 years ago. It's an entirely different world," he said. "So why are we relying on taxation models that were developed that long ago or even longer?  It's time we looked for answers that will work for us today and tomorrow, instead of hanging on to yesterday."

He said clear illustrations of the dischord include situations like the one with Celgar, in which major industry ratepayers are declining to pay their tax bills and filing lawsuits with the B.C. Supreme Court instead.

"Then there's the situation with the board of education (currently trying to problem-solve in the face of an anticipated $4-million budget cut)," he said. "The question here is, How do you maintain levels of service? We need to find another solution, a balance that allows us to keep service levels up without overtaxing any single group or tax class."

Chernoff penned a column to that effect that ran in the Vancouver Sun on Jan.19.

He says there has not yet been a response from the provincial government.

Comments

From the editor: I question your perspective

by Kyra Hoggan on 27 Jan 2010 at about 23:37.
Mike,
 
Look at the taxation history here ... it's not the way you're presenting it.

The province allowed major rural industry to be slated as "cash cow" to build, not the municipalities, but the province as a whole ...think provincial highways, seaports, centres of commerce ... in the province's infancy.

Money flew into capital projects - not in the rural towns, but at the provincial level as bridges were built, capital cities created, infrastructure blasted out of raw mountainside.

Now, the more-mature incarnation of B.C. is, with help from folks like you, blaming the very same municipalities they used to gather this investment capital as scapegoats rather than alter a system that is no longer sustainable and is, in fact, hurting more than "a couple of local governments", but rather the entire province and its critical rural base.

Look where these laws came from and why - it was a province-building effort, not  a municipal money grab. And it was aimed at developing urban infrastructure - which made sense then, but hurts us all now.

How sad, I think, that the province appears to care more about Olympic hooplah than a healthy, sustainable economy in ALL its ridings...urban and rural alike.

Respectfully,

Kyra Hoggan

Editor

 

I must be missing something here

by UrbanWorkbench on 28 Jan 2010 at about 08:25.
I must be missing something here. Whether the industry is in or out of a municipality seems to matter little to the province. The taxes they collect, particularly for the infrastructure you mention (aside from hospitals and schools), generally come from sales taxes or direct business taxes. I'm not sure how this relates to the fact that municipalities have the power to raise their own taxes, (and since 1983 have variable tax rates for different classes of property) through which municipalities across the province chose to tax industry at a higher rate. Again, I'm not clear on how this relates to a provincial money grab. And the couple of local governments I was referring to were the ones currently engaged in court cases with industry over municipal taxes. Thanks for the discussion, as I said in my first post, I'm asking questions cause I don't know the answers. I agree that all residents in the province deserve to see the benefits of the economic activity. Five minutes of an Olympic torch, how much is it worth per person?

A Taxing Problem

by UrbanWorkbench on 27 Jan 2010 at about 22:34.
Mayor Chernoff's column in the Vancouver Sun is a well balanced plea from a community on the brink of having to plug a hole that is draining about a third of the City's revenue. Although I'm not sure you can pass blame on the Province when they were giving the municipalities the very thing they were probably asking for at the time - the right to expand municipal boundaries to include these "cash cow" industries sitting just outside the existing city limits. Did the City take the new found revenue and use it to subsidize residential tax rates and prop up the high level of service we've come to expect? If this is what happened, from a municipal perspective (and in 20/20 hindsight) it is clearly unsustainable, the risks can be seen across the province in the forestry sector. In that regard, we are lucky to still have a pulp mill open for business and employing residents. I'd be happy to stand corrected, as I don't know how this situation evolved over the years, is the City blameless in this situation? We can't change the past, but we can learn for the future. Also, it may be true that Tax reform is necessary, but in the face of a massive deficit, will the province be keen to shuffle taxes for a couple of local governments' sake?