During last week’s budget meeting, the Fort Frances council approved a tax increase of two per cent on residential properties to be levied on Fort Frances residents.
This decision was not unanimous. Four councillors voted in favour of the two per cent tax increase while three others did not.
Councillors Wendy Brunetta, John McTaggart and Rick Wiedenhoeft were not in favour of the proposed tax increase.
Wiedenhoeft said while he is happy there will be a reduction in commercial taxes because this industry was hit the most during the pandemic, he still believes this is not the time to ask for a percentage increase on residential taxes.
“That’s almost three times the cost of living,” Wiedenhoeft said.
Wiedenhoeft added that the increase was above the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI is an indication of how well the economy is doing based on consumer goods and services purchased by households.
McTaggart echoed Wiedenhoeft’s comments and supported a tax decrease on commercial properties.
However, he expressed his concern with the tax increase on residential properties.
“Can we go to community services and see if there is something we could do in that area to trim the [taxes] a little but more,” McTaggart said. “Maybe we don’t get rid of all the money going into reserve, but maybe we can have a portion of it reduced.”
Doug Brown, chief administrative officer, said that diving into community services risks losing services that the community needs.
“We are going to plant the flowers of the cemeteries this year. That’s in the budget too. We’ve ordered them and hopefully we can do that,” Brown said. “I know that there’s infrastructure and manpower resources that we have to make sure that we protect when we come out of [COVID-19].”
Brunetta also suggested dipping into the reserve money to reduce the tax increase.
She said they had planned for $1.8 million to go into reserves when budgeting for 2020. However, there was a whopping surplus of $3.47 million put into last year’s reserves.
Brunetta said while many programs that were planned for 2020 did not run because of the pandemic, this is not an indication that the town will see a similar surplus in 2021.
However, she said with the surplus money of last year, reducing the increase below two per cent is achievable.
On the other hand, councillors Andrew Hallikas, Mike Behan, Douglas Judson and Mayor June Caul were in favour of th increase.
Judson said he thinks the two per cent tax increase is reasonable.
“I think it’s important that we condition our payers to what a normal growth factor looks like, even though the CPI portion is much different this cycle than in normal years,” Judson said.
“I know we talk a lot anecdotally about the economic consequences of the pandemic. But in my view, the people who are most impacted by that, from a financial standpoint, are not actually taxpayers. They’re the people who are tenants in precarious employment. They’re renting properties in town and not putting those expenses directly.”
Behan said the two per cent increase is a good staring point.
“I’m personally comfortable with that,” Behan said.
“I’m not happy about it, but I think I’m comfortable with it. It’s reasonable.”
