Duane Hicks
Property assessment decreases will make it a tough budget year for Fort Frances council, Mayor Roy Avis says.
Council is looking at a $210,700 tax revenue shortfall before having even started the 2017 budget.
This roughly equals a two percent residential tax increase on its own. But added to 1.5 percent council has been sticking to in recent years to keep pace with the Consumer Price Index (inflation) could mean a 3.5 percent hike overall.
To make matters worse, the town will have to pay an as yet unspecified amount back to Canadian Tire after a recent Memorandum of Understanding between Canadian Tire and the Municipal Property Assessment Corp. (MPAC), further increasing the amount by which taxes may have to be raised.
“Our biggest problem this year is going to be our budget,” Mayor Avis admitted.
“The problem there is, we’ve never over the whole time that I’ve been on council, really had to deal with an assessment decrease except when the mill closed,” he noted.
“And that was a tough year.
“This year going forward, from what I see, we are experiencing a decrease in assessment overall both in commercial and residential,” the mayor added.
“That’s done by MPAC and we have no control over MPAC,” he stressed. “MPAC is controlled by the Ministry of Finance.
“What I’m seeing when I look at the roll is a tremendous amount of discrepancies, and believe me, administration is working on it, I’m working on it, because I don’t believe that it’s a fair assessment of the value in our community,” Mayor Avis said.
Looking at the latest assessment roll, there are decreases to 1,282 residential properties.
A total of 157 properties will remain the same value but 1,631 properties will increase in value.
Factoring together the decreases and increases, Fort Frances is seeing a net residential assessment drop of $5.1 million.
Mayor Avis said if council wants to keep any tax increase as low as possible, due to the assessment changes, some homeowners will see “a tremendous increase.”
“Some of the properties that have been assessed have gone up over 10 percent in value,” he noted.
“In fact, one piece of property went up 55.8 percent.
“Logistically, I can’t understand,” the mayor said.
“I’ve been working with our treasurer, with our CAO,” he noted. “We’ve been in contact with our representative from MPAC that comes to the community from out of town.
“It’s a real serious problem for us.”
On top of that, Fort Frances is seeing an overall $5-million decrease to commercial assessment. For example, Walmart here has gone down $2.1 million.
The mayor stressed 50 percent of the town’s budget is uncontrollable—meaning it is determined by services like police, public health, and social services.
“We can’t go back and ask those people for more money,” he remarked.
“The only people we can go to is the taxpayer.”
Mayor Avis said there’s two approaches to addressing the tax revenue shortfall.
“We can increase taxes to offset that or you can have a reduction in services,” he explained.
“So council will be balancing that as we go forward and making sure that we can give the best service possible for the money we have available to us.
“It’s not fair to see these 55 percent increases for one or two homeowners in the community,” Mayor Avis reiterated, noting that in many cases, the CVA increases have been “illogical.”
“You want to be fair to everybody, and sometimes council’s hands are totally tied by the processes in place, the MPACs of the world, and things of that nature,” he remarked.
But there are some “bright spots” ahead, said Mayor Avis, who added he’s “hoping for a good year.”
For example, the town’s long-term debt is going to decrease after this year.
Mayor Avis said the town will be making its last payment this year on its long-term debt for the Ice For Kids facility, Townshend Theatre, and sewage treatment plant.
This $4.4-million debt has been amortized over a 20-year period. The town has been making annual payments of $389,994.98, with this year being the last.
Meanwhile, the corporation has continued to be “financially sound” by regularly contributing to its reserves and not borrowing money, the mayor noted.
Economically, the town, along with the rest of the district, has been benefitting from New Gold’s Rainy River Project, Mayor Avis said.
“Even though it’s 28 miles away, there’s a lot of people who commute back and forth to the mine to work,” he noted.
“They employ local people, they spend money locally.
“Overall, it’s been very, very good.”
At the same time, Mayor Avis would like to see the local pulp and paper mill restart in at least some capacity.
“I can only say that we have been involved with interested parties throughout the year,” he said.
“I don’t see them here with the wrecking ball yet, so all we can do is keep our fingers crossed and hope that something comes in the near future.”
The mill situation has remained on council’s radar since its closure, Mayor Avis stressed.
“We would love to see it get up and operating again, even if it was on a smaller scale or even if it was just portions that were operating,” he remarked.
“To us, they’re still paying taxes, it still has an assessed value—not as big as when it was operating,” the mayor explained.
“But if they came in and started to dismantle the facility, that would put council into a much harder position in trying to balance budgets.”
Mayor Avis also said there’s no vacancies in housing in the community, which at least partly is attributed to the influx of area First Nations’ residents moving to Fort Frances—an ongoing trend he welcomes if the town is to “survive in the future.”
Initiatives such as Huffman Court subdivision took off in 2016, added Mayor Avis, noting there’s only six of the 16 lots left (as of press time).
He conceded some people were skeptical when the town undertook the development of the lots a few years ago, but time has proven this was the right move.
Mayor Avis anticipates all of the lots will be sold by this spring (buyers have five years to build).
“What that does is it gives us the opportunity to increase our assessment in our community and believe me, we have to do that,” he stressed.
Mayor Avis said council is cognizant of the fact there’s other town-owned properties which are “divided and ready to go” for future development as subdivisions.
On a similar note, the town sold riverfront property to Syncor Contracting Inc., which is expected to complete one five-unit townhome early this year and then start building a second one—expanding the residential capacity of the town.
In fact, building activity overall has been up in Fort Frances. The town issued 109 building permit fees, with a total work value of $6.36 million, in 2016.
The permits generated $69,045.72 in revenue for the town.
Mayor Avis said he’s also looking forward to the building of the Rainy Lake Market Square in 2017.
“I’m really excited because it’s going to be a nice gathering point for the municipality, for the people—I hope it ties more into our museum,” he noted.
“We’ve got so many good things happening in town,” Mayor Avis added.
“We’ve just got to get them together so we’re all working on the same page.”
Mayor Avis also hopes negotiations on Agency One land (Point Park) “will be dealt with in a satisfactory manner going forward in 2017.”
Meanwhile, 2016 was “a very good year” that included plenty of changes for the corporation.
Mayor Avis cited the retirement of Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Mark McCaig and the subsequent search—both internally and externally—for a new CAO, which ended with council choosing Operations and Facilities manager Doug Brown for the role.
“One thing I am very pleased to see is the continuity that we have throughout the organization by doing that,” the mayor said, adding Brown’s appointment led to a series of personnel changes within management.
For instances, former Chief Building Official Travis Rob became the new Operations and Facilities manager while Tyson Dennis became the new CBO.
“Two things: we were able to keep youth within our community that grew up in our community, and also we were able to find very skilled workers for those jobs,” noted Mayor Avis, adding he’s glad the town has been able to gradually replace its retiring administration with new blood.
Meanwhile, fire chief Frank Sheppard retired, with Tyler Moffitt stepping up as the new fire chief/Community Emergency Management co-ordinator.
Other town-related achievements in 2016 included:
•completing about 80 percent of the work on the new tennis courts, with the net, power, and painting to be done in 2017 once the frost is out of the ground;
•reconstructing sanitary sewer mains, watermains, and storm sewers on Phair Avenue from Third Street to Sixth Street East, and along Colonization Road East from Scott Street to Elizabeth Street East;
•approving the hiring of a full-time IT position, which should be in place later this month;
•negotiating and ratifying collective agreements with CUPE Local 65 and the Fort Frances Professional Fire Fighters Association;
•reviewing downtown parking and having bylaw officers step up enforcement during summer months;
•implementing a new telephone system throughout the entire organization;
•jointly purchasing, with the Fort Frances Power Corp., a new financial software and hardware package, which is scheduled to “go live” in the first quarter of 2017;
•endorsing the OFSAA boys’ ‘A/AA’ hockey championships, which will be hosted here March 21-23;
•working with the Age Friendly Community Committee, which is collecting data on seniors’ needs in Fort Frances;
•holding sports tourism training sessions in the spring and fall; and
•co-ordinating the “Fight the Blight” campaign, which saw the town accept 603 tonnes of waste from around the community (the total cost of the initiative was $76,491.53).
