Councillor Gives Residents an Update on Tax Reform
Fall River (D2N) – Barry Dalrymple, Councillor for District 2 of the HRM, addressed the matter of Tax Reform in an update to his January Column. “This has been in the Halifax media a lot lately and I would like you to clearly understand my position on this. Two years ago the HRM struck a Tax Reform Committee which has diligently held Public Meetings, surveys, and responded to residents comments. From the information received this Committee came up with a series of proposals they felt would bring some balance and fairness to the taxation system the HRM uses. I mostly support these recommendations, but unfortunately the urban block of Councillors do not, and they are mostly opposed to any changes to the status quo. Articles have been placed in the Herald and Coast trumpeting that Tax Reform is about fewer taxes for the rich and more for the poor – that is completely and totally false and inaccurate. I am completely opposed to the status quo because the current system is based almost solely on the Assessed Value of a Home; this means that there is no provision for either Incomes of residents or services provided (or not provided) to be taken into account.
What is very obvious to virtually all of our District 2 residents is that we pay the taxes like they do in the urban city with a slight suburban & rural discount, but we get little or no services in return. Just a few examples:
- We all pay transit tax, the difference is that there are buses all over the urban area – virtually none out here.
- Most of the urban areas have both city water & sewer, maybe 20% of District Two gets either and we have to pay for the installation of it ourselves
- All Rec Centres & rinks in the urban areas are paid for by General Tax Rates (everyone pays), out here we pay Area rates (only we pay for them) etc etc
This is obviously brutally unfair, I support and have argued for a new tax system based on three components – those are the Assessed Value of a Home, Services provided, and Income. The problem with the whole issue of Tax Reform is that ultimately there are more Urban City Councillors than there are Suburban & Rural ones, so they will always hold the majority of votes. Last week, the six Dartmouth area Councillors voted against any kind of tax reform preferring the status quo. Ultimately they have voted against this because if we bring any kind of “Services Accountability” into the equation, taxes out here where there are so few services would have to go down; that automatically means taxes in the city where all the services are would go up and urban Councillors are not going to allow that to happen. We continue to work away at this issue to try to bring some fairness to the mix.
This article highlights the fundamental problem that lies at the heart of amalgamation. If this information is accurate then forming our own rural council is the only way we can keep tax levels fair for our residents. Under the current system of representation the urban councillors will always out number the rural councillors. The over taxing of rural residents will continue unabated.
For example, as a result of a policy chnage made by HRM in the past couple of years, Lockview Road residents pay several hundred dollars a year to the Halifax Water Commission even though they have no central water. We are on our second councillor since this theft of money from Lockview residents began and both Krista Snow and now Barry Dalrymple are either unwilling or unable to rectify this unjust treatment of their constituents. The recent change in policy resulted in an effective tax increase in many cases of over 20% in one year for Lockview residents.
It is easy to agree with the councillor on a tax system based to some degree on services provided and property value. In my view income should not be considered a factor when paying property taxes. Many of the services and infrastructure provided by the municipal level of government is cost shared by the provincial and federal levels of government. Both the federal and provincial goverments already tax people based upon their income and any move by the municipal level of government to do so would result in duplication of payment by those already having their incomes taxed at a higher level provincially and federally.
Good luck Barry.
PS. It was not my intent to knock the councillors on the “water tax with no water service” being charged to Lockview residents by the Halifax Water Commission. I simply believe that councillors are uable to have much effect under the current structure.