The Village of Boyle is planning to increase its residential tax rate by up to 1.9 per cent, but only to keep property taxes steady in the wake of declining assessment values.
Boyle council discussed its draft tax rate bylaw during its May 2 meeting, which proposed a village municipal tax rate increase of 1.9 per cent. However, council did not pass the draft bylaw, instead voting unanimously in favour of a motion by Coun. Mike Antal to defer a decision until council’s next meeting May 16.
Boyle Mayor Colin Derko said the aim of council is not to increase the amount of taxes people pay. Instead, the intention is to balance out a decline in property assessment throughout the village so that people will pay the approximately same dollar amount on the village portion of municipal taxes, he said.
“The reason we’re looking at a small percentage increase on our mill rate is we’ve lost a substantial amount of value on our assessments, which means we’ve lost value on our tax dollars,” Derko said in an interview after the meeting. “If people were paying $3,000 for taxes for last year, we want to keep it so they’re paying $3,000 for this year."
Derko said based on the budget, the village probably should be looking at a greater increase in taxes. But he added council was cognizant of all of the other organizations increasing taxes.
“We probably should be looking at an actual tax increase, but council has been fairly clear on the fact we wanted to give our taxpayers a break on everything being increased,” Derko said in an interview. “The carbon levy is coming on, the school portion (of taxes) has increased. There are lots of increases people are having to deal with right now."
Ashbey said during the meeting there are only so many ways a village can balance a budget in the face of declining revenues.
“Reality is, if you have continued declining revenue, then you have to reduce services. There’s no magic,” Ashbey said. “You can’t have it all.”
Council passes 2018 budget
Boyle council also passed a motion by Coun. Shelby Kitely during its May 2 meeting to approve its 2018 budget.
Derko said avoiding increases in tax revenue meant council had to make cuts, but service levels should remain the same in the village.
“We sat and drilled down our budget quite extensively,” Derko said. “We’re able to keep all the same services and everything is still very much the same as last year. We’re not going to be able to do a lot of the projects we’d like to do at this time simply because we’re just trying to be financially responsible.”
The budget does not include any capital purchases, Derko said, but budgets for road and sidewalk repairs remained the same as last year.
There were not any specific planned projects which were cancelled due to budget constraints, but he said village beautification projects he wanted to explore would have to wait.
“Things we had talked about in strategic planning – we wanted to look at maybe redoing some of our streets, redoing some of our alleys in the downtown area,” Derko said. “At this time that’s exactly still what they are, strategic planning ideas.”
He praised village staff for being frugal and added each councillor kept their election campaign ideals about fiscal responsibility.
“We’re coming up with the best budget we think is going to help Boyle the most,” Derko said.
