York Region council eyes regional tax hike of less than 3%

YorkRegion.com
Feb. 22, 2015
Lisa Queen

Chances are, the increase in your regional taxes will be kept below 3 per cent in each of the next four years.

Councillors made a move Thursday to bring this year’s tax hike in at 2.97 per cent.

As part of the region’s new four-year budgeting process, the increase in 2016 would be 2.85 per cent, while in 2017 it would be 2.69 per cent and in 2018, it would be 2.35 per cent.

This year’s budget still needs to be formally approved, which is expected to happen Feb. 26, and council can always change directions for 2016, 2017 and 2018 during budget deliberations in future years.

But councillors approved the plan in principle during a budget committee meeting.

“(Keeping tax increases below) 3 per cent may actually be a number that citizens of my city and perhaps the rest of the region could live with,” Vaughan Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua said.

The proposed 2.97-per-cent increase for this year works out to a $64 hike on the average York Region household assessed at $515,000, which would bring the regional portion of the property tax bill to $2,211.

In Georgina, it would work out to a $35 increase, which would bring the regional portion of the tax bill to $1,221.

In Aurora, it would work out to $63, which would result in $2,186 regional taxes.

And in Newmarket, the average household’s regional taxes would jump $50 to $1,730.

After being presented with two options that would reduce the originally proposed 3.8-per-cent tax hike by either half a percentage point or a full percentage point, councillors chose to go with a hybrid of the two.

The third option includes cutting about 11 of the proposed new full-time employees the region had been looking to hire and putting about $5 million less into reserve accounts than had been budgeted.

However, it avoids unpopular choices such as:

• Chopping the York Regional Police budget by $1 million;
• Eliminating high-cost transit routes with low ridership, which could include routes in rural areas where other transportation options may be limited;
• Cutting the number of low-income families receiving emergency repairs to remain in their homes and seniors receiving assistance to return home from hospital or stay in their homes rather than going to a long-term care facility;
• Cutting funding to community agencies.

It makes sense to avoid service cuts, Richmond Hill Mayor Dave Barrow said.

“If we don’t go to the police and knock $1 million off if we don’t have to, then I think that’s better off for all of our communities,” he said.

“And I don’t think the housing repair and renovation program for seniors, we better stay away from that with a 10-foot or longer pole. The transit service, if we’re going to dive in there…it may be the most expensive and least utilized but it could be someone’s life-saver way to get from work to home in a remote area of our region.”

A bid by Newmarket Regional Councillor John Taylor to have the police cut $500,000 from its budget was defeated.

It’s only fair for all regional departments, including police, to share the burden of cutting the budget, he said.

But the police services board has already found more than $490,000 in savings since September and has seen a $400,000 reduction in court transfer payments from the province, said Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti, who chairs the board.