Business cries foul (KAMLOOPS)

By MARKUS ERMISCH Staff reporter Feb 11 2007

Report says they’re taxed more; mayor disagrees
Business taxation is Kamloops is unfair, says the vice-president of the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce. But the mayor smells something fishy in a report that argues the gap between business and residential taxation is widening. “The tax regime in Kamloops is the same as everywhere else, and it’s never fair,” said Brant Hasanen, vice-president of the chamber of commerce. “When you look at numbers like that, it definitely has that perception.”

The numbers Hasanen is referring to are included in Uneconomic Development: The Growing Property Tax Gap in British Columbia. It’s a report, published by the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB), that examines the relationship between business and residential property taxes. In Kamloops, according to the report, the gap is widening. Last year, businesses in Kamloops have paid a mill rate that was 2.72 times higher than for residential properties. And it’s a gap that is widening, according to the CFIB.

Terry Lake, however, dismissed the report. “It’s a big red herring and they keep using this. And really, it’s not a good comparison,” the mayor said. “They want politicians to believe that there’s an inequity when there really isn’t.” It is true the gap is increasing, Lake said, but that’s because residential property assessments have increased at a faster rate than business properties. “In Kamloops, we have quite an equitable system,” he said, pointing out that businesses no longer have to pay for residential garbage collection after the cost for collecting garbage was converted into a utility. Hasanen said the complaint about unfair tax regimes is not new. But rather than measuring the gap between various taxation classes, he said, it would be more meaningful to measure consumption of city services. Without such a study, he said it is difficult to determine who should pay what.

Uneconomic Development: The Growing Property Tax Gap in British Columbia. Study can be found at http://www.cfib.ca/legis/bc/pdf/bc9502.pdf