A proposed hike in taxes isn’t going over well with some Vernon politicians. Council was presented with the draft 2008 budget Monday and it calls for a 5.07 per cent increase in taxes. For a home assessed at $380,000, that would mean an extra $37.67. “It’s completely inappropriate. It’s too much of an increase,” said Coun. Pat Cochrane. That is also the view of Coun. Barry Beardsell. “It’s way too high,” he said when contacted by The Morning Star.
He also points out that the draft tax increase doesn’t include borrowing up to $30 million for a civic complex, which will go to referendum in January. Beardsell fears that a substantial financial burden is being placed on residents not only by the city, but by other jurisdictions such as the regional district and library board. “From what we’ve seen, school taxes could be going up 10 per cent,” he said. With the municipal budget not needing to be adopted until spring, there is time for the document to be reviewed and to be changed. “Staff brought it forward and it’s our job to look at the priorities and where to cut,” said Coun. Jack Gilroy. Gilroy won’t speculate on what items may be trimmed from the budget but he has made it clear that he will not support a 5.07 per cent increase in municipal taxes. “That isn’t reasonable,” he said. Cochrane also isn’t sure what changes should be made.
“Everything being proposed is reasonable but it (budget) could use some fine tuning,” he said. Coun. Buffy Baumbrough doesn’t believe residents should become too focused on the budget or the rate of 5.07 per cent. “It’s way too soon to comment because it will shift,” she said.“It’s a preliminary budget so I wouldn’t place a lot of emphasis on it.”
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Don Quixote Note: 
Only time will tell and thankfully it is an election year but these are the same clowns who took a 6.8% initial staff budget, reduced it down to 2% for all taxpayers and then had the audacity to change the tax ratio on businesses so that the Residential Taxpayer paid 4.95% more and the business taxes decreased by 6.6%. All this was done with a known $700,000 operating surplus (that eventually topped out at $1.5 million) and most of them didn't understand how to use the surplus to help the residential taxpayer or more importantly didn't realize that or by how much they had raised their property taxes.
1 comment:
"Clowns" is the right description. Most of them do not know what they are doing,can not understand the budget and do not listen to the one that does understand and instead are the lap dogs of the beaurocraps!
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