City Presents a Residential Tax example for 2008 taxes !

For the first time ever the City has made an attempt to show the year over year tax increase for an average residential taxpayer and it is should be commended for the effort.

However I suggest you view the assertions of a 2.04 for the general City's portion of the taxes as being suspect. It does not acknowledge the 11.4% increase for fire protection (in the old city) as part of general taxation as happens in all other cities in the province. As I posted earlier these would increase the taxes to 3.64% in the old city and only up to 2.20% in Okanagan Landing.

There is also 1 other thing that is curious about this comparison. When I made my original comparision I had to assume the improvements %age used was the same as last year i.e. 48% with land coming in at 52%. I cautioned that Your tax increase is dependent on your assessment and whether the land and improvements assessment have varied from the average increase from the last tax year.

In the City's comparison they too have assumed the same proportion this year as last year and I find that this is questionable. They must have an updated breakdown on the land and improvement ratios for their average $418,676 house and I suspect it is not the same as last year.

In my own property's case my land went up 53.6% while improvements went up only 7.9% for a net assessment increase of 23.5%. My actual tax increase all in will be 4.07% compared to the average house increase of 5.88% even though my net assessment is higher. If I recalculated my taxes using the same proportion as in this example my all in tax increase would be 8.32%. My original tax increase of $113.20 would have jumped to $231.61.

It is obvious that a more valid comparison would be one that uses the actual land and improvements values that are for that average house. In my case my land values have increased higher than the average but my improvements must be well below the city average. This has actually reduced my fire taxes this year by .76% compared to the City's average house increase of 11.4%
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This presentation is a good first step and the introduction of an online tax calculator for both residential and business taxpayer as will be debated on Monday at the open Council Meeting will be a valuable tool in next year's budget discussions. An example of such a calculator can be found here.