It will cost you more for several services provided by the City of Kelowna come July 1st - 7% more in fact. That's when the harmonized sales tax (HST) kicks in province-wide and the City of Kelowna is obligated to collect the tax on many services it provides. Financial Systems and Reporting Manager, Genelle Davidson, told Kelowna Council Monday that services currently exempt from taxation such as transit, landfill, garbage pick-up and water will remain exempt while services which are taxable will be subject to the additional 7% HST.
These include city cemetery services such as yearly internment and maintenance fees, airport parking fees, programs offered through the Parkinson Rec Centre as well as facility rentals. All go up 7% as of July 1st. On-street metered parking and parking lot rates within the city will also be subject to the additional tax, however, Davidson says how that will be integrated will be brought to council by the Parking Manager at a later date. "For the City of Kelowna, the revenues we collect on our fees and charges is neutral to the city. We will be passing that tax onto Canada Revenue Agency," says Davidson. "We will not be keeping any of that to ourselves. The customers on the other hand will be affected as they will be paying an additional 7%. Previously they had been paying 5% GST on the taxable services, now they will be paying 12%."
While approving new wording within city bylaws to reflect the new tax, council also asked that trending information be sent back to the Audit Committee for review as requested by Councillor Robert Hobson. "The principle of the HST is supposed to be that things will end up costing no more or less over a period of time because the inputs will go down in cost," says Hobson. "Are we doing anything for example in our recreation services to track the real impact of the HST on our costs? It seems to me that would be something we would want to do over a period of years because I think the long term expectation would be our cost would go down by say 7% and therefore we would not need to raise our fees by 7%.
Item 3.2 - Staff Presentation to Council, Harmonized Sales Tax.pdf (389kb) (2010-06-14) ------------
Don Quixote Note: There will be no extra charge on Garbage and recycling for the HST so the increase on Garbage Rates and Recycling rates will only be 25% increase for residential customers and 5% for commercial customers. Residential Garbage rates will increase from $19.23 to $23.12 per quarter while recycling rates for residential pickup will increase from $5,50 to $8.28. (see P.315 of Agenda Package
). This rate increase was the result of NORD upping their tipping fees at the dump from $62.00 per tonne to $75.00 per tonne effective July 5. (20.97% increase -(P.312)). This increase was necessitated by Nord's desire to use most of the increase to create a Statutory Reserve for the Dump decommissioning when required in the future.
1 comment:
Increase to create a statutory reserve!They had a reserve before but spent the money without full explanation to the public when they bought the Vernon dump and used up the "non statutory"reserve that was there for future closure costs.Everything that they have done is poorly managed and they fully use outside consultants-why do we need overpaid employees and now an engineer?
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