[rage2]

Originally Posted by transplant99

Thanks for this.

I had read a while back on the Chamber of Commerce site something somewhat different in regards to how much small business was enjoying the policy changes that resulted in higher taxes for owners.

This part stuck out.

So it looks like it was a policy change that hurt them then was somewhat corrected, but the "feeling" was that it was still expensive to do business in Calgary.

I have no idea myself as i am not a business owner and haven't been for many years. Just talking to people who are gave me a very different perspective. Then again that is only on side of the story too.

I can tell you that relief really did nothing in the grand scheme of things. Here's a good read on how the city essentially f'd small business owners outside of the core:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...cast-1.4320615

The problem lies in the "dark math" of property tax bills.
To make up for the fallout of downtown businesses, the tax burden has been shifted.#Again, because the math has#to work out. The city cannot run a deficit.

"If a building owner were to sell their building, obviously they're going to get a lot less money for it if it's empty versus if it's full of renters," says Zoe Addington, director of policy at the Calgary Chamber.

"Because they are empty with all the layoffs that we've seen, the value has dropped down in downtown. And because the city doesn't have other sources of revenue, what they did was go to businesses outside of the downtown core and basically just transferred that tax burden onto them."

Now council did end up passing a $45-million relief fund to soften the blow, but it's unclear if a similar reprieve will happen again in 2018.

Some business owners are also questioning changes to their assessments.
Bernard Druin,#owner of 17th Avenue Framing,#saw the assessed value of his store jump more than $1 million in 2017. As a result, his tax bill went up 95 per cent.

He appealed the assessment but lost. So he started planning for the following year.

"What I did was I contacted a professional assessor that assessed properties in the past and I explained to him the situation saying, 'I'm sure if you appraise it, you're going to come to a number totally different than what the city's coming, and I could use that next year in my challenge,'" says Druin. "He basically said, 'You know I'd like to take your $3,000 for your assessment but you're not going to win. The city — they don't care.'"

The tax bill for another former business farther east, Studio Revolution Fitness, jumped from around $19,000 to $61,000 this year.

These aren't one off cases either. This was happening at a pretty large scale.