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Originally Posted by The Yen Man
I'm not surprised people in Calgary are more opposed to it than the rest of the province. With the high unemployment rate, and the downtown vacancy rates, people in the city are already facing ever increasing property and business taxes. To ask Calgarians to tack on even more taxes for a 2 week party probably doesn't sit well with Joe who saw his business taxes go up double digits over the past few years.
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And even more salient to this point was what was presented to council yesterday.
This city is in for a very very rough ride in regards to existing and lost tax revenues.
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City officials say they don’t have an easy answer for how to address plummeting downtown office building values that have left a lingering property tax gap that isn’t going away and could see other Calgary businesses picking up at least part of the tab.
City manager Jeff Fielding said Tuesday that the past three years have seen more than $12.5 billion in lost property value from highly valued downtown office space, amounting to a $192-million tax burden that has to be shared between 13,815 commercial properties in Calgary.
“This is our hot potato. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Fielding said. “It’s unique to Calgary.”
In 2017 and 2018, the city pulled a total of nearly $90 million from its fiscal reserve fund in an effort to cap non-residential property tax increases at 5 per cent. Mayor Naheed Nenshi said it’s unlikely that the city will be able to shield businesses in the same way in the coming year.
“I’m telling you, I don’t know what to do here,” Fielding said. “This is one of the interesting things about this problem: people are saying, ‘You had this problem for two years. Why the hell aren’t you doing anything with it?’
“It’s a very simple problem and it’s very specific to a select number of buildings and it’s going to persist for a while.”
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https://www.thestar.com/calgary/2018...tax-shift.html
So spending hundreds of millions of the dollars they do have that doesn't really address any of the tax revenue issues downtown without raising business taxes even further.....may not get a lot of support.