Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
And that is misleading. If assessments were cut in half and the mileage doubled there would be no change to taxes for a homeowner. - mill rate doesn’t matter
Comparing taxes in Vancouver and Calgary Vancouver is going to have a lower mill rate because of higher average property value. This comparison is meaningless - mill rate doesn’t matter.
In the past when the media reports on tax rates they report on increase to the average tax bill - again because mill rates don’t matter. This reporting also has flaws because their needs to be an inflationary increase every year to maintain service so a 2-3% increase in tax bill is actually a 0% increase.
Council also doesn’t set the mill rate. They aren’t allowed to run a deficit so they can set what percentage of budget comes from residential and commercial property taxes, but since they don’t control assessed value or debt mill rate is is just budget / assessed value. - no one cares about mill rate.
But if the city of Calgary just has a flat mill rate this year that is a massive tax increase even post 8% inflation.
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It's totally misleading, and I bet city council knows it. They speak to it purposely because this way, they can claim they didn't "increase taxes", it's just the market value of houses went up. Which makes absolutely no sense, because at the end of the day, property values are used to determine the amount of the pie to split to each household. The overall pie that city hall wants to collect from the city is still set by them. They then adjust mill rate x property values to get to the overall end target.