For those citizens keen to dig into the origin story of their property tax bill, the City of Calgary has published a handbook to help navigate it.
Calgary city councillors learned more about the 38-page Property Tax Policy Handbook during the June 17 Executive Committee meeting item on the financial task force recommendations.
The handbook examines property assessment, budget setting, and then dives into the property tax policy and all the bells and whistles that go with it.
“One thing that we’ve definitely talked about is making sure that the information, especially the policy handbook, is available on our website,” said Eddie Lee, director of assessment and tax and the City Assessor.
“We’ve made sure that it is in plain language and it has all the principles that we use and tools that we have available to help with any relief programs.”
Every year, there’s inevitable confusion among citizens in how their properties are assessed, how the tax rate is calculated, and how the two are used to derive the annual property tax amount applied to a residential or non-residential property.
This aims to close that gap, Lee said.
“These tools explained in the handbook include tax share shifts, grants, assessment subclasses, deferrals and phase tax programs, just to name a few,” he said.
“The handbook also includes examples of how each of these tools have been applied by the city before, and some considerations for their future use.”
Lee also noted the heavily-used property tax calculator and a new tool in development that will provide councillors with the opportunity to input the property tax requirement, what the impact of a tax share split and the proposed tax rates between residential and non-residential properties.
The more information is better, says councillor
More tools to provide city insight to citizens are a good thing, according to Ward 9 Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra. He said that having more people understand the tax system, in particular, is welcome.
“The more we can demystify our revenue collection system, the better,” he told LWC.
“I’m of the opinion that the more people know, the better, because it drives us. I mean, it is not a sufficient condition towards building a better world, but it is a necessary condition.”
Ward 10 Coun. Andre Chabot said he, too, likes the idea of creating a property tax handbook for citizens because it answers a lot of citizen questions. His praise does come with slight hesitation, however.
“The only thing is that the unintended consequences of putting out something like that that’s so comprehensive is it may actually raise more questions in the general public, saying, ‘What is this?’ because there’s a lot of detail in there,” he said.
Ward 7 Coun. Terry Wong said that he spoke to a delegation of nearly 100 city realtors and thought they would have a good handle on the city’s taxation system. But, they didn’t, he said.
“They thought our taxation process was done in an entirely different way,” Wong told his fellow councillors.
“So, again, great job sharing this.”
More information on the City of Calgary’s tax collection process can be found here. The property tax handbook is posted below.
