Proposed tax increases: Are North Shore councillors incompetent or irresponsible?

As we enter the new year, property owners have received their assessments. But, whether your assessed value is up or down does not necessarily represent what your tax increase will be.

Every year, our councils appear to believe it’s not just “OK” to continue with significant property tax increases; they seem to do nothing to stop them. West Vancouver hasn’t decided on its increase yet, but staff offers three options ranging from 4%  to 11%. What are they thinking? The average increase in the City of North Vancouver is 4.5%, while the District of North Vancouver proposes a 7% tax increase. I wrote previously about this in 2021.

To say that I’m appalled at all these massive increases would be an understatement. While I don’t want to make light of proposed increases at West Vancouver or DNV, I will focus on NVC since this is where I live. I have presented to the CNV Council and spoken with councillors. City will boast how they only increased the tax burden by 4.5 while others are much higher, such as Vancouver and Toronto at 10% and Winsor Ontario at 14%. But my argument takes a different view. Why should taxes be increasing at all?

Of course, we all know and feel the inflation thrust upon us due to government policies we had no control over and didn’t vote on. But is that an excuse?

With more than a 22% increase (CNV) in the number of residential family taxable units over the past decade, you would think that “economies-of-scale” would allow for taxes to remain constant or maybe even go down. This isn’t the case, and when I asked about this specifically, the head of the budget process shrugged it off and said, “We’ve taken that into consideration.”

But there was no explanation of what he meant. Given we are told by governments at all levels that “housing affordability” is one of their most important focuses, governments are some of the biggest problems regarding the increasing costs of home ownership. In addition to ever-increasing property taxes, there are tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars (per unit) in added fees to build a new residence, which is part of the problem, along with the unnecessarily long time it takes for approvals to build something due to red-tape.

In my discussions with councillors, I suggested they look at ways to reduce expenditures, to keep tax increases to zero or reduce them. I haven’t seen any move toward taking real action in this realm. Two of my initial recommendations were:

Tell every employee and department head in the City to think of and look for ways to cut costs. There would be incentives if they can come up with something that gives significant savings to the City budget. They could be anything from earning a percentage of the savings as a one-time bonus to receiving an extra paid vacation. There are many ways to incentivize people here.

Another option was to cut the staff expenditure by reducing staff (this could be via attrition and hiring freeze) to keep the budget such that no tax increase is required. We’d be surprised how innovative the staff might be in coming up with savings when jobs are on the line.

Stop spending on non-necessities during this inflation time, like the NVC tree planting initiative. We don’t need a tree canopy, we barely see the sun and look around, there are trees everywhere.

These are just three ideas, and I could go on. But really, why can’t staffers, our mayor and councillors come up with incentives to reduce the budget ? The real problem is that as the government gets larger, it becomes more important that they justify their existence and importance. This self-importance is misguided as to what their needed function is. In reality, they are there to provide necessities beyond the realm of an individual’s ability.

Too often, councillors and officials have “pet-projects” which were never voted on by the electorate. No one voted for the Pedestrian Bulges, speed bumps on our main streets, no right turns or the narrowing of our streets. Yet millions of dollars have been spent on these projects that “fix a problem” that never existed and, I would say, have made traffic worse on the North Shore.

While I’ll give the team at CNV a two-finger clap for not being the worst in our jurisdiction, they must do much better to get my vote! Some councils may not be incompetent, but some are, and they are responsible for this never-ending cycle of increased taxes and excessive spending. They are not doing their job by not instructing their staff to come up with ways to negate the need for tax increases.

Their lack of understanding of the huge impact of constantly increasing compounding taxes on many families seems to infect most politicians once they gain power. That doesn’t mean we should give them a “pass” on the topic; quite the opposite. We must tell our Mayors, Counselors and Provincial and Federal Politicians to stop these constant tax grabs and cut their spending.

They must stop looking at the spending and ignore the impacts on the people they are raising taxes on. These are “after-tax” (income tax) dollars it takes to pay these property taxes! We are not an endless ATM pool for them to withdraw from, and we must tell them that. We must also keep these things in mind whenever we can vote for people in or out of office.

Tony Neumeyer has lived most of his life on the North Shore, and is interested and involved in local civic issues. Views expressed in this column are his own and may not necessarily reflect those of this publication.