Is there anything that is more contentious to almost every adult than taxes?
It is unlikely anything is as universally disliked, so when they go up the reaction is not going to be particularly supportive.
In Yorkton property taxes at the municipal level have been steadily inching up in recent years.
And this year the numbers were frankly ugly, although the near 10 per cent hike was largely the result of a provincial government offloading its deficit from last year. The senior level chose to make municipalities be the bad guys in increasing taxes rather than taking that responsibility directly.
While the reason for the increase is obvious, the impact is still a hit on taxpayer pocketbooks.
But the issue goes beyond the provincial offload.
There are issues with the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency.
Yorkton Council has talked about alternatives to using SAMA on more than one occasion because they have been unhappy with the numbers coming out of the provincial agency.
The view of many property owners is no better. The SAMA system is not easily understood, and many see the assessment attached to particular properties as ridiculously unfair.
The combination of the provincial offload, the issues of SAMA numbers are then added to a municipal system which remains in a serious infrastructure deficit which demands ever larger budgets just to try to keep pace.
Most are aware the life expectancy of asphalt, sidewalks, and underground piping is far short of the reasonable timeframe a municipality can afford to replace it.
The issues with SAMA were enough to warrant a public meeting on property taxes, and the organization’s impact on those taxes, in the city last week.
The event attracted about 100, a significant number given that the sate of the meeting was late June, a time when any number of outdoor activities can draw a person away from the harsher realty of taxes.
The meeting process was good in that it gave some insights into the SAMA process, although whether most people were in agreement with the resulting numbers remains unlikely.
An explanation of a system widely seen as flawed does not ulitmately appease, nor does it change the results.
And that may be why there were not more at the meeting. Nothing said at the meeting by anyone was going to change the process, or the numbers.
In the end property taxes are a required evil in our lives.
Communities require safe drinking water, good sewage handling facilities, recreational facilities, descent roads and the list goes on. None are provided without dollars, and those come via property taxes.
We may not understand how the numbers are generated, and few like the actual dollars required to be paid but at present no viable alternative appears to exist.
