It’s not the news most people want to hear, but taxes might be going up next year.
At the Standing Committee on Finance and Audit meeting yesterday afternoon, Prince George City Council discussed a 5% rise in property taxes for 2019.
Councillor Garth Frizzell said the five percent was a “very, very preliminary” discussion, however, a number of factors contribute to that estimation.
According to him, the Employer Health Tax (EHT) means a mandatory one time hit for all municipalities across the province, and will account for about 1% of the increase, another 1.86% goes to “general city issues.”
“There’s another 2-3% just because of the increased cost of snow clearing and infrastructure costs we’ve been expecting for about a decade and are now just starting to hit home,” said Frizzell.
According to him, the increase is not something council wants to do, and so they’ve asked staff to come back with some ideas about what might need to get cut in order to bring that number down before they make any final decisions.
“Nobody wants to increase the taxes up to 5%, but we looked at where the numbers are coming from and there’s no gravy in this budget, it’s just looking at covering the costs of the things that have hit us in 2018 and looking ahead to what 2019 is going to be.”
“Nobody is really happy about the numbers and we will look for options to reduce them, but those first estimates are what we are going to start with and see where we go.”
The date of their next meeting has yet to be decided, but Frizzell said it will be early next year.