The issue:
School property taxes
WE SAY:
Squamish is paying more for education and getting less
Squamish taxpayers may feel like they got their lunch money stolen by the school bully when they get their property tax bills next month.
Once again, Squamish council has managed to keep its hands out of the cookie jar - for the most part - in passing a zero per cent tax increase municipal budget. That said, they still got an extra $600,000 from new properties, but at least they left existing taxpayers alone.
But the province has gone for another dip in your pockets.This year, the government dropped its tax rate by nine per cent in Howe Sound. For Whistler, which saw a flat year for property value increases, it's the first year in recent memory that they won't face sticker shock on their tax bills.
But in Squamish, where the average property went up nearly 20 per cent this year, you're looking at an eight per cent hike in school taxes - more if your home's value went up more.
That's on top of all the extra money the government's getting for all that new property that's come on the market.
Now, we wouldn't have quite as big a problem with that if we were actually getting more services for the extra money. But that's not how it works.
School tax rates are set by the provincial government based on the value of assessed property in each district. It then hands out funding to school districts on a flat per-student basis.
This formula has meant that for years, places like Whistler have paid exorbitant school taxes for the same service as everywhere else - subsidizing the rest of the province.
Now, with two years of skyrocketing property values, Squamish is starting to face the same problem. We're becoming a provincial cash cow and we're not seeing any benefits.
School funding in Howe Sound has been largely flat - except for the one-time increase announced last month as part of the government's pre-election spending blitz. Even if we count that, it's a 3.4 per cent increase - in other words, less than half the size of the property tax hike they're taking out of here this year.
As the Howe Sound Teachers' Association recently pointed out, the Howe Sound School District has lost three times as many teachers as it should have based on enrolment, as well as disappearing funds for teacher-librarians, special education and gifted education.
School taxes are just one of the many ways this government has nickel-and-dimed its way into your pockets in the past four years - and a particularly sneaky one. Both school boards, which have nothing to do with the issue but absorb the heat, and municipalities, who collect the taxes along with their own, insulate Victoria from this tax grab.
Last year we wrote about this same subject, and told you to remember where your tax hike came from in the next provincial election. This time, you don't have to remember quite as long - about 19 days, in fact.
