The City of Calgary says they have sent a $10 million invoice to the Alberta government for their share of property taxes the city collects on behalf of the province.
Council voted back in March to invoice the province for the administrative cost to remit the funds, with the price tag totalling $10 million. The city now says they’ve sent that bill to Edmonton.
“A vast majority of people don’t know that about 37 per cent of the property taxes that they pay actually go to the province,” said Gondek on Monday. “And that’s because they get a single bill and it is issued by the City of Calgary.”
“There are other places that money could go; quite frankly, it could impact our budget decisions.”
For Calgary homeowner Karen Stauffer, when she got her property tax bill in May, she didn’t look at a line-by-line breakdown of which part went where.
“I just look at the overall number and pay that overall number,” she says.
And she’s not alone, which is why it has become an irritant for council over the years, and especially so this year after the provincial education property tax on the residential side went up by 15.6 per cent.
For her part, the premier didn’t commit to picking up the tab on Monday, but she did say she was open to changes.
Danielle Smith was speaking at an unrelated press conference where she said she’s open to a centralized model for tax collection.
“I’m quite happy to start that conversation if they feel the cost of tax collection has become too onerous,” Smith says.
But Gondek says, beyond remittance, she believes Calgary is not receiving its fair share of that tax revenue.
“That is not coming back proportionally to Calgary, ask anyone, we don’t have enough schools in Calgary,” the mayor says.
But some Calgarians, like Kevin Parent, who do look at what share of his property taxes are going to the city and what are going to the province, says the city also bears responsibility in trying to make life more affordable for Calgarians.
“They both can be cut, but it seems there’s more waste on the city side, I’ve seen,” says Parent.