Business owners in the Municipality of Pontiac are venting their frustration after council announced a commercial property tax increase of at least 40 per cent this year.
Because of the increase, some businesses will have to pay an additional $1,500 on their tax bill.
Mayor Joanne Labadie tried to justify the tax increase by pointing to the fact that residents of the Municipality of Pontiac still enjoy some of the lowest residential taxes in the MRC des Collines.
Labadie said a major cause was the fact that the municipality just negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement with public works employees who’ve been without a contract for four years – which means four years of retroactive pay.
She also said that with the amount of residents who left the region after the floods, coupled with the decrease in property evaluations, there is less revenue coming into the municipality.
To add insult to injury, Labadie also noted that the Municipality of Pontiac’s municipal shares have gone up 5.89 per cent.
These issues are a small consolation for entrepreneurs like Siri Ingebrigtsen, who owns Avant Garde Horse Farm. She said she’s on the hook for a tax increase of $1,500 this year.
“It’s almost like they don’t want us to be here,” Ingebrigtsen said of the municipality’s treatment of local businesses.
Social media pages dedicated to the Municipality of Pontiac have been flooded with angry residents demanding answers.
They’re afraid this isn’t the end of the increases.
Many people have pointed to the deferred capital expenditures budget from 2019-2021 as a potential source of increased tax rates in the future.
These budget items include new fire stations, new fleet vehicles and several road repair items. The deferred capital expenditures budget is basically a wish list for the municipality – not everything on the list will be done in the next three years.
Municipalities must come up with a capital expenditure budgets by law. They list all of the deferred maintenance projects in the municipality. It’s essentially a list of what has been neglected over the years.
With millions of dollars in projects listed, it’s safe to say that the can has been getting kicked down the road in the Municipality of Pontiac for some time.
Clearly, the municipality’s poorly managed finances go back further than the current council.
The Quyon Community Centre, which is surrounded by a flood plain, sits idle while the municipality goes over the building with a fine-toothed comb after disputes with the contractors.
Neither of the municipality’s fire stations – one of which is a former jail and the other a former public works garage – are equipped with showers for firefighters. On top of that, the municipality has listed new Luskville and Quyon fire stations on the last two capital expenditures budget.
With the municipality feeling the need for a 50 per cent increase in business taxes, many people are wondering what the future holds with so many projects on the horizon.
To go four years without having a contract with public works employees seems less than ideal. But to act shocked when a new deal includes retroactive pay shows a stunning lack of foresight.
To be so surprised by the contract – one that has needed to be renewed for four years – that commercial taxes shoot up 50 per cent in some cases is downright negligent.
Maybe a better solution would have been to increase residential taxes to bring them in line with the rest of the municipality in order to ease the burden currently being foisted on small businesses.
To top it off in the most tone deaf way, Labadie extolled the fact that residents are still paying a much lower tax rate than the rest of the MRC while saddling business owners with a hefty tax increase.
As Ingebrigtsen said last week: “If I as a business would have made that kind of error budgeting, I would have gone bankrupt.”
Chris Lowrey
