I think dividing out the tax bill into two categories of costs - costs that change by frontage v. costs that don't - would make a lot of sense and make it far easier for the public to understand how taxes work.
- Costs associated to roads, sidewalks, pipes = frontage tax
- Costs for everything else = citywide cost allocation based on assessment value
The frontage tax portion wouldn't be huge, but would provide property owners a lot more information on how their taxes are calculated and incentivize narrower lots in the long-term to reduce the frontage tax.
Another idea related to tax innovation I have - I wish we had more political ambition and tax creative to do one-off taxes for specific purposes. Part of the problem of our current approach to local budgeting and taxation is that it's so rolled up and centralized that it's really tricky to make big moves on any single portfolio. When everything is balanced together, nothing is a priority problem. There's pros to that, but a big con is a status-quo/incremental bias. Big changes are difficult.
For example, everyone complains about transit service, however there's not an easy way to add a truly meaningful funding increases in a way that makes it clear what that investment will get the public. The current process doesn't reward big swings and advocacy, instead driven by internal to city processes and meeting expectations rather than aspirations.
Would be interesting if someone could/would propose a specific top-up to the base budget. Something like below (numbers are all made up but to illustrate how you might communicate this as a plebiscite question):
The proposal:
A 4 year tax increase about base budget of $180 / year / average home = $99M / year ($180*550,000 homes)
What that gets transit:
- $100m / year more for transit (increase to $500M from $400M today)
- +25% more service hours every day
What you get:
- Every bus runs 30 minutes or better all day
- Primary routes run 10 minutes or better all day
- Ctrain sevice every 5 minutes or better all day
- 24 hour night-owl bus service implemented on core routes.
Right now special taxes can be used for:
Waterworks' sewer, boulevard (paying for maintenance of grass and trees), road maintenance, dust treatment, paving, fire, drainage ditch, recreational service
Special taxes can be levied based on: assessment, parcel count, frontage, land area.
Local improvement taxes can be used for projects that "council considers to be of greater benefit to an area of the municipality than to the whole municipality". Local improvement taxes require 2/3rd of owners to sign a petition. I think the province could be brought on-board to transform them into votes much like a Special Project Local Area Tax (SPLAT). The tax can be based on assessment, parcel count, frontage, land area. Council could then set up a process to petition for a SPLAT, like: petition-->project definition including area affected-->vote on SPLAT to fund project preparedness-->project developed and budget set-->vote on SPLAT to fund project.
Local improvements anticipate projects, and pay for the undertaking. Usually these are limited to things like alley paving in Calgary or building out a local sewer system in a rural municipality.
I think both should be used more. Moving the Green Line downtown underground, local owners should be challenged to agree to pay the incremental cost via a local improvement tax. They could also be used to support TOD and brownfield development where the government needs to build out infrastructure to support private development.
For commercial 'high streets' Business Improvement Area Taxes (existing tool that is underused) has current powers to fund things like:
(a) improving, beautifying and maintaining property in the business improvement area;
(b) developing, improving and maintaining public parking;
(c) promoting the business improvement area as a business or shopping area.
We're used to BIAs doing C, and a limited amount of A (increased garbage pickup, sidewalk cleaning). But I think they should be challenged to work together to do a lot more of A and B.
