BC: Take Back City Hall

Every spring, thousands and thousands of British Columbians grumble as we fill out another big cheque for our property taxes. Across the province, property taxes seem to be continually rising as city halls keep adding to municipal services--spending tax dollars at an alarming rate.

We have done a lot of work on this file over the past five years, equipping community advocates with our Ratepayers Guide, issuing reports and checklists, writing op-eds, and gaining more than 90 candidate signatures on our 2011 Contract with Taxpayers. The announcement of a new Auditor General for Local Government (AG-LG) was also a huge step forward for property taxpayers.

We want to give the AG-LG, expected to be in place by the summer of 2012, some ideas and files to work on. Task one should be addressing municipal politician pay and perks.

Not only is pay for mayors and councillors on the rise (see articles here and here for a few examples), but one-third of their salaries are actually tax-free allowances--a historic anachronism that needs to be changed. Technically, this tax-free allowance is supposed to take the place of claiming expenses, but that has fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Several years ago, the provincial government scrapped the tax-free allowance for its MLAs. Two years ago, the City of Victoria followed suit. But now it's time to change the law and dump this perk for all municipal politicians across the Province.

Everyone should pay their own way when it comes to taxes. It's neither fair nor just for someone to wriggle out of paying income tax just because they are an elected official.

To that end, we have launched a petition asking the Province to scrap the one-third tax-free allowance for municipal politicians. Please sign our petition, and ask your friends and neighbours to follow suit. You can also e-mail the Premier, Leader of the Opposition, Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development, and the President of the Union of BC Municipalities with your concerns. We will add your petitions to our formal submission on politician pay to the AG-LG later this year.

In 2012, we will continue our effort to find ways to push city halls to hold the line on property taxes. We will work with our ten successful Contract with Taxpayers signees (http://taxpayer.com/blog/21-11-2011/bc-ten-contract-supporters-elected-office) to get a Taxpayer Protection Bylaw tabled in their communities, and establish a model the rest of the province can look to. We will continue to pursue examples of waste at the municipal and regional district level. Is there somewhere we should be looking? E-mail us (bc.director@taxpayer.com) and let us know! It's a big province, with more than 200 municipalities and regional districts, but together we can make a big difference.

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