SASKATOON, SK: The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on Saskatoon City Council to reject any funding strategy for its arena plan that would impose new taxes on taxpayers.

“The last thing that Saskatoon taxpayers need is to pay more taxes,” said Gage Haubrich, CTF Prairie Director. “Families are dealing with sky-high grocery prices and back to school costs, they don’t need city councillors trying to grab more money from their pockets.”

City council will be voting on a funding plan for the proposed new arena that includes implementing a hotel tax, ticket tax and loans backed by potential new property tax revenues called Tax Increment Financing.

A hotel tax would add a 5.9 per cent fee to hotel and other short-term accommodations in the city, making all hotel rooms more expensive. This would stick Saskatoon with one of the highest hotel taxes in the country.

A ticket tax would add a 9.5 per cent fee on all tickets at TCU Place, SaskTel Centre and the planned event centre/arena.

Because this would increase ticket prices, the report states this could cause “promoters to bypass Saskatoon with their event,” according to the report.

The proposed Tax Increment Financing plan from the city relies on new tax revenue from development around the arena to pay back loans used to pay for it. Taxpayers will be forced to pick up the bill if new tax revenues don’t cover the cost of the loans.

“Saskatoon’s lower availability within the [Tax Increment Financing] boundary creates risk on the amount of new development that may be able to occur easily,” says the report. This means new revenue to pay back the loans isn’t very likely to happen.

A similar scheme was used to finance Winnipeg’s Princess Auto Stadium and it resulted in multi-million-dollar bills for taxpayers.

City council recently hiked property taxes by six per cent this year.

“Taxpayers could be forced to pay new taxes and be left with the bill for city hall’s development gamble,” said Haubrich. “If council wants to move forward with this project, it needs to find a way to pay for it that doesn’t mean even more costs for taxpayers.”

The total cost of the arena and downtown entertainment district project is estimated to be $1.2 billion.

Saskatoon City Council is meeting on Aug. 28 to discuss the funding plan for the arena.