Black Diamond residents who say they’re paying too much in property taxes are getting to the bottom of their lofty rates.
The residents, who call themselves the Concerned Taxpayers Group, have spent the past few weeks delving into the Town’s expenses, comparing their property taxes with similar-sized communities, attending budget meetings and bringing their findings to other concerned residents.
“We started out just as a group that wanted to educate ourselves and then we started educating the public,” said Glen Fagan. “We love the community, this is a great place to live and the people are great and the council is great, but the cost of living here for some people is horrendous.”
Fagan said the initiative began after he read posts on a Facebook group, called Do you know where Black Diamond is, where residents expressed concerns over property taxes.
“I saw all the discussions and I thought I need to understand what taxation is like here,” he said, adding he moved to Black Diamond from Calgary seven years ago. “We all believe our community is paying too much in taxes.”
Fagan and a small group of people gathered together the Town’s audited statements since 2007 and compared property taxes to those of similar-sized communities within an hour’s drive of a large centre.
After crunching the numbers, Fagan said the group figured the average taxpayer in Black Diamond saw a 10 per cent increase on their net municipal taxes each year since 2007.
Fagan said their calculations also show Black Diamond property owners are paying slightly above average for towns of similar size in Alberta.
“It’s been a lot of work on seven people’s parts doing lots of research and analysis,” he said. “We’ve had probably a meeting a week vetting our analysis to make sure it’s clear - on top of that dealing with calls and emails and Facebook. It has become a fairly intensive piece of work.”
During council’s committee of the whole meeting earlier this month, the Concerned Taxpayers Group requested a moratorium on their taxes for 2015.
Council and Town administration are currently working on the municipal budget, which will be set later this spring. The Town’s 2014 operating budget saw a tax decrease of 1.5 per cent for residential and 2.6 per cent for non-residential from 2013, yet property assessments resulted in an average increase of seven per cent.
“Our group has spent a lot of time attending all the budget meetings to analyze the budget proposed to council and had a one-on-one session with the mayor,” Fagan said. “It’s been open dialogue. We don’t want loggerheads, we wants a cooperative effort.”
Fagan said members of the group have been sending ongoing questions to council and administration, and the replies they receive are sent to the group’s email roster of about 100 individuals.
“It’s going to be some additional work and there’s going to be hard questions that might be asked, but it’s a good opportunity to understand where the taxes are going to come from,” he said. “We will certainly have people in attendance at every council meeting.”
To help answer some of the questions the public has, Black Diamond Town council decided at its regular April 15 meeting to host an open house.
Although the event date has not yet been set, council agreed to host it one evening between May 7 to 27.
Mayor Sharlene Brown said the open house won’t only be an opportunity to explain the budget process to the public, but address such recent queries council received as plans to repair Bob Lochhead Memorial Park, which was severely damaged in the 2013 flood, and the Town’s decision to relocate Wilrich Park.
“Now that there is a little bit of momentum that’s been gained it might be a great time for council to hold an open house to discuss not only the budget, but a lot of issues that are happening in the community,” she said.
Brown and coun. Judy Thomson attended one of the Concerned Taxpayers Group previous meetings and are well aware of the initiative.
“It’s a group of informal resident that are concerned, and rightly so,” Brown said. “They’ve put a lot of effort and time into what they presented to the community and they’ve done some analysis in the province. It’s great when people are involved in active citizenship.”
