Lethbridge County Reeve Lorne Hickey. (Lethbridge News Now)

By David Opinko

Lethbridge County sets 2020 property tax rates & delays for tax penalties

May 8, 2020 | 12:18 PM

LETHBRIDGE COUNTY, AB – Council for Lethbridge County has approved this year’s Tax Mill Rate bylaw.

“I think we did our best to come up with a balance that worked,” says Reeve Lorne Hickey. “I mean, some of the increases are going to be fairly minimal, like $30-$40 or in some cases or for industrial use it might be up a bit.”

The 2020 mill rates by assessment class, with the percentage change from 2019 in brackets, is as follows:

• Class 1 – Residential: 7.4674 (+1.054%)
• Class 2 – Non-Residential: 13.1362 (+1.486%)
• Class 3 – Farmland: 27.5586 (-0.011%)
• Class 4 – Machinery and Equipment: 9.4482 (+1.241%)

There are a couple of significant changes that went into determining what this year’s taxes would be.

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The Alberta School Foundation Fund, also known as the education requisition, is not being collected by the provincial government this year. As well, the Green Acres Foundation levy, which funds seniors’ housing projects, rose 3.7 per cent.

One glaring thing of note in the tax rate bylaw is that the provincial police levy that will be collected by the county has doubled to $234,570.

When the Government of Alberta announced in December 2019 that they would be adding an additional $286-million into rural policing, it was mentioned by the province that communities would be required to pay higher amounts for it.

“Normally, most rural municipalities do not pay for RCMP services, so the government, in trying to balance out their budget, has put in a policing cost to each of the municipalities and it’s going to ramp up over the next four of five years,” says Hickey.

Lethbridge County also passed a bylaw concerning when penalties would be applied for late payments of property taxes.

It means that late fees will not be applied on unpaid amounts until October 1 instead of the usual date of July 1.

Similar to what a lot of other municipalities are doing right now, these measures will help to alleviate some of the financial stress from the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Hickey, the bylaw mainly centres around the education portion but also applies to property taxes in general.

“I guess if you can’t pay your property taxes, it will be allowed to be deferred.”

“We’re encouraging people to pay their taxes if they can afford to do so, otherwise we’re gonna have to dig into a line of credit or something else, just the same as everyone else. Either that, or we’re going to have to trim our operations back significantly.”

At this time, Hickey told LNN that, while some employees have been working from home recently, they have not announced any layoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic.