By Pepper Parr
November 23, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
Councillor Stolte asked that we include the following in our report:
Wondering if you could clarify your article regarding my question of the delegate this morning.
I did not suggest an additional TAX on vehicles.
I was suggesting a possible USER FEE “in lieu of taxes” as the delegate was suggesting that the City should be charging individual residents more by way of User Fees rather than increase taxes.
This example of a $300. Per vehicle user fee could REPLACE the Infrastructure Levy and thereby reduce property taxes.
How would you feel about this one to lower taxes?
Vera, a banker was delegating when Councillor Stolte asked her how she felt about a $300 tax on every vehicle registered to a Burlington address.
Ward 4 Councillor Shawna Stolte asked a delegation what she thought about the idea of putting in a $300 a year tax on every vehicle with a Burlington address.
The public would holler about being asked to pay that amount – that would be the same public that went for more than five years without a tax increase and as a result the city has an infrastructure deficit of around $5 million.
It would certainly not be a popular tax – but it is the kind of thing Burlington is going to have to do if they are to get a grip on their budgets.
Councilor Stolte in my opinion with her suggestion is simply public enemy Number 1. This needs to be broadcast by hand bills to every resident in her Ward just in advance of the next election. I will volunteer my services. Kudo’s to Jim for his dry sarcasm.
Ted. Obviously this was a suggestion to respect the delegate but to highlight the absurdity of imposing massive user fees on non homeowners and away from those in this city who hold the majority of RE wealth in this city. Rail on, Ted. Those with wealth here (read real estate) will have to pay up…or leave.
Looking for other inaccuracies by the Mayor? In one of her “are you aware” moments, she asked Dan Chapman if he was aware of the MPAC impact on his property assessment and had factored that into his tax increase calculations. Her point was that MPAC was another factor beyond City control. However, later in the meeting Chair Kearns correctly disclosed that MPAC had not conducted any mass property reassessments since 2016. In other words, the MPAC impacts on most property tax bills has been neutral for the past 7 years.
To paraphrase Arthur James Balfour, “there are three kinds of deflection, spin, damned spin and are you aware spin.”
In my neighborhood it is routine to see two, three, more, cars in driveways. How about levying a fee for more than one car per address? After all, this is just a user fee, for users of the road system, and would accomplish several other objectives:
A) repatriate the gift Doug Ford gave car owners with the “free” annual license fee, which of course cost everyone in mis-applied Provincial tax revenue.
B) apply fairly to people who can choose whether or not to own multiple cars and can afford the extra cost (in this case, about the cost of a tank or two of gas per year).
C) over time, encourage people to reconfigure their transportation decisions in favour of public transit, walking, cycling, etc. Reduce road congestion, maintenance, probability of accidents, air pollution, carbon dioxide emissions.
Incidentally, we already put up with many other “user fees” based on controllable choices, like time of day electricity rates, shopping at Denningers or No Frills, dog licenses, you name it.
Of course, designing a process with a minimum of loopholes, exceptions, and bureaucratic overhead would be complicated, and require cooperation of the Province…. but it could be done. So why not?
(Disclosure: My family owns two cars, we think we need two, and are prepared to pay for the privilege,)
Another poorly conceived, off-the-cuff and badly curated proposal to address a financial problem that requires the application of better prioritization and more creativity.
News flash: this is a suburban, commuter community. People live busy lives. They juggle a myriad of personal and professional priorities and issues, everything from jobs to kids to family responsibilities. They need vehicles to travel for shopping, getting to work, taking the kids to soccer practice, etc. And despite the pervasive fixation on bike lanes it snows six months of the year. A car is practically a necessity, so taxing already over-taxed taxpayers is taxing, to say the least!
If the City wants to raise revenues start by: 1) taxing landlords with vacant rental and housing units that are being withheld from market; 2) increasing fines for residents who flagrantly abuse municipal by-laws like feeding wildlife, etc.
Or the other option is just to stop wasting tax revenue on silly, WOKE and trendy initiatives with marginal value and limited utility like the “Love My Neighbourhood” program which doles out $500 each year to residents so rich white folks living in $3 million houses can host neighbourhood parties. And do we really need to subsidize so-called Advisory Committees at City Hall which are really Advocacy groups? And I’m not sure how many leaves City employees will be picking up but most of the folks in my neighbourhood bagged and recycled them weeks ago, so maybe it’s time to re-visit that failed initiative.
Hi Stephen, like every other municipality in Ontario, and Canada, those who hold the most real estate wealth pay the most. The suggestion that user fees be initiated by delegates is an attempt to shift this broad based responsibility from you to others. Obviously, Stolte was being respectful to the delegate, but her suggestion for per-car user fees was to show the absurdity of this arrangement. It is getting expensive to live in the best city in the world. Duh.
I hope that people will go and watch the excellent delegation by Lydia Thomas from Tuesday, the one from Vera (referenced in this article) today and the one from Dan, also today. I apologize for not having Vera’s and Dan’s surnames. These delegates told it like it is. It is their words that we should be reading and speaking about here.
They spoke about the need to stop taking the vast majority of our revenue from property taxes, but finding other revenue sources, such as user fees on certain things. Dan spoke of “fiscal mismanagement” and warned that lest council think that cramming these huge increases in all at once three years before election will be forgotten come election time, he will be back next year and the year after and the year after that and he will remind people. He did not accept that their big projects are acceptable – pointing out that things like crumbling infrastructure should have been known about long ago and planned for properly. Each of them gave a mini course in how to properly budget year by year.
All three of these delegates spoke about the big picture – despite council continually trying to trip them up with their “are you aware?” questions and trying to point out one item from the budget and ask if they would keep that in or not, etc. Often, the councillors, especially Rory, and Sharman offered to go offline and speak with them later, etc. Well that doesn’t do the rest of us very good, does it? The point is to answer to them in public, now. I believe it was obvious that all three delegates held their own and came away, in my opinion, far more knowledgeable and with far better suggestions than I heard from council.
Kudos to Chair Lisa for chairing so well and for letting the delegates speak their minds.
I am encouraged by these new delegates, and their knowledge and their willingness to dissect the budget so well and get up there and speak. I hope that they and others like them can be the needed new faces and voices to advocate for change, accountability, transparency, and helping find new people to run who understand and respect fiscal responsibility. We know some of us oldies are being tuned out, and I’m tired of my own voice and posts, so I’m sure council and staff and everyone else is too.
It seemed clear to me that all three of these delegates rattled the Mayor and council. More Dan, Vera, Lydia please. There was also another delegate who phoned in, but I was unable to watch her. I will watch it back when the video is up. Please take the time to watch the two videos.
Councilor Stolte’s idea of adding a $300.00 dollar per year tax on every person in Burlington with a car and Burlington address is ludicrous!
Are all residents who use the bike lanes in Burlington going to also pay a tax for using all of the multi million dollar Bike lanes that all property tax payers in Burlington have and are paying for?
In regards to user pay fees for services, I do agree to that. The user should pay for services they use, such as recreation centres, arena skating, hockey games, tennis clubs, pickle ball, soccer, football etc. etc. And not a city wide tax on all property owners who don’t use any of these services but are forced to pay for them anyway.
Also, I listened to some of the delegations this morning, on Nov. 23, and one of the delegators asked Council to not spend money on several of their wants listed in this 2024 Budget, one of which was the renovation to Burlington Civic Square.
Mayor Meed Ward told this delegate that the renovation of Civic Square was being covered by monies received from the Provincial and Federal government and with No cost to the City tax payers. This is Not true! There is a cost to the COB for this project and it is listed in the 2024 Budget for an amount of roughly 1,400,000 million dollars. This is a fact, and the Mayor was not being truthful!!
We need more honesty and more transparency from this Council. What else have we as residents missed in this Budget?? That we are being charged for?
This is a lazy budget by Council. Just throw more money in the budget and see if we need it. Really?
Our Council should be going through the Budget line by line and cut all of the “wants and nice to haves”.
Council Stolte asked if we would add the following to the story we published.
Wondering if you could clarify your article regarding my question of the delegate this morning.
I did not suggest an additional TAX on vehicles.
I was suggesting a possible USER FEE “in lieu of taxes” as the delegate was suggesting that the City should be charging individual residents more by way of User Fees rather than increase taxes.
This example of a $300. Per vehicle user fee could REPLACE the Infrastructure Levy and thereby reduce property taxes.
Did Mayor Meed Ward really say,” Mayor Meed Ward told this delegate that the renovation of Civic Square was being covered by monies received from the Provincial and Federal government and with No cost to the City tax payers”. If Mayor Meed Ward said this, someone should inform her that we are all “City Taxpayers”, meaning we all pay taxes to the Federal, Provincial and Municipal Governments, who then bribe us to vote for them in the next election with our own money. Do we need a fancified Civic Square, where Karin and company will be cutting the ribbon with scisosrs I paid for with my tax $? Not on my dime.
I too was very mad at the statement by the mayor that the civic square reno isn’t costing us anything. Absolutely it is including in staff time along with the still large portion we are forking out. It all comes from us!
Caren thank you for your understanding that truth, transparency and accountability are missing from the Burlington committee and council meetings and indeed the provincially legislated public meetings. We have been addressing this since MMW and PS were elected. Prior to 2010 while our audits caught mistakes, we had no problem in getting matters corrected. That changed in 2010 and our audit files are bulging with unaddressed issues that involve millions of dollars.
We are cataloguing all recorded instances of setting truth aside that we become aware of as deceit to obtain a vote of council is a criminal offence. Can you please email us the time on the video that MMW made this statement on fully covered by funding anneandave@gmail.com, Regards.
That’s awesome. I hope you nail them.
MMW spins it, she actually said no tax increase money as 2 funding partners and money put aside. It is still 1.3 m Ihat could have been available to decrease budget given the only reason it never got done in 2019 was Council were underwhelmed by design and wanted their stamp on it. News for Council pride goes before a fall.
Bentivegna opposed leaving it in 2019 but is not supporting his previous position that if left would put us on hook for much more money. That is a support Council poor decision that hits us where it hurts, rather than best interests decision Thumbs down on Bwntivegna on this one you blew it and join the ranks of what’s best for you, not the city.
I was only too happy to copy this article; Ms. Stolte is my Ward 4 councillor and I will be using this article to remind residents in my area why she is unworthy of reelection.
This council and mayor are clearly addicted to “tax and spend”. Perhaps it’s time for them to get off their collective butts and do the hard work that comes with proper budgeting–insisting on hard spending limits within each department and requiring a proper line-item analysis. Too long has this mayor and council been raising City property taxes in Burlington far in excess of the rate of inflation–that’s easy and irresponsible in an affordability crisis. Controlling how much the bureaucracy spends takes real leadership and courage when it has become all too apparent that the staff, not the political leadership, are calling the shots at City Hall.
This council is completely out of it’s mind! Why not reduce the bloat before you start adding “user fees”. I can’t begin to comment further as it wouldn’t pass any decency filters you’ve got on the comment section.
Sure, why not add one more tax to an overtaxed nation? Here is an idea, STOP spending our money. Or, if you think taxing cars is a good idea, why not tax every, boat, dog, cat, bicycle, leaf blower. Better still, lets talk about pay-for-use, instead of income redistribution.
https://www.taxpayer.com/newsroom/fiscal-update-shows-spending-up,-deficit-up,-taxes-up
Hi Joe. While it is fun to pretend all government is out to get you, and the taxpayer, the reality is a) stuff today and next year will cost more. b) Burlington homeowners, who hold the majority of wealth in the city, will pay for increases (unless you feel poorer people with no wealth equity in the city should pay the difference, if there are really any of these left). O% tax increases are toxic to any city. User taxes, unless broadbased and significant, will be a spit in the ocean. Try a real solution.
With all due respect, Councillor Stolte is in the right church but sitting in the wrong pew. User fees, as an example of non-tax revenue, are one of the most equitable means for the City to avoid property tax increases. It is a point that Lydia Thomas made in her delegation on Tuesday and underlies her very astute observation that the City needs to fundamentally restructure its revenue program.
However, a Road User fee hits low income users far more than it does those in the higher income brackets. It is neither equitable nor responsible. User fees should be applied to things that are discretionary not necessary. For many people, a car is the means of transport to work – part of their required expenditures – and not a matter of choice. You choose to play tennis or golf or have an Aquafit program and fees attached to these activities can and should be increased.
I personally do not drive. That is a matter of choice but it is also a royal PIA to get around Burlington without a car. Burlington is not Toronto or Amsterdam and the bike lobby, to which Councillor Stolte is very responsive, should recognize that.
Perhaps the council could do its’ job and put together a reasonable budget rather than inflict us with this ridiculous tax. When is the next election ?
Msarshall there are moves afoot that are well supported to determine if this budget has dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s reqired by a municipal budget. That will deal with the issue much quicker and neater than an election in three years time.. If you did not hear the Eric Stern delegatkion on Nov. 21st you should give it your full attention. There is always molre than one way to skin a cat and far too much damage can be done in the next three years to allow these decision maker to remain unaccountable.!.
Hi Marshall.
“Ridiculous tax rate”. Do you know what the 2024 tax rate increases are for Oakville, Hamilton, GTA? Research that first. No one wants to pay more. But living in the fastest growing and one of the most desirable cities in Ontario, don’t pretend you didn’t know it. I hear New Brunswick has a lower tax rate.
How about a $1000.00 charge per address that does not have a car for which they do not have to buy gas and pay taxes that contribute to the transportation system that they use and benefit from it being there?
Well said Jim, lets hear you say that at a delegation at the November 28th Council/Special Council Meeting that isn’t and collect some friends and neighbors signatures on your delegation notes to support yur position that are filed with the minutes.