City council will be asked to approve the 2014 property tax rate at their next meeting on Monday. A slight decrease in the education mill rate means the city could have collected an additional 1.2 million dollars in taxes than what was budgeted for last fall. Senior Financial Analyst Dawn Sauve says they presented four options to the city’s corporate services committee as to how to deal with that.
“Administration really did not have any technical reason why they would choose one over the other. It is purely a political type of discussion, and so we did not want to push that political discussion one way or the other.”
In the end, the committee decided to go with the option that would see both low density residential and other residential mill rates set at the same level, with the projected tax increase of 2.4 percent staying in place. That would result in only an additional 284 thousand dollars in overall tax dollars being collected.