By John Francis
On the Municipality of Northern Bruce Peninsula’s homepage, there is a link to a “2025 Budget Survey”.
When you click through to the survey, you will find a remarkably well-thought-out document. It asks only a few questions and none of them are dumb.
For example: Should the Fire Department get less resources, about the same, or more resources? There is an identical question about the eight most important elements of municipal services.
The next section wonders how you feel about the municipal budget. It goes all the way from “Increase both taxes and user fees to maintain service levels” to “Decrease of service levels to reduce current taxes and user fees”.
You can do the whole survey in under five minutes if you just answer the questions. It will take longer if you actually write something in the comment boxes.
But I promise you that you will not get annoyed and click off halfway through. Let’s hope they get a useful number of responses.
A tip of the hat to whoever designed the questionnaire.
MPAC Answers Questions
Anthony Fleming of MPAC — the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation — attended MNBP Council’s Oct 28 Meeting to answer questions.
Fleming explained that all assessments are currently based on 2015 values.
Mayor McIver asked him a question that I have heard countless people ask. (But Milt was asking the right person and got a believable answer.) Suppose a property, which was evaluated in 2015 at $450,000, sells now for $750,000. Does that affect other properties nearby? Fleming explained that 2024 selling prices would have no effect whatsoever on the Jan 1, 2016 value of the property, and that is what everything is based on. So there would be no effect on neighbouring properties and no effect on the property itself unless there had been “betterments” to that property.
Why, Councillors wondered, had quarry and pit owners seen such a dramatic increase in their taxes in recent years? (see Council Minutes) Fleming explained that this reflected a change made by the Province of Ontario, not MPAC. Pit and quarry properties were switched from the residential class to the Industrial class, which triggered much higher tax rates. MPAC — and the municipalities — were just the messengers on this file, but they both took quite a bit of flack for the province’s decision.
Fleming also took the opportunity to remind staff and council of the public services that MPAC offers.
Any property owner can request a review of the assessed value of their property. There is no charge for this. The review will be conducted “within 180 days”, according to the program’s literature but Fleming assured Council that the vast majority of such reviews are “much quicker” than 180 days.
Fleming also reminded Council that property owners can use the AboutMyProperty utility to find out how their property valuation was done and how the property value compares to those of neighbouring properties. This is also free. AboutMyProperty.ca
You’ll need your MPAC assessment notice to log in, though. Those who — like me — looked at the assessment, had no complaints about it and threw it out? We’re out of luck — there’s a number on that notice and you can’t log in without it.
Fewer Community Newspapers Every Year
Three of us from Bruce Peninsula Press went to the Ontario Community Newspaper Association’s Independent Publisher’s Retreat this weekend.
There are barely a hundred independents left in our province of sixteen million people. The OCNA itself suffered a nasty shock last year when Metroland shut down seventy small community newspapers. That’s seventy fewer members to be paying dues to the OCNA.
That’s also seventy fewer communities with reporters attending their council meetings and news events, seventy fewer communities with reporters, editors, photographers, graphic designers and so forth in their midst.
It reminds us how lucky we at the Press are to live where we do.
We are grateful to the dozens of correspondents who take photos and write copy about the clubs and organizations they love, who keep us abreast of everything that’s going on so we can keep the calendar of events up to date. We are grateful to the advertisers who pay the bills and make it possible for us to keep it all rolling.
We love what we do. Thanks for making it possible.
