City Council set the property tax increase for Edmontonians for 2016 in a council meeting Thursday morning.
This year, Edmonton home property taxes will increase 4.1 percent, and non-residential property tax will increase 2.1 percent.
The city’s portion of the tax increase is 3.4 percent – the increase was initially supposed to be 2.8 percent. The mayor said the higher number reflects an expected loss in revenue from the province.
“We had an option to go lower, but we also had the offsetting bad news of the province reducing our infrastructure grant that we were counting on for neighbourhood renewal by about 20 million bucks,” Mayor Don Iveson said.
Councillor Michael Oshry didn’t support the increase – he was the only one on Council to vote against the updated numbers.
“If we would’ve known we wouldn’t have got that money from the province last budget we might have made some tougher decisions on some of the other items,” Oshry said. “Neighbourhood renewal likely would’ve stayed in, everyone’s a fan of that, but we would’ve made some tougher decisions on some other stuff.”
“I don’t think we had much of a choice, otherwise we would have actually had to tell a neighbourhood ‘You know what? You’re moving back in line,’ and council was quite clear that we didn’t want to do that,” Iveson said.
The City said – for a typical single-family home (valued at $408,000), the tax would total $3,265 – an increase of $127 over the previous year.
Of that, $963 will go towards education.
Tax notices will be mailed to property owners on May 24, and the deadline to pay is June 30.
With files from Susan Amerongen
