What property owners should really expect from media coverage about assessments and taxes
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it! They’ve lowered the tax rates for 2025!
Leaving aside the fact that there are no longer news boys standing in the street shouting such things, my response to lowered tax rates is, “Who cares?”
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Wait, what?! Shouldn’t we be happy about lowered tax rates in our municipality? Well, yes, but only to a point. I’ll explain in a bit.
In the meantime, here are some recent headlines from various stories about finance and taxes in TJ News (I recognize that the reporters don’t necessarily write the headlines but my point is the same, as you’ll see):
And there are many more of a similar type, this being budget discussion season among our municipalities. And every single one with headlines like the above are incomplete at best and utterly meaningless at worst.
Why?
Because each reflects the respective reporter’s fundamental misunderstanding about how the property tax system actually functions in New Brunswick and what property owners really need to know when reading articles about municipal budgets and property taxes.
What does a property owner really want to know?
As a taxpayer, here’s what I really want to know about municipal finances when reading a media report. It isn’t about lowered tax rates, it’s about:
- How much is the government spending and on what?
- How much is spending increasing from last year to this and why?
- And, most importantly, how much more will I have to pay next year than I did this year?
(From the perspective of news coverage, that last one could be asked as, “How much more will the average house in my municipality have to pay this year vs. last year?”)
That’s it.
Two questions about what the municipality is doing and one question about how it affects me, the taxpayer, financially. The rest, including changes to the tax rate, are just details.
Some examples
Some articles definitely contain more information than others and are therefore decidedly more helpful. Let’s return to the three headlines above.
City of Miramichi
The first headline above as it pertains to the City of Miramichi includes a fair bit of good information, such as the percentage increase in the amount of total assessment, the percentage increase in the operating budget (but not the capital budget, unfortunately), and a statement that the City will maintain the 2024 rate into 2025. But that last part is, unfortunately, the basis of the story’s headline.
What the story doesn’t tell is the most important part, though, namely that the combination of budget needs and the tax rate remaining steady will increase the tax bill on most residential properties, likely by some hundreds of dollars. The math in the story simply makes that inevitable.
So think what your immediate impression of the article would have been, had the headline read something like, “Average property taxes in Miramichi to increase by several hundred dollars in 2025”. That certainly would have been more useful to the property-owing reader than the headline about the tax rate holding steady (not even a lowered tax rate in this case), would it not? The municipality wouldn’t have liked it, but that’s not the reader’s problem, is it?
Municipality of Tantramar
Other articles by different reporters are even more devoid of the information that property owners need (i.e., not just a lowered tax rate), with the Tantramar story being a fine example. (Note: it’s interesting that I can find nothing about Tantramar’s budget on its website. Guess it’s not important enough to make the “News” page…)
Firstly, the sub-headline reads, “Council gives green light to slight tax decrease”. That alone is enough to make you scream in that nowhere in the article is there any discussion about taxes decreasing, only about the tax rate decreasing slightly (a mere half-cent, as it turns out – try to restrain your joy, Tantramar ratepayers). Big difference.
As for the rest of the article, there is no mention of how much the budget has increased, no mention of how much the overall municipal assessment has increased, and certainly no mention of what that half-cent decrease in the tax rate relative to increased assessments means for the average property owner – only the part about the lowered tax rate.
In other words, there’s not much in this article would really be considered helpful to the people of Tantramar.
Town of Riverview…but not the worst of it
Then there’s the article about the Town of Riverview and its lowered tax rate for 2025, five cents on $100 of assessment, as the article goes on to say. To the reporter’s credit, the article also includes information that the Town’s operational budget will increase by 9.8% from 2024 to 2025 and that the median cost of a house in Riverview is $320,000. But there’s really not much more need-to-know information than that.
However, it’s in the questions the reporter could and should have asked that we find the real story here.
As the article notes, the Mayor trumpets that Riverview has reduced its tax rate by 21 cents per $100 of assessment over the past few years. “’Any tax rate reduction is meant to help offset some of the increase of provincial tax assessments,’ Mayor [Andrew] LeBlanc said Friday. ‘In Riverview, the median cost of a house is approximately $320,000 and a lower tax rate makes it more affordable.’”
That’s a nice way of drawing attention away from the fact that their operating budget is up 9.8% from last year, which means that residential property owners in Riverview will inevitably pay more tax in 2025 than in 2024 regardless of the five-cent lowered tax rate for 2025 (we’ll find out exactly how much when the assessments go online in early 2025). This alone is something the reader might like to know, I’m thinking.
Town of Riverview…the worst of it
But this isn’t the worst of where the reporter could have held the Mayor to account. The budget document that the reporter quotes says that, as a result of the lowered tax rate, “the town is giving up (emphasis added) approximately $1.3 million of potential revenue”.
This is like the schoolyard bully saying he could have taken more of your lunch money but decided to be a nice guy by letting you keep some of it.
News flash, Town of Riverview: you didn’t give up anything – it was never yours to begin with. If, based on Council deliberations, your budget didn’t require that money, then you have an absolute obligation to your ratepayers to reduce the tax rate.
It has nothing to do with you being magnanimous and working to keep owning a house “affordable” – it has to do only with how much money you need to operate. PERIOD.
Think what the headline might have been for this article had the reporter asked better questions. “Town of Riverview claims it is ‘giving up’ $1.3 million in revenue it has no right to” – or something similar (and maybe catchier). As with the other stories I mention herein, the one question the reporter absolutely positively needed to ask is, “How much more tax will the average homeowner have to pay in 2025?”
But he did not, and the Town of Riverview is smiling because of it, even if taxpayers will not when the tax notices arrive in March.
Municipalities need to be held to account
For too long, no one has held municipal councils to account about municipal finances and the property tax system. Because members of media are often not trained to ask the right questions, municipalities are easily able to blame tax increases on the assessments or tell the story the way they want it told (lower tax rates) instead of the way the property owner needs to hear it (increased taxes).
It’s time to demand more, both from the people who cover municipal politics and from the municipalities themselves. Accountability and the ability to ask the questions that get us there are the least that taxpayers should expect.
How it’s done elsewhere
For comparison’s sake, have a listen to this short CBC video on how news about property tax is covered in Alberta (in Edmonton, in this case).
Note that there is no talk about the assessment “base” or tax rates. Not a single word.
Why? Because they’re irrelevant to what the taxpayers need to know.
The video talks about the budget and to what extent budgetary decisions affect how much more tax people will have to pay in the coming year.
That’s it. This is how it should be in NB.
This piece was first published in the Northumberland Free Press, 2024-12-07
I enjoy reading your content Jerry. Hope post appraisal life is treating you well.
Thanks, Rob – that’s very kind. All the best to you in 2025!