Can you hear that sound? It's the groaning of calculators at the district office as the financial wizards urgently tap in the numbers for the proposed 2007 budget options. At the moment the job satisfaction of trying to make these numbers add up in a pleasing way must rank somewhere below that of those poor guys who clean out the blocked ditches downtown.
The closure of the Woodfibre mill is not new news. Yet, the long-closed facility has left Squamish with a $1.9 million taxation revenue hole to fill in, and is part of a $3 million shortfall overall, and it looks like the only way to fix it will come from an extraordinarily high raising of residential and business taxes in town.
Our page one story goes into the details, but here are the headlines: There are two plans for assessing tax on both residential and business properties. In plan 1, home assessment tax bills would increase by 22 per cent, while the same for businesses would rise 68.6 per cent. Ouch. Plan 2 would raise residential tax bills by 11.7 per cent and businesses by... drum roll, please ... a whopping 104 per cent. Double ouch.
How does a district council let these percentages get so high without jumping on the problem long before it gets that far out of control?
While the closure of Woodfibre came as a terrible shock to many, it is the district's job to consider all the possibilities and to have a contingency plan for losing Squamish's largest single taxpayer, paying 17 per cent of the town's taxes. It would have been very prudent to have scaled back on expenditure in 2004 and 2005. Instead, spending increased by 13 per cent in 2006 and is projected to increase by 5.48 per cent for 2007.
Councillor Corinne Lonsdale has been yelling about this for two years, and now it seems that maybe she'll be listened to. She is not a crank and this is not a lame issue.
Councillor Greg Gardner calls it a crisis. It is, and one for which we're only just beginning to learn the implications.
