Chatham-Kent council adopted their 2021 budget last night in their fourth night of deliberations.
The budget features a 2.4% increase in residential property tax. For a home assessed at $168,500, that works out to close to $71 more a year.
The increase includes 1.43% infrastructure increase, and an increase in spending of 5.21% or $3.1M over 2020 infrastructure spending levels.
To get taxes down, council approved having administration pulling $300,000 from strategic reserves.
A big issue for councillors during the deliberations was the use of reserves to try and offset the proposed tax increase.
Chief Financial Officer Gord Quinton said he doesn’t recommend using reserves for lowering taxes because if reserves are used he said it’s just creating a problem in the future, as most reserves are earmarked for a number of projects.
“It just comes back to bite you. That’s where we end up with closed roads, things breaking down and repairing them and it’s more costly than replacing them sometimes,” Quinton said.
Councillor Doug Sulman said reserves are rainy day accounts, put in for emergencies.
“If you don’t think that Covid-19 is a rainy day, well I guess we can respect each other and agree to disagree on that,” Sulman said.
If there is a silver lining to the 2021 Chatham-Kent budget, it’s the fact that the majority of businesses locally will pay less taxes this year.
In its 2020-21 budget, the province lowered the business education tax for all businesses. This will result in most businesses paying less tax this upcoming year, with the average Chatham-Kent businesses seeing a 6.5% reduction.