{"id":10875,"date":"2015-06-03T18:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T22:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=10875"},"modified":"2015-06-10T17:31:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-10T21:31:19","slug":"average-residential-taxes-to-increase-by-130","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/average-residential-taxes-to-increase-by-130\/","title":{"rendered":"Average residential taxes to increase by $130"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aurora homeowners with a property assessed at $500,000 can expect a $129.95 increase to their annual tax bill following Council\u2019s approval of the 2015 Municipal Budget last week.<\/p>\n

After a lengthy and extended series of deliberations, Council approved a 3.91 per cent increase on the municipal portion of your tax bill in an 8 \u2013 1 vote. Mixed and weighted with a 2.97 per cent increase from the Region of York \u2013 and unchanged education taxes \u2013 this increase will result in an overall combined tax increase of 2.69 per cent.<\/p>\n

A $500,000 property was used as the benchmark in this year\u2019s budget deliberations but owners of residential properties assessed at $300,000 can expect to see a combined increase of $77.97, while those assessed at $400,000 and $600,000 can expect $103.96 and $155.94 respectively.<\/p>\n

Aurora\u2019s 2015 Budget accounts for $56 million to operate Aurora\u2019s programs and services. $37 million of this will come from property taxes, with the remainder stemming from user fees, fines, and charges, according to the Town. A further $18 million Capital Budget was approved in March to cover infrastructure.<\/p>\n

The 3.91 per cent increase can be broken down as follows: 1.82 per cent to run Aurora as it operates today \u2013 as well as covering costs to improving services, and rising insurance and benefit rates \u2013 along with 1.3 per cent pressure for the six year phase-in of a new fire crew to serve Aurora and Newmarket, and the remaining .79 per cent to Aurora\u2019s \u201cfiscal strategy\u201d, which includes weaning the Town off the interest accrued from reserves set aside from the sale of Aurora Hydro. <\/p>\n

Voting against the budget was Councillor Wendy Gaertner, who said 3.91 per cent was simply too much.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know everyone has worked hard, but I can\u2019t approve a 3.91 per cent tax increase,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

Others, however, were keen to stress how this 3.91 per cent breaks down.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could have easily gone to the reserves and taken from it to offset the tax increase, which has been done, but we\u2019re going in the opposite direction,\u201d said Councillor John Abel. \u201c1.3 per cent is being put forward for the crew our Master Fire Plan has said there is going to be a need for, and I think I am pleased with the 1.82 per cent to [operate Aurora]. I know Councillor Gaertner can\u2019t see 3.91, but I think it is prudent to say where that came from. <\/p>\n

For Councillor Michael Thompson, the 2015 budget process was particularly \u201cchallenging\u201d over previous years, but there is a silver lining, he said, citing the groundwork that has been laid by Council in establishing a Finance Advisory Committee with the intent of making the budget process more efficient. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe arrived at a consensus that is better off for the residents but, more importantly, we all came to the realisation we need to improve upon the current process moving forward so it is more efficient,\u201d he said. \u201cI agree that throughout it all we tried to take a balanced approach. We tried to look at the affordability of the taxpayers to be able to pay and, at the same time, maintaining the quality of public service that we provide and the residents expect. I think this is a reasonable budget. It does touch upon all of those things with regards to how to maintain affordability and the maintaining of service.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we started this budget process I remarked the fact the average wage increase was only about two to 2.5 per cent, and that was part of my role in terms of the base budget of running Aurora. We\u2019re trying to keep it in line with some of the metrics out there. We\u2019re not there yet, but through our process we will get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Providing a breakdown of the tax bill was important not just on how the municipal portion is divvied up, but also how it is compared and weighted with increases coming from the Regional level, said Mayor Geoff Dawe. Aurora is part of a two-tier system, he said, with Aurora having the smaller piece of the tax pie. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think we need to look at this holistically,\u201d said Mayor Dawe. \u201cWe need to look at everything we put together. Yes, our individual rate is 3.91. A lot of people would be upset with that because it is way over the price of inflation, but when we roll in everything that the upper level government provides, which is policing, which is social services, which is hospital funding, transit, and everything else we use, we have to look at the blended rate in order to fairly compare what our cost of operation is to other places.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also recognized those same challenges with bringing this year\u2019s budget in for a landing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe worked very hard [on the Budget] and some of us were more frustrated than others with the budget process. I have some lessons learned in terms of how I could have helped our new members be more comfortable with the budget process \u2013 and I can certainly appreciate that because I was in your position four years ago, and I guess I forgot where I was four years ago, and I apologise for that, but I think going forward with our Finance Advisory Committee, we are developing some good processes to put in place to have a system that is going to be much more manageable and much easier to understand.\u201d <\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Homeowners with a property assessed at $500,000 can expect a $129.95 increase to their annual tax bill following Council\u2019s approval of the 2015 Municipal Budget last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-2Pp","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-18 15:14:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}