Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Journalist
Three representatives of the Municipality of Alleyn and Cawood traveled to Quebec City last week for the Federation of Quebec Municipalities conference, where they did not miss the opportunity to spread the word about their ongoing fight to change the way property evaluations are calculated.
The municipality’s director general Isabelle Cardinal and councillors Sidney Squitti and Guy Bergeron met with several top politicians, including Minister of Municipal Affairs Andrée Laforest, to discuss what can be done to change what they believe to be a flawed evaluation system. They even introduced themselves to Quebec Premier François Legault.
“We would like a review on the legislation for the calculation of municipal evaluations, to have it modernized and changed so there’s a better reflection of the activity on the real estate market right now,” Cardinal told THE EQUITY after returning from Quebec City.
“This evaluation law has been in effect since the 70s, so it is something we need to modernize, because right now we’ve seen the effect of COVID which had a real big impact on our real estate market.”
Last year, in year three of its triennial roll, the municipality was hit with a 370 per cent increase in its total municipal evaluation, due to the sale of a handful of empty lots sold for over three times their previously assessed value.
While the municipality lowered its mill rate so that its residents weren’t paying taxes on what the municipality believed was an over-inflated value, this increase still jacked both the shares the municipality had to pay to the MRC Pontiac, as well as some of the other provincial taxes paid by ratepayers.
Cardinal said that because Alleyn and Cawood did not want to increase the taxes it collected from residents, it had to cut its own services to meet its budgetary obligations to the MRC.
In Quebec City, the municipality’s representatives, who back home have been working with a larger task force of residents to raise awareness about the issue, found their call for changes to the evaluation system to be well received.
“We’ve seen a lot of openness from the ministry’s office, because now we’ll be working with an employee over there that will be looking at our situation,” Cardinal said.
She said their call for change also seemed to resonate with other municipal officials from across the province.
“We’ve been hearing for a couple of months now that this is an Alleyn and Cawood problem, this is a one time thing,” she said. “But after talking with a lot of different municipalities, they didn’t get a comparative factor quite as high as us, but they lived something similar to us.”
The Alleyn and Cawood task force is also hoping the MRC Pontiac will change the way it calculates municipal shares so that general, and potentially inaccurate evaluations from year two and three of the triennial roll won’t be used to determine what a municipality should pay to the MRC.
Cardinal and an accountant presented a new bylaw to the MRC’s mayors at their August plenary meeting.
At the public council of mayors meeting in September, the MRC tabled a motion to begin the process of writing a new bylaw.
The MRC’s director general Kim Lesage confirmed by email that now, before any new bylaw can be adopted, the MRC will have to present a new draft bylaw at a public meeting, and then at a following meeting it will be able to adopt said bylaw.
THE EQUITY requested to speak with the MRC to better understand all it is considering when revising how best to calculate municipal shares, but the MRC did not offer an interview before the publication deadline.
While Alleyn and Cawood’s total municipal evaluation came back down this fall, when it and 13 other MRC municipalities received their more in-depth year one property evaluations, Cardinal said it’s important the outdated system be changed so that other municipalities won’t be similarly pinched by inflated municipal assessments.
“Now that people want to leave urban areas and come to our rural area, we’re going to see this more and more,” she said. “The sad thing is that it’s our locals who are paying the price on this.”
Cardinal noted five municipalities have just received their year two evaluations.
“So they will be affected by the comparative factor if nothing is done before budget time,” she said.
“If they don’t want to be affected they just need to show support. If not, they can carry the bill, like we did.”
Cardinal said two years ago, the Municipality of Chichester requested the method of calculating municipal shares be revised, but nothing came of it.
“So we want to make sure that we will not be silenced. There is no urgency, but we don’t want the same thing to happen again. That’s for sure.”