By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Bromont mayor Louis Villeneuve summarized the feelings of many Brome-Missisquoi homeowners when he told a December council meeting, “Une année de rôle n’est pas une année drôle” – a property assessment year isn’t a fun year.

Rarely has that been truer than this year, when property values in some municipalities with new roles this year – assessed based on July 2022 market rates and updated in 2023 – more than doubled.

One of those municipalities is West Bolton. Several West Bolton homeowners have contacted the BCN in recent weeks with concerns about their property value rising. One homeowner who preferred not to be named said their property value jumped by 113 per cent since the last assessment, when no previous increase had exceeded 9.1 per cent. A nearby homeowner, Marie-Christine Moulin, said the assessed value of her home had risen by 80 per cent, and an unused adjacent piece of land she owned by 125 per cent. Michelle Chartrand said her property value had risen by 224 per cent.

“The mayor [Denis Vaillancourt] said the assessment role showed an average increase of 84 to 87 per cent,” Moulin said. “How can that have happened in three years?”

In response, West Bolton reduced the residential tax rate from 53 cents per $100 of assessed value to 36 cents and announced it would allow citizens to pay their tax bills in four installments instead of the usual three. “Some [property owners] will end up paying the double [of their previous tax bill] anyway.” (Although Vaillancourt told the BCN in a brief email exchange before the release of the budget that the tax rate would “naturally” have to go down, he did not respond to further requests for comment.)

The MRC Brome-Missisquoi coordinates property value assessments for 16 Brome-Missisquoi municipalities, including West Bolton, and mandates an external firm to do the actual evaluations. Evaluations must be carried out 18 months before the entry into force of a new assessment role – meaning that for West Bolton and other municipalities getting a new role in January 2024, their evaluations are based on property values as they were in July 2022 – near the height of the pandemic-driven bidding war over rural second homes, as Patrick Lafleur, assessment department co-ordinator at the MRC de Brome-Missisquoi, explained. “West Bolton has a special situation – there are places near Brome Lake that have sold for a lot.”

Marie-Hélène Cadrin is a board member and spokesperson for the Association des évaluateurs municipaux du Québec and an evaluator at J.P. Cadrin, a Sherbrooke-based firm which recently carried out Bromont’s assessment role. She said pandemic-driven demand put “strong market pressure” on the region.

“Inspectors visit the properties and collect data … on the size, the materials, the state of the building, whether there were renovations or a basement added. We analyze recent transactions and sales and apply that to the properties. We ask the question, ‘How much would this house sell for?’”

Lafleur and Cadrin note that homeowners can contest their property value assessment with the MRC. However, several homeowners are skeptical of this process, which they pay for out of pocket – $88.80 for a property which is valued at less than $500,000 and $355.00 for a property valued between $500,000 and $2 million. However, some homeowners are skeptical of that process. “I wrote to the MRC with very specific questions quoting the Ministère des affaires municipales qualitative criterion like access to commodities, risk associated with the land, noise, frontage, topography, dust, wind orientation, etc. They told me to fill a form. I sent another question and they sent me a link to a video which does not address my question at all. The MRC is judge and jury in this situation in which it is making money,” Chartrand said. Moulin said she plans to contest her assessment once she receives her tax bill.

Cadrin and Lafleur rejected any notion that political and economic considerations could affect property evaluations. “A lot of people think we are aiming for the highest value we can get, but as an evaluator, I don’t get any advantage from a higher value,” Cadrin said.

Jimmy Desgagnés, an evaluator with the Fédération québécoise des municipalités, noted that Quebec’s property evaluation system “dates back more than 40 years” and is applied equally to major cities with thousands of transactions per year and towns like West Bolton with only a few hundred total properties, although he said “extreme sales” weren’t factored in.

Moulin, one of the West Bolton homeowners, wondered aloud whether the system was built to respond to months and years of extreme sales. “We’re coming out of an exceptional period, and one day someone will look at that and say ‘What happened here?’ The method they use does not take into account the pandemic, and that’s something they maybe could have done – the current situation makes no sense.