When Dryden Mayor Craig Nuttall resigned to take a job advising his nemesis, the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, reporters had to ask if his was a case of, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?”
Nuttall said no. He wanted to make change from the inside.
Thunder Bay Mayor Keith Hobbs used the same reasoning when he was granted a seat on MPAC’s Board of Directors.
“Making change from the inside” is a common rationale for protesters selling out but considering how serious industrial tax assessments have become for resource towns, let’s remember we re-elected these men on their record.
Northern leaders rained scorn on MPAC for failing to represent our interests as mill values plummeted. Outside pressure left the North in the cold.
Just ask Terrace Bay’s former Mayor Mike King who resigned over refusing to repay $600,000 to the A.V. Birla Mill. In Fort Frances, it was $1.5 million. In Dryden, $5.4 million. After nearly three years, Thunder Bay still hasn’t released how much it will pay back its Resolute Mill
The retail sector has followed as companies like Shopper's Drug Mart and Tim Horton's appeal to pay a smaller share toward municipal operations.
The mayors are mad because the stakes are high.
Kenora Mayor Dave Canfield rallied the public by comparing the mills’ assessment drops to someone arguing they shouldn’t be taxed for their five-car garage because they only own one car.
Nuttall never disputed the decline in pulp markets but how could the Assessment Review Board be so cold as to demand a quarter of Dryden’s operating budget and call it the city’s “share in the costs resulting from that decline?”
Through it all, MPAC officials have pitifully cried it’s the province’s assessment process that’s responsible for our municipalities having to give the mills back their taxes. It isn’t MPAC’s fault the rules kick single-industry towns when they're down.
MPAC didn't invent retroactive corporate welfare on the backs of residential property owners. If MPAC's guilty of anything, it's getting out-lawyered but they made a strong enough case to get Nuttall and Hobbs on the inside.
Then this week's turned it inside out.
On Tuesday, Thunder Bay released a list of three local property assessments the province is appealing, exploiting loopholes in its own process to pay the city less.
City officials said the province routinely appeals its property assessments but in Toronto, Ontario’s appealing $65-million worth of assessments on 19 provincial buildings – including Queen’s Park itself.
The very people in the very building where they make the very decisions the Northern mayors are hoping to change from the inside intend to use their own appeal system to get themselves a tax break at Toronto’s expense.
It’s the spine-chilling moment in the urban legend when you realize the call’s coming from inside the house.
If the ones making the rules are going after the biggest player in the municipal game, what chance do we have, inside or out?
As for the province’s tax appeal, the winning point for the mills was, there isn’t as much of a market for its product in the 21st Century.
What’s Queen’s Park’s excuse?
