Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
The rate is derived from the amount of the assessment roll and HRM's desired total revenue. So it is totally a function of the other two things, of which HRM has control of the revenue part of the equation. In and of itself, however, the rate is meaningless year over year as those other two items are the variables that determine it. All that should matter to the property owner is the amount of the tax bill.
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It's true in aggregate but not true of each taxpayer. The distribution of taxes paid can vary from year to year. Assessment caps will make this even more complicated; the new buyers for example might have to take on a much larger tax burden. When the city is growing by 2% a year, assessments by 20-30%, and the context is a 3% increase in revenue, this can definitely be a significant part of the picture.
As others have said inflation also matters a lot. We are currently in a higher inflation economy and so the nominal dollar amount collected in taxes will go up faster given a fixed real taxation level.
My earlier comment was partly about how the coverage style in that CBC article (the original I read and got an impression from; I'm not sure about all the later changes) seemed to be more about pulling out shocking-sounding numbers (some of which seemed like errors) rather than laying out the facts and context and letting readers come to their own conclusions. I think if one wanted to communicate clearly one would publish the tax rates, something about assessments and how they're changing, and what the resulting budget is expected to be. Then put the stuff about how HRM spending is/isn't shocking into an explicitly labelled opinion piece. The CBC in particular should have high journalistic standards, in part because we are all paying for it. Maybe they edited the story not just because HRM communications people badgered them but because the original seemed to have errors in it (isn't it odd how the journalism errors always seem to pull stories in a more clickbait-y direction?).