In Episode 119 of our weekly podcast on municipal politics, hosts Troy Pavlek and Mack Male are joined by City of Edmonton tax experts Cate Watt and Anton Szabo to discuss two tax-related reports considered by city council's executive committee recently.
One of those was about the potential for collecting property tax in a different way, based on either location or land-use rather than market price. The idea is that if homes in certain geographic or less dense parts of the city cost more to service, they could be taxed accordingly.
Watt and Szabo told the committee that while more research is needed, using tax as an incentive or disincentive is not something they'd encourage as it could have unintended effects.
"If you build an ultra-dense property and you get an even better tax rate as a consequence then that property is going to become more desirable and the market value of that property is going to increase commensurately as well," said Watt.
The other report was about the potential for using community revitalization levies to help build LRT. That's not likely to happen as CRLs have fallen out of favour in Alberta.
Photo of Edmonton by Dave Cournoyer on Flickr