Late penalties on unpaid property taxes are necessary to ensure the timely collection of county revenue, Rocky View County (RVC) executive director of corporate services Kent Robinson told councillors at the Oct. 11 meeting.
Councillors were about to consider 11 waiver applications brought forth by local ratepayers who missed the June 30 deadline, and had a 12 per cent penalty applied to their property taxes as a result, when Robinson made his comments.
Robinson said RVC levied about $133 million in property taxes in 2022, representing about 25,000 ratepayers. Robinson said of those 25,000 ratepayers, about 2,400 were late this year in paying their taxes, but the County had only received 27 late payment forgiveness applications from among those.
“I can assure it is not an unusual year,” explained Robinson. “This is pretty consistent for what we do … I want to give you some sense of why we apply a penalty. It is an incentive to pay your property taxes. There are lots of ways to pay your property taxes, including an annual or a monthly tax installment.”
Robinson said not only did the County have to fund all its own operations with the taxes collected, it also had to remit about $12.5 million in Education Taxes received to the province every three months without exception, whether all taxes for the year have come in or not.
By the June 30 tax deadline this year, said Robinson, the province had already expected two payments totalling $25 million to be paid – even though all taxes hadn’t yet come in.
“We are obligated to pay the province on quarterly installments,” he confirmed. “That is money that has to go out the door, and we are still collecting property taxes as of June 30. So we have all those months leading up to June 30 that we have to fund our operations as well as make payments (to schools).”
Robinson acknowledged council has expressed a desire to revisit Bylaw C-4727-96, the late payment penalty rates bylaw, later this year to consider lowering the penalty amount by some margin. But he wanted to remind councillors that it was important to ensure the late penalties were still strong enough to incentivize timely tax payment– even if council ultimately decides to lower that amount from the current 12 per cent.
“If we make that penalty too low, it perhaps lessens that incentive to pay,” he said.
Council always has the option to lower the amount of the penalty paid on a case by case basis through the appeals process without having to change any rate bylaws, Robinson reminded councillors.
