Re: Taxes hit industry hardest, The Record, July 17.
As the old saying goes, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. It seems that when it comes to municipal tax rates, the City of New Westminster prescribes to the third axiom in this old saying by using statistics to bury the fact that it has the second-highest commercial tax costs of the 16 municipalities west of Georgia Strait and east of the Pitt River/Langley-Surrey border.
According to your article, city staff has reported to council that our rates are only slightly higher than the average, which I guess is true if 4.75 per cent can be considered only '"slightly" higher.
What, as a business owner/operator, I would like to know, is the total actual difference in city charges for services like, water, sewer, garbage and hydro - in addition to the property tax rate - in comparison to other municipalities? Of course, we need to remember that New Westminster is the only Metro Vancouver city that has its own electric utility, which buys power from B.C. Hydro at wholesale rates and charges it out at rates equivalent to the hydro rates others pay directly to B.C. Hydro. This exercise puts us in the enviable position of operating a utility that delivers net revenues, in excess of operating costs, directly to the city.
What we should also remember is there is a single service provider for water and sewer services throughout Metro Vancouver and all municipalities pay an equivalent rate to Metro Vancouver. The difference in rates from city to city is driven by the individual municipality, and, from personal experience, I've learned that these differences can be staggering, with rates varying as much as 2,000 to 3,000 per cent, with New Westminster being one of the highest, if not the highest.
Your article quotes Randy Grant as saying, "Typically, rents tend to be lower in New West than in Burnaby and East Vancouver," and statistically speaking, he may be right, but one needs to remember that these lower rates are often because the properties available in New West are much older on average.
I'd like to see the apples-to-apples comparisons of new commercial spaces in New West (shops at New Westminster Station comes to mind), which are still experiencing significantly higher vacancy rates than similar properties in the two neighbouring municipalities in spite of the "advantage" of its unique interaction with the SkyTrain (an advantage that won't be unique for long).
Another old saying comes to mind - a sucker is born every minute. It seems city staff believes they all live in New West!
Harm Wolding,
New Westminster
