MPAC assessments ballooning - Peter Desotti

In the Academy Award winning Pixar animated movie Up, Carol, the beleaguered homeowner, is pressured by a greedy developer to sell his house, which wavers as the lonely holdout in a sea of commercial construction.

At the same time, an obsequious representative of a retirement home is exhorting him to leave his dreams of adventure behind and settle down. Carl dispatches both problems by attaching giant balloons to the roof of his house, and that’s when the story (and Carl’s home) really takes off.

Neither the story nor Carl’s house would have ever got off the ground had the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) been on the scene.

At the first hint of a major commercial development, MPAC would have immediately doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the assessed value of Carl’s house, and his municipal property tax assessments would have been the only thing that ballooned.

It has been six weeks since I submitted my formal request for reconsideration to protest the 160 per cent increase in my residential property assessment.

Judging by the long wait, there must be numerous other irate and worried property owners who were compelled to do likewise.

Record low interest rates, increased hiring at local mines and smelters, and affordability are just some of the reasons which have pushed selling prices of seemingly modest homes and their assessments into the stratosphere.

This volatile upward trend could easily be reversed (and may already be doing so) due to federally legislated restrictions on mortgage lending, higher interest rates and varying economic conditions.

There is no reason why some clever bureaucrat at MPAC or in the city tax department could not develop an algorithm to smooth out the peaks and valleys that plague the market value approach to an assessment.

Currently, MPAC merely prorates the increase in assessment over four years – hardly a panacea. In Canada, the progressive income tax system, universal health care and old age security are just a few of the programs which ensure that concepts such as fairness and equity have practical manifestations.

It is infuriating to think that all the good these and other programs can do through a redistribution of income can be so easily undone through a muddle-headed approach to property tax assessment.

Peter Desotti
Greater Sudbury