Residential taxes in the District of North Saanich are going up this year.
The council recently approved a tax rates bylaw that sees a 1.73 per cent increase in residential rates in the municipality. Commercial rates have also increased but Rob Buchan said those could come down, depending on the amount of commercial development in the District this year.
For the average homeowner in North Saanich, the rate increase in 2017 will mean paying $21 more in taxes for the year.
Buchan, the District’s Chief Administrative Officer, says a full one per cent of that increase will be put specifically toward infrastructure reserves.
“That portion of the tax increase goes to pay for future replacement of our infrastructure,” he said, adding the District has been saving similar amounts of tax dollars in order to avoid what is known as an infrastructure gap — the distance between potential repair and replacement costs and what a municipality has available to pay for it.
The provincial government has, for years, required municipalities to have up-to-date infrastructure inventories and cost estimates on how much money it would take to actually replace those items - or at least the items that are reaching the end of their typical service life. Because North Saanich has been socking away money in its reserve accounts, Buchan said it’s one of the few municipalities in good shape.
“Our goal is to have those reserves fully-funded within a few years,” he said, adding when that occurs, the extra tax dollars being paid into that, won’t have to be as high to ensure adequate coverage.