The due date is normally July 2nd, but City Council has voted unanimously in favour of extending that this year, after the provincial government announced that commercial property taxes would be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Director of Finance Kari Bolton…
“It makes sense to do that for all our classes, just to provide for consistency and ease of collection, so staff is recommending that we set the due date for all classes at September 30th with the 10 percent penalty applicable on October 1st, and because we’ll be able to borrow from our reserves we’ll be able to make it to September.”
The province announced last week that local governments could borrow money interest free from its capital reserves to use for operating expenses, something they are not normally permitted to do.
Bolton says tax notices will also be going out a little later this year…
“We’ve delayed printing our notices to wait to see what the due date is on them, so we are going to be a couple of weeks later than normal, so it will probably be the last week of May that the notices will go out.”
Council has the ability under the charter to adopt an alternative municipal taxation scheme.