County council has passed the 2010 tax rates for the County of Lethbridge bringing with it some slight increases and decreases.
The largest looking increase is to residential, which has gone from an assessment of $738,767,000 in 2009, to $766,153,300 in 2010, in the county.
Reeve Lorne Hickey said the increase doesn’t necessarily mean individual tax rates will go up since additional tax revenue from the assessment increase due to residential growth reduced the seven per cent increase on the 2009 residential levy.
“With the growth that the county had last year it has softened the increase in tax overall,” Hickey said.
The required residential levy has gone from $10.2 million to almost $11 million on the municipal side.
“Your taxes should, unless your property assessment went up, be very close to the same as they were last year,” said Hickey.
“It depends on whether… your evaluation would be up or down from last year because all properties are based on assessment value base.”
Hickey said that because the tax rates are based on assessments from a July of 2009, the rates should not change much if your assessment hasn’t changed.
“Basically they’re pretty much in line with what they were last year, farmland is up a little bit but the rest are pretty much in line.”
Commercial and farmland saw slight increases with farmland seeing an increase in the required levy by seven per cent, bringing the levy from $1,848,879 to $1,978,301 but only raising the actual assessment by a small amount.
Dennis Shigematsu, county manager, said that overall the tax rates have not changed much for farmland.
“Even though the mill rate for farm lands has gone up just about a (million) the assessment… has stayed the same.”
The school tax levy has decreased from last year to this year from $4,127,594 to $4,082,656.
“School taxes have actually gone down,” said Shigematsu.