Prince George’s Standing Committee on Audit and Finance recommended how the city should distribute this year’s tax increase across various property taxes during its meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 26, the first of 2025.
Kris Dalio, director of finance and IT services, explained that during budget discussions in January, council agreed on a 2025 budget that requires a 6.21 per cent increase in tax levies, amounting to an additional $10,847,385 compared to the 2024 budget.
What remained to be decided was how those additional taxes would be collected from the different property classes in Prince George: residential, utility, major industry, light industry, business, and farm.
Dalio compared Prince George to other BC communities, including Chilliwack, Kamloops, the Township of Langley, Maple Ridge, Nanaimo, Saanich and Victoria. He noted that Prince George has by far the highest tax rate per $100,000 of assessed value but the lowest average assessed value for its properties in 2024.
Prince George also had the lowest population, according to the 2021 census, and the second-lowest total residential taxes at $4,127, behind only Chilliwack at $3,818.
“It’s just math, unfortunately,” Dalio said. “If you have a city with generally lower assessed values — and we do have pretty low assessed values compared to, say, Kelowna, Vancouver, or Toronto, where you’ll find single-bedroom apartments costing millions of dollars — you can have an actual full-fledged single-family home here for about half a million. When we calculate tax rates, we’re just making the math work.”
Dalio referred to the value of a representative home in each municipality, as set by the Province of BC. He said Prince George’s representative home value is lower than almost all of its peers.
The representative home in Prince George was valued at $453,777. In 2024, the owner of a home valued at that amount would have paid $5,367 in property taxes and charges: $868 for School District 57, $2,718 in general municipal taxes, $190 to the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George, $335 to the Fraser-Fort George Regional Hospital District, $16 to BC Assessment, and $1,401 in residential user fees.
Dalio presented a chart to the committee showing the percentage of Prince George’s total property assessment and total tax levy that each class represents.
In 2024, for example, residential properties made up 80.4 per cent of the city’s total assessment value and 54.2 per cent of its annual tax levies.
That same year, utility properties accounted for just 0.3 per cent of the total assessment and 1.2 per cent of the total levy. Major industry properties were 2 per cent of the total assessment and 14.1 per cent of the levy. Light industry represented 1 per cent of the assessment and 3.7 per cent of the levy. Business properties made up 16.2 per cent of the assessment and 26.7 per cent of the levy.
Other property classes, such as managed forest, recreation, non-profit, and farm properties, were noted in the staff’s report but accounted for less than 0.1 per cent of the city’s total assessment, so no specific tables were created for them.
Regarding tax exemptions for non-profits, Dalio said the organization must own the land it occupies.
The committee was presented with three potential starting points for setting the 2025 tax rates, though Dalio said there was flexibility to modify them.
The first option would set the tax rate for the representative home at 6.21 per cent, with the remaining tax revenue obtained by equally increasing the tax rate for the other property classes. According to the staff report, this option would increase the tax rate for a home valued at the representative amount from $2,718 to $2,887, including an assessment increase for 2025. It would also keep the utility tax rate unchanged and reduce the tax rates for business, major industrial, light industrial, and farm properties by 0.86 per cent each.
The second option would set the business tax increase at a ratio of 2.5-to-one compared to the residential rate, with the remainder of the tax revenues coming from major industrial, light industrial, and farm tax rates. The staff report indicated that this option would keep the utility tax rate the same, decrease the tax rates for major industrial, light industrial, and farm properties by 11.95 per cent, and increase the business tax rate by 6.48 per cent.
The third option would increase the tax rates for business properties at a ratio of 2.5-to-one compared to residential properties, the light industrial rate at a ratio of four-to-one, and the remaining tax revenue would be obtained through major industrial and farm tax rates. According to the staff report, this would keep the utility tax rate unchanged, decrease the tax rates for major industrial and farm properties by 9.21 per cent, decrease the light industrial tax rate by 21.82 per cent, and increase the business tax rate by 6.48 per cent.
The committee unanimously approved the first option, which will now be referred back to city council. The bylaw setting the 2025 tax rates must be adopted by May 15.
The committee also passed a motion to invite representatives from BC Assessment to a future meeting to answer questions about how they calculate assessment values and property classes.
