Home and business owners in Warman will need to have their property taxes paid in full by the end of August this year.

Warman City Council voted at a meeting on Tuesday, May 25 to set a deadline of August 31 for payment of current taxes due.

The move by Warman council restores the traditional August 31 deadline for payment of property taxes.

In May of last year, council extended the property tax payment deadline to the end of October, 2020. The additional two months were provided in order to allow residents and business owners hit hard financially by the COVID-19 pandemic a little more time to come up with their payments.

With the reopening of the provincial economy and the gradual return to normal conditions, council felt a further extension this year was not required.

The August deadline applies to those who pay their taxes in a lump sum. Increasing numbers of Warman homeowners and businesses are not impacted by the deadline because they utilize automatic monthly withdrawals through the city’s TIPPS program.

At the May 25 meeting, Warman council gave two readings to a property tax bylaw setting the mill rates for different classes of land. The bylaw was not adopted at that meeting because it did not receive the required unanimous consent for all three readings.

The bylaw setting the mill rate will be on the agenda for an upcoming council meeting in June.

The bylaw proposes to increase the city’s base tax by $50 per property (from $530 to $580 for residential, and from $830 to $880 for commercial). Base taxes are payable by all property classes, regardless of assessed value, and are intended to cover basic municipal services such as fire and police protection, snow removal, and street maintenance.

Councillor Trevor Peterson voted against the bylaw at the May 25 meeting, saying he was opposed to any increase in the base tax this year, and suggested it would be preferable to raise the commercial mill rate factor above that proposed in the bylaw.

  The proposed bylaw would also set the 2021 mill rate at 5.72, a slight drop from the 2020 mill rate of 5.74; and increase the commercial mill rate factor from 0.87 to 0.94.

In January, 2021, council approved the city’s 2021 budget, which included a 1.6% increase in property taxes.

While the budget adopted in January determined the total amount of income needed from property taxes, it didn’t actually set property tax increases.

That is the objective of the current bylaw debate.

The amount of taxes due for each property is dependent on assessed value of that property. (Assessment notices were issued earlier this spring to property owners.) That amount is calculated using a ‘mill rate’ set by council.

The ‘mill rate’ means a tax rate expressed as mills per dollar. For example, one mill is equal to 1/1,000 of a dollar, or $1 in tax for every $1,000 of assessment. Municipal governments also set ‘mill rate factors’ every year to adjust the amount of tax burden distributed among residential, commercial and agricultural property classifications.