This article was previously published on EloraFergusToday and GuelphToday.
FERGUS – Griping about taxes is about as Canadian as griping about the never ending winter, but have you heard of complaining about a bill being too low?
It’s happening in Fergus, as someone who lives at a freehold townhouse condo community of 47 units in the Storybrook subdivision has been given a quarterly tax bill of just $0.05 for the shared elements.
“What a ridiculous waste of time, money and effort by all the levels of government is what I thought,” said community resident Blake Kent, also the condo board’s treasurer. “It costs them more to send off the tax bill in the mail than the $0.20 they’re collecting for a year.”
Kent explained all property owners pay their own individual tax bill for their property and previously he wasn’t aware there were tax payments for the common elements in the condo community. The property manager didn’t appear to be aware of this either.
“This morning we got copies of the four tax bills from our property manager who says ‘by the way we paid your tax bills for you,’” Kent said. “They even said that they manage other common element condos and that they’ve never paid a tax bill for them. Apparently it’s either new or someone just caught up with it.”
The only common elements Kent said there were are an interior park walkway, a parkette and the roadway.
Kent, who has a background in finance, said a typical policy would be to close the account on bills that are overpaid or underpaid by $2 or less.
“They’re not going to chase you for something that’s going to cost them more than what they can obviously collect, right?” Kent said.
He’s not looking to attack anyone over this and Kent figured somebody is simply doing their job but he can’t help but scratch his head and wonder why nobody involved has questioned the point of this.
“Somebody’s got to say ‘whoa pull the back up the truck here and let’s take a look at what we’re doing,’” Kent said. “If we’re doing it, how many other municipalities across the province are doing the same thing? How much does it cost the province in time and effort?”
