The Province has made an adjustment in the way it calculates its portion of our property tax bills. As a result, The City of Calgary will be receiving $52 million of this “tax room.” To be clear, this is $52 million a year, every year, moving forward. It’s a serious amount of money. So, we now need to answer a $52 million question: what to do with this money. The City has asked, “How should we use 52 million dollars?”

Among the available options is the idea to revitalize our communities: A Revitalizing Our Communities Fund would provide comprehensive neighbourhood infrastructure upgrades, community by community, to support redevelopment and make older neighbourhoods more liveable.

Here are our five basic choices as tax payers:

  1. A dedicated transit fund (building up our 4-car train fleet on the LRT lines & building new transit ways)
  2. A dedicated community infrastructure fund (replacing crumbling infrastructure in our older communities)
  3. A payment towards smoothing the differential between the non-residential and residential property taxes (businesses pay a much higher portion of our tax load)
  4. A payment towards reducing the City’s debt
  5. A refund to individual taxpayers (on average $135 off your yearly property tax bill)

To learn more about the options and vote, visit www.calgary.ca/52million