Re: “It’s time for perennial property tax misunderstanding,” Progress Editor’s Notebook, Jan. 6, 2023.
If, as the Realtor claims, assessments have no impact on municipal taxes, why are assessments used to level taxes?
What the assessments do is create an unfair and discriminatory cost on the taxpayers. For example, in a typical neighbourhood, homes will be assessed at different amounts. This means that homes assessed higher will pay more in taxes. They will pay more for fire or police protection than a lower assessed neighbour even though they both use the same amount of service.
I believe that all residential pays the same amount for garbage and recycling. I think it is a fixed yearly amount, the same for everybody in the neighbourhood. Assessments used for determining taxes ensure that everybody in the neighbourhood is not treated the same.
Assessments may be valuable for statistics, or real estate or mortgages but, again, it ensures unfairness in any given neighbourhood.
Gail Wade
Langley
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