As the saying goes only death and taxes are inevitable.
However, only one of those two things need to be a mystery and it’s not the taxes which is why the city says they work hard to make resident’s tax bills as transparent and easy to understand as possible.
“We are also happy to assist residents individually,” said Brenda Hewko, Controller with the City of Chestermere.
“Our Reception Staff, the Tax Clerk, Finance Manager and myself are happy to sit down in person or help over the phone,” she said.
For those who don’t work in accounting or other financial sectors, the way that a person’s taxes are calculated can be confusing.
The tax rate for the city is calculated by dividing the tax requirement of the city by the total assessed value of the community. In Chestermere the tax requirement is $19,501,666 and the assessed value of the community is $3,423,845,360 which means the 2018 tax rate is 0.005593784.
The city’s tax requirement is the amount of property tax revenue the city needs to collect that will support the city’s expenses that aren’t funded by other revenue’s such as grants or user fees.
“The City budgets so all revenues and expenses are equal to each other,” said Hewko.
As many people know, the City of Chestermere approved a 0.913 tax increase for the 2018 taxes.
This number refers to the increase in the city’s tax requirement and is not directly the increase in the 2018 tax rate.
“The amount a resident pays should be approximately 0.9% more than last year,” said Hewko.
“The reason for the word approximate is because of the amount of change of an individual home, when compared against how the total community changed, will also impact their portion of the General Municipal Expense (property tax),” she said.
Anyone with questions about their municipal taxes can contact city hall, a member of council or go online to www.chestermere.ca/taxes.
“There is a lot of information available on the website, including an explanation of how to read your Tax Notice,” said Hewko.
