They might want to start installing a few more telephones at Municipal Hall soon - three or four dozen should do.
After this year's budget is finalized and the tax bills start hitting the mail, the calls are going to start flying in fast and furious. After the trumpeting of a zero per cent budget increase, all the people who are facing a hike in their taxes are going to want to know why.
We had fun trying to explain it to people in our office. It's a zero per cent increase, and the tax rate for homeowners is actually going down by 26 per cent. Yet, in the end, if your home increased in value by more than 29 per cent, you'll actually pay more taxes than you did last year. Clear, isn't it?
But in the end, the up-down dipsydoodle of property taxes isn't the thing that people should be concerned about. It's Squamish's continued reliance on a teetering industrial tax base that worries us.
Earlier, at the start of the budget process, we wrote that council should consider taking some of the windfall from skyrocketing property values and continue to reduce our fiscal reliance on industry.
The particularly jarring example in this year's budget is the Woodfibre pulp mill. Squamish's biggest taxpayer contributes a whopping $2 million - more than 10 per cent of the entire property taxes collected in Squamish.
That wouldn't be quite as much cause for concern if its future were clearer. Its parent company, Doman Industries, has been going through court-ordered bankruptcy protection for more than a year, and is in the process of being taken over by a group of bondholders who just closed Doman's other pulp mill in Port Alice.
One decision by a suit in Vancouver - or further away - and the District of Squamish could be left with a $2-million hole in its budget.
If that day comes, we won't be writing about the murky world of property tax increases and decreases. We'll be writing about the massive property tax hike facing nearly every homeowner in Squamish.
Better to hedge our bets sooner and create a rainy-day fund to help cushion the blow when the smokestacks finally shut down - like the Alberta government's Heritage Trust Fund.
And if that day never comes? There's always ways to spend the windfall later.
