By Sebastian Kanally, Times Chronicle
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Following the months-long drama of Osoyoos’ tax brouhaha, Oliver has finalized its 2024 property tax rate with an overall increase of 5.7 per cent with barely a whisper of discontent.

This 5.7 per cent increase is a total from all property taxation including all the assessment classes which include residential, business, light industry, utility and farm and recreation.

The final number of 5.7 per cent is an incremental increase from the previously discussed 5.5 per cent increase back in February.

John Kurvink, chief financial officer explained that this small 0.2 per cent increase is because the town has now received the revised tax role, as well as the RDOS requisition which allows them to finalize the numbers.

Now that the town has received these numbers, the change in the revised tax roll shows that “the non-market change decreased somewhat, and because the change decreased somewhat it makes the tax increase go up from 5.5 to 5.7 per cent,” explained Kurvink. 

For the average single family home the 0.2 per cent increase will result in just $3.00 per year. The overall increase which is set at 5.7 per cent will amount to a $48 per year increase. 

The biggest influence on this year’s multipliers and tax rate was the increase in non-market changes to the business and light industry sectors.   

Light industry increased 27.6 per cent compared to the residential increase of four per cent. In total, the increase across all classes amounts to $161,363.

Back on February 20, when council was discussing the financial plan, council had multiple options for adjusting how the total tax increase would be divided.

Kurvink explained on Feb. 20 that “this year, the light industry and business had a larger increase, and a bigger share of the pie, so if you leave everything as status quo, they would pay more than the previous year.”

This would result in a heavy burden on that sector and thus has to be spread out among the sectors.

Council decided at that time to set the single family residential increase at 4.5 per cent, instead of the alternatives of 5.6 and 3.4 per cent, based on balancing out this burden.

All three councillors David Mattes, Petra Veintimilla and Aimee Grice chose that number back on Feb. 20, which influenced in part how these numbers worked out to 5.7 per cent. 

Oliver passed the first three readings of their 2024 Tax Rate Bylaw at their April 22 council meeting.