Property Taxes: A tax cap isn't a budget

A 5% property tax cap sounds good. But a cap isn't a financial plan. Lower taxes by doing what? What are you going to cut, reduce, defer, or fund differently to get there? Council can't simply pick a politically appealing number and make costs fit. You can’t start with the answer before you've done the math.

Sooke Together believes the next Council needs to question spending, find efficiencies, protect essential services, pursue grants, make development pay its fair share, and ensure taxpayers get value for money. But we also need to learn from Sooke's past mistakes. Sooke had a history of keeping tax increases low, sometimes at zero. Meanwhile, investment in roads, underground infrastructure, facilities, and other public assets didn't keep pace.

Imagine if, through those years, we’d made reasonable annual increases that kept pace with costs and consistently invested in our infrastructure. Small increases could have meant less catching up now. Instead, costs were pushed forward. That's part of why Sooke introduced a 2% asset management levy in 2024 to make ongoing, predictable investments in infrastructure. That's good – but it should have started years ago. And remember, a 1% tax increase in Sooke brings in only about $150,000. That doesn't go far. Skip road maintenance and it still needs fixing. Delay aging infrastructure and eventually it needs replacing – usually at a higher cost, sometimes in a crisis. Drawing down reserves, borrowing, increasing fees, and postponing projects might lower this year's increase but taxpayers still pay eventually. Those are games, not cost savings.

Can we find real savings? Absolutely. We should. But promising a guaranteed cap before understanding the whole budget is backwards. We already know what happens when keeping tax increases low becomes more important than planning for tomorrow. We're living with it. We owe taxpayers more than a good-sounding number. We owe them responsible decisions that hold up over time.