WINNIPEG (Staff) – Trying to work with tax-roll information from about 700 different municipal government agencies in four provinces has been an exercise in logistics, to say the least, for administrators of the Crow Benefit payout.
Rick Gaube, operations manager for the Western Grain Transition Program, said most municipalities have electronic databases, but they use many different programs and systems of storing information. And some didn’t have databases, which meant information had to be compiled manually.
Out of this mass of information, Gaube said 270,000 application forms were sent out. While the majority were on target, Gaube said there were a lot of bugs:
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- Many people who own land in more than one municipality received more than one application.
- If a landowner’s name or address was recorded in a slightly different way in the tax rolls, he or she likely received more than one application.
- Sometimes, municipalities showed a tenant as being a landowner.
And about 10,000 landowners called the administration to say that they didn’t receive an application form. In Manitoba, about 430 calls were from incorporated farms.
Different application form
Gaube said because of the way some of the incorporated farms were recorded, 18 percent of the 2,400 farms in the province did not receive an application and their land likely appears on another incorporated farm’s application form.
Gaube said any farmer still needing an application or any information can call the Western Grain Transition Program at 1-800-667-9962. The deadline for applications was recently extended to Nov. 1.
