Ken Will won’t be counting on any money for road repairs from his
neighbouring rural municipality any time soon, even though traffic to
his neighbour’s grain terminals is damaging his roads.
Will is a councillor for the RM of Bjorkdale that brought a resolution
to the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities convention held
in Saskatoon Nov. 14-15. It asks the province to legislate tax sharing
between municipalities that have grain terminals and those who do not
but whose roads carry the traffic.
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“We don’t have a single elevator in the RM any more. They are all in
Tisdale. One is only a mile and quarter inside the boundary. They
collect all the taxes on three concretes and we get none. But our
farmers have to deliver on our roads. Truckers use our roads to get to
their terminals, and we get no tax revenue,” said Will.
Allan Brigden of the RM of Brock opposed the idea even after backing a
pair of earlier resolutions that dealt with grain transport and road
wear.
“We only have 400 delivery points today. Twenty years ago it was 3,000.
That’s a lot of load focused on a few miles of road and the province
needs to help us increase our compensation in the volume distance
rate,” he said during the earlier debate.
He said the province also need to create legislation allowing RMs to
establish truck routes, “just like in the cities.”
Viola Bell of the RM of Invermay said hog developments in her area “are
beating our roads to death. They don’t pay proper compensation for the
damage through taxes and in some cases they just pass through us from
others (RMs) … we need to solve this road damage problem fairly.”
Will agreed with Brigden and Bell on both counts, but said
municipalities with terminals and the tax revenue should be prepared to
share.
Brigden disagreed.
“We worked to attract these terminals. We gave them tax concessions.
Revenue sharing would just socialize the whole thing. Potash, oil,
pulp, should we all share that tax revenue too? I don’t think we want
to socialize our tax revenues,” he said to the 900 delegates.
Despite agreement from many RMs that grain is not paying its share for
roads, it was not enough to win the argument and the resolution for tax
sharing was defeated.
SARM president Neal Hardy said the debate has been raised before and
was defeated by only a few votes during the 1999 convention.
“Today it was much clearer. The message was the majority didn’t want to
share their tax revenues from grain or anything else,” Hardy said.
