For people who don’t like numbers, the latest meeting of the Rural Municipality of Corman Park was positively revolting.
There were enough percentages and dollar figures tossed around to work an accountant’s convention into a frenzy, but it had the opposite effect on the voters and ratepayers gathered in a Saskatoon hotel last week.
The mood in the room could best be described as calm and congenial.
Three people in one row nodded off during the initial barrage of statistics provided by organizers of the Saskatchewan tax revolt movement, who were invited to speak at the meeting even though they live outside the RM.
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After two hours of debate dominated by the outsiders, ratepayers voted 67 to seven in favor of a resolution to withhold property taxes until the education portion of that tax “is removed and applied fairly to all Saskatchewan residents.”
The taxpayers who attended the meeting represent about two percent of the RM’s 3,500 ratepayers. Corman Park is the 38th RM to hold a tax revolt vote and the 37th to pass it.
Farm incomes are stagnant
Morris Prescesky, a farmer from Mayfair, Sask., initiated the discussion. Sporting a green sweatshirt calling for an end to trade-distorting grain subsidies, he held up a tax receipt for a piece of land his father used to own in the Maymont, Sask., area.
The $198.95 receipt was dated June 20, 1949. Prescesky said he paid $2,500 in taxes for that same plot of land last year.
He then held up a grain ticket from that area dated April 12, 1948. He said the price received for feed oats was 84 cents per bushel, about the same price a farmer would get now.
Other revolt leaders spoke of the need for the provincial government and the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities to take immediate action to correct what tax revolt leaders see as a faulty system for raising money to pay for kindergarten to Grade 12 education.
They said a proposal put forth by a coalition of six farm groups doesn’t go far enough.
That proposal calls for education tax on agricultural land to be capped at 1999 levels and reduced by 15 percent a year until 2010.
“I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, I need help and I need help now,” said one revolt organizer, who farms south of Prince Albert, Sask.
“Why do we have to wait 10 years?”
Some ratepayers from the RM of Corman Park also addressed the meeting.
Reduce spending
Shayne Grieve got the biggest round of applause for his impassioned condemnation of what he considers excessive spending by the local school division.
Citing an example, he said administrators are holding meetings in Saskatchewan lake resorts instead of at school facilities.
“Why are they going outside to have these meetings? They say they don’t want to be disturbed. Who’s going to disturb them on Saturday in a school in Hepburn or Aberdeen or Blaine Lake?”
He said people may not have to resort to tax revolts if school divisions cut back on spending.
A representative of the school division responded to Grieve’s accusations by noting the division’s administrative and instructional costs are among the lowest in the province when calculated on a per teacher or per administrator basis.
Grieve said in the five years since he purchased his acreage in the RM, his municipal taxes have risen eight percent from $666.33 to $718.20, while the school tax portion of his property tax bill has nearly doubled from $865.06 to $1,674.95.
Reeve Ed Hobday said Grieve isn’t the only one facing huge increases. Since 1996, school taxes have gone up an average of 82 percent in his municipality.
He said the education tax issue has been simmering for years and has boiled over now because of the farm income crisis and the 1997 provincial reassessment of property taxes.
“They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.”
Hobday said he will be writing to Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow and the appropriate ministers to warn them that the issue must be addressed in the next provincial budget.
“To do nothing is to put themselves in considerable peril.”
