Saskatchewan ranchers are banding together to fight a property tax reassessment they think will cripple them financially and injure the land environmentally.
Carl Block said hundreds of thousands of acres of rangeland have been assessed far too high and are being appealed.
Other producers are only now realizing that reassessment will double their property taxes and will react with outrage once tax bills come out, he said.
Block said the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency’s formula for assessing rangelands and lease lands is badly flawed, but they have refused to change it.
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“They’ve sold everybody a bill of goods and are on a runaway.
“The money just isn’t out there. The cows just don’t produce it.”
At the Saskatchewan Stock Growers convention, Pat Hayes told environment minister Lorne Scott that many ranchers will have to overgraze their land in order to pay the jump in property tax.
That would be bad for the environment because the land would be degraded, Hayes said.
Scott said he wants to make sure property tax reassessment doesn’t threaten the viability of rangelands.
“The last thing anyone wants to see is government policy that promotes overgrazing or turning range land for crops,” he said.
He has organized a meeting so the Stock Growers can tell municipal government minister Carol Teichrob about the problems with SAMA’s reassessment.
