By James Matthews
Haliburton County residents may pay the equivalent of an average bottle of wine to cover the upper tier portion of their tax bills next year.
The total levy required to maintain county services in 2025 is a little more than $25 million, which represents an extra $13 per $100,000 of assessment on a residential property.
That’s a 5.15 per cent tax rate increase over last year.
The economic and fiscal impacts from various sources continue to have significant operating budget pressures next year. These impacts have bearing on discussions to ink the county’s 2025 capital and operating budget.
“As service delivery costs continue to increase each year there is a continued concern that overall county service levels may be impacted to accommodate these increases,” according to a draft of the budget presented during council’s Nov. 13 meeting.
Cost increases were highlighted to provide council an understanding of the impact those costs have on the overall annual tax rate.
“Today is intended as an introduction to the budget,” said Warden Liz Danielsen, the mayor of Algonquin Highlands. “Some members of council have been working on it for a bit.”
It’s hoped a final draft of the 2025 budget will be ready by mid-December.
“Unless we run into any roadblocks between now and then,” Danielsen said.
“We have a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility within the county,” said Gary Dyke, the county’s CAO.
Treasury staff have been focused on soundly prioritizing how money is spent, he said.
“We made a number of changes in the budget where we shifted money away from certain things to reference the importance of them,” Dyke said.
The spine of the prioritizing was ensuring required services will be provided efficiently for county residents, he said.
“The way the budget is put together, it reflects a careful balance of the acknowledgement of the impacts of any increase on the ratepayers across the county,” Dyke said. “But also at the same time recognizing the pressures being put on the local municipality as well. The spheres of influence that directly relate to them. We’ve taken that into account.”
Some of that financial pressure on the lower tier municipalities is in the service cost increase for local policing by the OPP. It averages to an about 22 per cent rate increase over last year’s policing bill.
“We’ve taken all that into consideration,” he said. “However, at the same time, we experience our own significant financial pressures at the county level as well.”
That pressure for the upper tier is reflected in the costs for social services and housing services through the county’s partnership with the City of Kawartha Lakes.
Dyke said the cost of those services for Haliburton County has increased by a whopping 33 per cent. According to draft budget documents provided by Kawartha Lakes, that increase equates to about an extra $700,000.
“Which has a significant impact on our budget going forward,” he said. “These increases come at a time … where, once again, we received a 15 per cent decrease in the infrastructure funding we receive from the province.”
That provincial funding has decreased by that amount each of the last three years.
For perspective: The province cut a cheque for $630,000 for infrastructure services in the county in 2022. That amount has dwindled since then to $387,000 that will be received next year.
“We are faced with the immovable challenge of raising funds to do the work that we’re charged to do with an antiquated revenue system which is the property tax base,” Dyke said. “It was a system that was introduced in Ontario in 1849 and, aside from some new classifications put in place, it’s roughly the same process, the same system that was put in place in 1849.”
He said there is no reflection of how much money residents make a year. Rather, taxation is based on how much a property is worth. In Haliburton County, about 72 per cent of the tax base is residential properties.
“Just in perspective, the provincial average is 21 per cent,” he said. “We’re very mindful of that.”
