The RM of Portage la Prairie continues to call for the province to put an end to a $5,000 cap on tax rebates for farmers. They raised the issue of the cap on education tax rebates at their latest Association of Municipalities meeting, and AMM will be addressing the issue at their conference in November. Reeve Kam Blight's pleased to see AMM taking action, calling the cap unacceptable.
"With the shift of taxation that's going on right now and the assessment of farmland seems to have a lot more municipal taxes being picked up by farmland and agriculture, which includes school taxes. We're asking the province to remove the $5,000 cap because that's just a drop in the bucket. We feel it's totally unacceptable and totally unfair to the farmers."
He notes council's heard the concerns of the farmers in the RM, and are also feeling the impact of the cap themselves.
"A lot of us in here are producers as well. We recognize and feel the sting of it first hand. It's something we know is a huge burden on our municipality, as we are an agricultural municipality. It's something we need to address and we're definitely going to be loud on this issue."
He says while they'd accept a percentage of the education tax, without a cap, returned to farmers, they're hoping to see much more done by the province.
"They did have a percentage in place and they're supposed to be removing it so that school taxes are totally removed from farmland. That's the direction we'd like to see it go. However, we have to be realistic because if they reduce it back to this amount, we have to try and get them back up but we're pushing for full removal of school taxes from farmland."