A topic that made for much discussion last August will make its return to the Council Chamber this evening.
That as Chief Financial Officer Corrine Bobmen delivers her report on the status of Property values for properties associated to the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, or PILT which mostly is focused on Prince Rupert Port Authority land.
The report was requested by former Councillor Blair Mirau last August, that after he and former Mayor Lee Brain explored a range of themes related to the Port, PILT and the City of Prince Rupert.
The report had originally been requested for the September 20, 2022 council session.
Both Councillor Mirau and Mayor Brain ended their time in elected office with the election of the new Council on October 15th.
In her findings to be delivered tonight, Ms. Bomben outlines some background to the issue as well as the data compiled from 2019-2021.
The City sent a request for PILT to the Prince Rupert Port Authority (PRPA) based on the values provided by BC assessment and the PRPA made the payments which are characterized as interim PILT payments while the PRPA contracts with a private appraiser to give them a value of their lands with which the port makes a final determination of values.
Once that final determination is made, the City has 90 days to appeal to a panel charged with providing advice pertaining to the resolution of federal property value disputes called the dispute advisory panel (DAP).
Towards that Dispute Advisory Panel, the CFO's report notes that the City of Prince Rupert has applied to the Panel to challenge the final values for the years 2018-2021, however she also notes of some of the potential risk that choosing that challenge may bring.
Dependent on the outcome of the DAP proceedings any advice provided to the PRPA could impact the PILT already received for those years.
Just so I read this correctly, the city has disputed this for three years through proper channels provided by BC Assessment and the PILT DAP?
ReplyDeleteTo this date, they have not received any response from those parties.
This reader finds this far more concerning than PRPA executive variable compensation incentives.
That's not quite how I read it, which is that this is the first time that they have appealed the years in question ... could be wrong though.
DeleteHopefully some of the council members follow up the report with a few questions to clarify the issue some more for us. NCR
This reader agrees with the blog's subsequent comment, with one addition: the DAP process could not be initiated until final values were know, which would have not been until the last month or so.
DeletePlus: look how long the passport lineups are. Do we really think the feds will offer a quick turnaround? Me thinks not.
Cold Lake Alberta had a PILT dispute that took years to resolve.
Deletehttps://coldlake.com/en/news/court-finds-decision-to-withhold-pilt-for-golf-club-unfair-unreasonable.aspx
Here is a quote from the Mayor of Cold Lake,
“This dispute has dragged on for years and the only positive progress has been through legal action or appeals to the Dispute Advisory Panel,” Mayor Copeland said. “When all is said and done, there is only one taxpayer and Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill for the federal government’s fight against the City, whose residents, we feel, are being shorted. The situation is far from ideal, but our council has always taken a principled approach and refused to back down when we feel our residents are not being treated fairly, and we certainly feel that is the case here.”
If you read the fine print, this release by the City clearly demonstrates a conflict of interest (albeit not an illegal one) for the entire PRPA executive.
ReplyDeletePage 5: 25% of the CEO's bonus is calculated from net income. So if the PRPA is successful in dropping their PILT payment by $2 million, that means he personally makes tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands more.
Page 7: VPs still get a 15% bonus for performance that is "below expectations".
Page 7: the still CEO gets a 25% bonus for performance that is "below expectations".
Page 8: All VPs stand to benefit tens of thousands from reducing PILT by $2 million per year.
Regardless of one's opinion about the port or the City, as they say "follow the money"!
One question for the media worth asking is how on earth the rules can be used to the point that the Port's bonuses paid out will be 3x more than their reduced PILT payment?
ReplyDeleteThis is not right. Nor fair. Nor reasonable.
Another question that might be worth asking is if the Port's financial targets had already ready been exceeded (with the higher PILT amounts included) in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 under the variable compensation plan, then wouldn't it also mean then that the plan payment maximums to employees in this area would have also have been reached? If so, a lower PILT expense of any amount in each of those years would have no impact on the calculation of variable compensation.
ReplyDelete