During the latest Estevan City council meeting, the council put their focus on some of the latest bylaws, as usual, this time looking at taxation across the city. That's due to a recent provincial reassessment, which saw the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency (SAMA) look at properties and make adjustments accordingly.
Trina Sieben, the city's tax adjustor, talks about how that impacted Estevan and the steps they're taking to make sure the city is keeping on top of the change.
"This re-evaluation saw some significant shifts in assessment. The City of Estevan is unique in the sense that we experienced one of the highest shifts in assessment, given the positive and negative economic impacts affecting the market. The difference in taxable assessment from 2024 to 2025 saw a decrease of $30.7 million."
A change in taxable value would have been trouble for the city, necessitating some changes to its mill rate.
"If the mill rate remained the same as 2024, the City would see a deficit of approximately $1 million," said Sieben, "Therefore, it was necessary to analyze each property classification and assessment to establish new subclasses and rates to compensate for shifts while keeping all property taxes in line with our budget. We have spent the last month analyzing, researching, and reviewing other cities' taxation methods."
The city has come to a number of tax changes as a result of that analysis:
- The residential minimum tax has changed from $700 to $1,200.
- The commercial minimum tax of $700 was replaced with a $1,000 base tax.
- Tax tools have been used to create subclasses to alleviate the changes and shifts in assessment for most property classes, including residential, commercial, hotels, multifamily, and condos.
The floor was then opened to Sieben for questions from the gathered city council, with Councillor Kirsten Walliser asking for an example of how this would affect homeowners.
Sieben says that if your assessment was near the averages, which were a 3 per cent increase for residential properties and a 14 per cent decrease for commercial, you shouldn't see any big changes in taxation.
This valuation is dated for January 1st, 2023, as SAMA takes two years to publish its findings. The evaluation will be in place for the next four years.
Sieben says that anyone looking for the information from the assessment can call her office at 306-634-1811 to get access to resources sent out by SAMA.
She encourages people to go onto SAMAview online to see their evaluations, as the onus is on the homeowner to correct any work done by SAMA.
The council proceeded to adopt a motion that would send their taxation bylaws out to the public, with the next reading set for May 26th.
Besides the bylaw to fix the rate of taxation, the council also looked at bylaws to change the rate for the Business Improvement District, healthcare, and library levies.
The BID levy is expected to generate $27,500, paid entirely by businesses in the downtown area and not residential homeowners. The city's library levy is expected to raise $402,000, or $37.05 per capita for the Southeast Regional Library, with no say by the city on how much it allocates to the library each year. The health levy will generate $100,000, going towards the campaign bringing MRI services to Estevan.