Keep an eye on city charges
By Letter to the Editor on February 21, 2020.
The City of Medicine Hat has put a Municipal Consent and Access Fee (MCAF) on utility bills; this line item first appeared November 2016 with a zero amount and became an ongoing charge on January 2019.
Municipalities charge electricity and gas providers for access to city land and infrastructure. For example, the City of Calgary charges ATCO for access to city property and then forwards this charge to consumers. However, the City of Medicine Hat owns our utility; the city is charging its own department a fee that must be passed on to the consumer (you and I). As with all things consumer, GST is charged on this fee (tax), another tax on a tax. This is very strange logic.
What is really going on is the creation of a new revenue stream for the City of Medicine Hat that does not sound like “property tax increase.” The plan is to raise $9 million from 2019 to 2022; send Justin Trudeau a half million in GST and then re-evaluate the tax fee. Income taxes were a temporary proposal in 1917 that we continue to pay today.
Those in favour of the tax fee justify it by saying Calgary has a MCAF; library cards are free in Calgary, perhaps we should do the same here. Medicine Hat has always taken pride going its own way, but the growing trend is “they are doing it so we should also.”
Now the Medicine Hat ratepayer not only has to keep an eye on their property tax statement but also their utility bill to see what “imaginary tax-fee fantasy” plus GST is being created today.
Mike Somerville
Medicine Hat
Just as soon you think City Administration can’t get any more ridiculous they prove you wrong.
Major changes to Administration and Counsel are long overdue.
While many Alberta seniors support these politicians who are hellbent on looking after their rich friends by giving away our oil wealth and huge tax breaks , they find it smart to bash our municipal governments who are desperately trying to run their under funded communities the best way they can and these seniors aren’t smart enough to understand it.
What was wrong with the Lougheed system of collecting proper taxes and royalties , along with health care premiums, and financing our municipalities properly , keeping our property taxes at a reasonable level ?
It’s no secret that the Klein government destroyed Lougheed’s system and gave Albertans , on average , the highest property taxes in Canada and what Kenney is going to do will only make it worse. It can’t be helped . Can you prove me wrong ?
Some people can’t seem to grasp the concept that the party they voted for thirty, fifteen, or even five years ago is the same party they are supporting today.
Political parties evolve in both name and ideology, but there seem to be one ideology that has rebranded itself more than all parties combined. That is the ideology of conservativism and it is usually changed not because of ideology, but rather because of greed, and scandal with no care or concern for the people that have blindly supported them their whole lives.
I wrote in a “Letter to the Editor” about two weeks ago what this government is doing and going to do. and people only read what they want to read. But because of some people’s lifelong support and blind faith in an ideology they no longer understand they criticize the ones that attempt to point out what is so obvious.
This is part of what I wrote;
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Any government ceases to be civilized when it perverts its authority to abuse the people it is elected to serve.
First, it will be the weak, sick, old and vulnerable that get abused and then it will be the people that look after them. The nurses, teachers, doctors, front line workers like the police, housing and homeless workers and the list is climbing.
Let me ask: When will you be concerned? Only when they come for you? When you can’t insure your car? Because let me remind you, we are already at that point and it will only get worse.
The City of Medicine Hat can and will nickle and dime us to the grave. Once the City began paying it’s employees the highest wage in all of Canada, it became a moot point on there no ending greed. Of course those fine men and women in blue are the highest paid cops in the country with one of the lowest case loads to boot. For that we get threat’s they can’t maintain check stops. When is the last time anyone got pulled over for speeding? It does”t happen, the mailman does it now.
It is no surprise to any Hatter when these new charges are added to utilities or any letter head that says “City of Medicine Hat” on it. Now they send out that joke of a survey about snow removal. It is just another way of informing the good folks of the Hat we are gonna soon be gouged for more money.
So what has your whining got to do with collecting proper royalties and taxes from the rich and providing your city with proper funds to run it’s finances properly? Can you prove what you say is true? The fact is we hear similar excuses from our fellow seniors throughout this province and we fully agree with you, it is a problem. But we are smart enough to know that we didn’t have this problem when Lougheed was running the province, so why have so many seniors allowed themselves to be put into this situation by blindly supporting Reformers pretending they are conservatives?
Les certainly understands it, so why don’t so many other Alberta seniors. This blind support of anyone who attaches the word Conservative to their name is just plain stupid. and I supported the conservatives for 28 years and am smart enough to know there nothing conservative about them.These guys are out to make your lives a living hell and they don’t care who gets hurt doing it. When we tried to stop Klein from doing it we got called all sorts of names, yet look at the mess he created. We will all be paying for it for the rest of our lives.