[Dado]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

So the little, two-bedroom, one-bath, Vetran's House, built on a double wide lot because it still has a septic system would pay as much tax as the two, five-bedroom, four-bath monster homes built on the severed lot next door which was connected to city water and sewer? But which would use more of the City's resources?

The way you deal with issues like that is to exclude certain fees for services where practicable, much as we already do.

Another modification is to do add in the total floor area of any buildings to the area calculation. It's more to measure and it does vary a bit more often than property size, but it's still a lot more constant than property value. The downsize to that, besides added complexity, is that it can discourage development; it's not as "clean" from an economic perspective.

The city of Ottawa used to charge taxes based on frontage, but that didn't stop developers from selling 75' x 100' (or larger) lots.

I'd stick with area rather than frontage. Frontage really gets messed up with culs-de-sac (wedge-shaped lots). A property's contribution to the city's costs is probably more related to how much land it is occupying than how much frontage it happens to have.

Pamela Blais's belief that charging development fees based on frontage would drive people to choose smaller lots may not be as true as she hopes. How swayed is a person who is prepared to buy a $700,000 home going to be if he can get the same house on a much smaller lot for only $695,000?

But would the difference for a "much smaller lot" really be only $5000?

I agree that charging taxes based on lot size should have the affect of shrinking the lot sizes, but is that the only goal? Isn't there more to smart planning than making all homes five stories tall, on 20 x 20 lots?

Having large lots can push development out further and further, but does that have to be un-smart? What if it created true satellite cities on land that wasn't suitable for farming? What if there were distributed sources of water and waste disposal so that large, long, pipes were not needed?

I think that's getting into separate discussions on "strategic" land use planning that can apply pretty much regardless of the property tax regime.

Maybe there needs to be more zones and user-fees. Zones would handle the distance from utility plants and user-fees would capture other aspects - including road frontage. For example, typically a garbage collection fee should be the same for two families which both put out two bags of trash. However, if one family is in a neighbourhood of 100' lots and the other surrounded by 30' lots, then there is a greater efficiency for the collection in the denser neighbourhood. If a person lives on a large lot very near one of the water purification plants, should they pay the same fees as a smaller lot much further away which requires long pipe runs? As the developments further away get more dense, those long pipes need to get larger in diametre, too, eventually forcing the replacement of the pipe all the way back to the source. What about the dense street with driveways so close together that all of the snow needs to be trucked away, verses a street with larger lots onto which the snow can be plowed and left; shouldn't their user-fees for winter maintenance be different?

Snow clearing and the costs associated therewith is a pandora's box of its own...

We have these wide residential streets, which on paper would give us lots of room for snow, but then we clear them fully, meaning we need still more space to store it all. Streets with boulevards would appear to offer more options than those with sidewalks next to the curb, but of course the weed lawn that develops there in the rest of the year needs to be kept under control.

In the Netherlands, a lot of residential streets are made so narrow that they are one-way only (for cars), so that would tend to lessen snow clearing needs generally.

Then there are sidewalks, which need their own specialized equipment to clear.

And on and on it goes.

Making a fair municipal tax system is not a simple thing; but it should be done.