A handful of homeowners along Spring Creek Drive who have been living with a construction zone on their doorsteps this spring and summer have the sympathy of their elected officials, but not their approval for a tax break as relief.
One homeowner on Spring Creek Drive at Main Street has written to request council forgive its municipal property taxes this year for the period that construction of the roadway in front of their home has been occurring – from April through October.
The multi-million dollar deep utility and roadway project was moved up in the five-year capital plan to this year to align with construction of a new hotel by Spring Creek Mountain Village. The hotel construction required significant utility work the municipality also needed to do on its roadway that leads into the subdivision in the downtown.
The municipality focused the early part of the project on the Main Street section of the road, which was complete by Canada Day. However, the construction site and how they have been treated have frustrated homeowners along Spring Creek Drive.
In a letter to council, the homeowner requesting tax relief detailed their services, dust, noise, access, and safety concerns.
What has compounded the problem, they wrote, is a lack of communication throughout the entire project even though they were promised advanced notice for work that affects their home.
“Our time is valuable,” they wrote to council. “We have been required to spend hundreds of hours in the past 18 months negotiating our rights, discussing the construction with the Town and council, writing and receiving emails to outline our requests and participating in meetings to voice our concerns. We have constantly been passed on to the next person requiring a reiteration of the same points. It appears no one has authority to make decisions on our behalf without including several levels of administration and municipal government. This has only added to our frustration and time commitment.”
Mayor John Borrowman and other councillors said they are sympathetic to the inconvenience the $4.3 million capital project has caused in their lives.
“I also spent time talking with two of the property owners on site and it was brutal,” Borrowman said. “We are going to see more projects of this nature that will have similar unfortunate impacts on immediate neighbours.
“I totally understand how terrible it was for these property owners, but there have been in the past, and will be increasingly in the future, projects of this nature.
“I am loathe to start a precedent to forgive taxes for property owners negatively affected by the really important work the Town does to maintain our infrastructure.”
Manager of financial services Katherine Van Keimpema recommended against granting the tax relief to the property owners. Van Keimpema said while owners feel they have not received the services they expect for taxes, they are based on assessed property value and should be upheld.
“Tax breaks for homeowners on Spring Creek Drive sets an expensive precedent,” she said.
Chief administrative officer Lisa de Soto told council the deep utility work on the roadway resulted in homes along it being hooked into municipal services like sewer and water, as they were on wells and septic systems.
“That is one of our oldest streets,” she said. “Several of those homes are on wells and septic systems, so we are actually connecting the homes there to the municipal systems as part of this project.”
De Soto said normally the cost of being hooked up to municipal water and wastewater services would fall to the homeowner. However, due to the “extenuating circumstances” of the roadway construction “it made sense to incur those costs and connect those properties,” she said, adding the total cost for the improvements was $80,000.
