The City of Moose Jaw’s tax policy is slowly shifting the tax burden so that it’s closer to an equal split between residential and commercial.

In 2018, city council requested a detailed report from administration about the differences between taxation between commercial and residential.

“Commercial property would pay 2.5 times the amount of municipal taxation that residential property would pay,” said city of Moose Jaw finance director Brian Acker. “That’s not uncommon in the province... in all cities in Saskatchewan, commercial does pay more on the same amount of assessment in terms of taxation as does residential.”

Moose Jaw’s ratio was in the middle of the pack when it came to the province, Acker said. At the time, council decided to move the needle closer to even over a period of time. The council looked at a number of options, and the one they chose was a tax sharing approach.

“Simply, each year when you have a tax increase, you share it between your commercial and your residential properties, such that there’s a slight shift in taxation to residential and a slight reduction in commercial,” said Acker.

The 2.5 ratio of commercial to residential taxation is now down slightly to 2.36 for the 2019 tax season.

“It’s just a realization by council and the city as a whole that commercial properties are being taxed at a rate that’s significantly higher than residential, so there’s a desire to move that down,” Acker said. “If you look at other cities in Saskatchewan, some would be in the under two range.”

This year’s tax increase of 3.01 per cent was evened out by applying 3.55 per cent of the increase to residential taxes and 1.9 per cent to commercial properties.

“Ultimately in a perfect world, your residential and your commercial would be taxed at the same rate,” said Acker. “If we ever got to that, that ratio would be 1.4. And the reason it would be 1.4 and not one is that commercial properties are able to write off their municipal taxes as an expense, so you have to take that into account.”

The three-year tax phase in for new builds and renovations for commercial properties in Moose Jaw is also still in effect.