New Brunswick property tax bills are out. Homeowners are hit the hardest — again

New Brunswick mailed out 460,242 property tax bills to landowners last week, seeking a record $1.48 billion in payments this year to help fund itself and 89 local governments.

And even after assessment, tax rate and municipality changes in 2022, the results for homeowners are pretty much the same as last year — the amount they are being charged is up.

"People aren't happy with it," Jim Bedford told CBC Information Morning in Saint John last week as the bills began arriving in his community.

Bedford is mayor of the new municipality of Fundy-St. Martins, where both assessment and tax-rate increases in the rural community established by the province have each raised what residents are being billed. 

"We get nothing in return," said Bedford. "It's pay it and have a good day."

For the last two years, large increases in assessments, primarily on houses and apartment buildings, has been driving up tax bills on those properties all over New Brunswick.

Even in municipalities where local councils have been cutting property tax rates to offset the rise in assessments, bills to homeowners have still been climbing rapidly.   

In part, that's because homeowners have to pay for discounts their local governments have to provide to many large properties in their communities that are provincially owned or funded.

In Moncton this week, property tax bills sent to the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre, the Université de Moncton and the Moncton Campus of the New Brunswick Community College are down a combined $488,700 from what the three paid the city two years ago.

The discounts are the result of classifications in New Brunswick legislation that define certain large health and education related properties as "residential."

That entitles them to the same tax treatment as a house.

Over the last two years, Moncton has cut its residential tax rate 12.5 per cent to offset assessment increases residents have experienced on homes. But those assessments have risen as much as 50 per cent in some neighbourhoods and the result is tax bills on houses are rising anyway.   

By contrast, many provincial government buildings, which have had only minor assessment increases over the last two years, are getting significant reductions in their bills by piggybacking on the residential tax cuts.   

It's one of the reasons cities are asking the province to divide up tax categories into more precise groupings.