Update: COVID-19 Response
Council met today. And the world has changed a lot in the two weeks since our last meeting!
Today’s meeting was virtual. The Mayor was the only member of Council in Chambers- everyone else called in.
Our last regular meeting was on March 9. At that time, COVID-19 was something the City was monitoring and preparing for, but it wasn’t yet a reality in our community.
A Special Council Meeting was held on March 18th. However, it was a quick meeting where only one action was taken: the declaration of a State of Local Emergency.
Today was Council’s first opportunity to discuss how to respond to COVID-19 and its impact on our community and economy. There were three major topics of conversation:
An Operational Update from our City Manager
Property tax deferral
Support for renters
Below is a summary of what was discussed and decided.
Important note: any mistakes or opinions expressed here belong to me and me alone. I am not speaking for the City or for Council in my blog posts.
OPERATIONAL UPDATE
The structures of municipalities are dictated by provincial legislation. This legislation makes it very clear that Council’s role is a governance-only role: we create budgets and bylaws, set high level policies, and approve and monitor programs. However, we don’t operate the City. Instead, Council hires a City Manager to implement Council’s directives and to oversee the day-to-day business of the City.
Provincial legislation creates an even large separation between Council and operations in a State of Local Emergency (which we are now). The City Manager has wide ranging authority to make decisions for the health and sustainability of our community. Council doesn’t get a say into these decisions.
However, as the group that hired him, Council is ultimately responsible for the actions of the City Manager. And, as an elected body, Council is well positioned to offer advice to him. So during the meeting today, our City Manager provided an update on how he and his staff are responding to COVID-19.
The primary focuses of the City have been to:
support the province in its health response
make sure that essential City services (police, fire, water, snow removal, etc…) will continue to function throughout the pandemic
enable all residents to access basics like food, water, medicine, and shelter.
I’m very proud of the work our staff have done.
We have experienced, smart, and capable people working for the City. The Grande Prairie Regional Emergency Management Partnership is one of the best Emergency Management Agencies in the province. And our people were preparing for COVID-19 weeks before it got to Grande Prairie.
You can get full updates about the City’s COVID-19 response on its website: click here.
You can get updates about the province’s response here.
Some highlights of our local response that were shared today:
35 States of Local Emergency are active in Alberta right now
On Wednesday, intends to ask that our State of Local Emergency be extended for another 7 days
Many departments are busy supporting the Grande Prairie Emergency Regional Partnership
If the province orders residents to shelter-in-place, we are preparing to support that
Employees who are able to are working from home. Those who do essential physical work are implementing social distancing into their operations.
Engineering is preparing to ramp up our capital projects if increased federal or provincial funding becomes available. They are also re-assessing our currently approved capital projects to see if they are still feasible from a labour and supply perspective.
Service areas are working to structure their operations around minimum staffing levels and to ensure business continuity
Dave Barr is being prepared as an overflow shelter for our homeless population. Processes are being put into place for food and medication delivery. It will be ready by Wednesday. Work is also being done to create a third overflow shelter and to ensure there is isolation options available for our vulnerable population.
Staff are working with grocery stores to ensure adequate supplies of food and other essential products remain available
An emergency food and medicine delivery service is being prepared for if it becomes needed by residents
PROPERTY TAX DEFERRAL
Council recognizes that many people and businesses are facing significant financial challenges. In order to help with cash flow and liquidity, Council directed administration to create “relevant bylaw amendments and implement necessary procedures” to defer property taxes until August 31st. These will be debated and confirmed at a later date.
Under our current direction, there will be no application process for tax deferral. Setting up an application process would be expensive for the City. It would be time consuming for property owners. I’m also not clear on if provincial legislation gives us the ability to implement one. This means that all property owners will be able to take advantage of this deferral.
However, when taxes are deferred, if you can pay your taxes on time, that would really help the community. Even if we aren’t collecting taxes through the spring and summer, we still need to pay for police, fire, roads, and other expensive services. The City is going to have cash flow challenges, which carries risk. If too many people defer their taxes, we might have to make dramatic cutbacks on City services or incur financing costs.
We’re in a time where we are trusting our community to keep each other physically healthy through social distancing. But that isn’t the only thing we’re trusting people to do. Council is also trusting people to keep our community financially healthy. We trust that those who are able to pay their taxes on time will do so.
A few other important notes:
Aquatera is also taking steps to help people who are struggling to pay their bills. You can learn more about those steps here.
As far as I know, we are the first Alberta municipality to take action on deferring taxes. We opted to show quick support for struggling residents and businesses. But there is a risk in being early movers: the province may over rule us and dictate a different course of action for municipalities.
Our property tax rate isn’t set yet. Last November, we set a budget that estimated average properties seeing a below-inflation tax increase of 1.25%. However, tax rates don’t actually get set until a Property Tax Bylaw is passed in the spring. I expect there to be lots of debate on our final tax rate. On one hand, lowering taxes would be beneficial to many. On the other hand, the City is incurring big expenses and lowered revenue right now and we need to have enough fiscal capacity to help with economic recovery. Lowering taxes could prevent other important actions. This will be an important and complex conversation over the coming months.
This is a deferral, not a cancellation, of taxes. However, it will still remove revenue from the City. The City’s budget assumes that it we will receive tax penalty payments each year. Not levying penalties over the summer will have an estimated cost of ~$900,000.
This is an important step to help people get through the next few months. However, more needs to be done to help residents and businesses recover and find long term prosperity. I’m sure there will be many conversations about how to best do this in the coming weeks.
SUPPORT FOR RENTERS
Many residents (including our most financially vulnerable) are renters. Property tax is baked into their rent, but they don’t pay property tax directly to the City. Deferring property taxes (and in some cases utilities) doesn’t help them directly. Changing property taxes only helps tenants if landlords choose to and are able to work with them.
Over the past week, I’ve spoken to a number of renters who have shared stories about compassionate landlords. I’ve also heard from a few landlords whose greatest concern is keeping their tenants housed. I trust that the vast majority of landlords in our City will work with tenants who were unexpectedly impacted by COVID-19.
There are a number of smaller landlords with limited financial capacity and who may not qualify for mortgage deferrals. There are a small minority of landlords who are unreasonable. Some tenants in our City who may be at risk of losing their home.
This is a tough challenge for Council to address. Provincial legislation gives us no authority over tenant-landlord relationships. There is nothing Council can do to directly protect people from being evicted due to COVID-19 related hardship. However, today Council decided to make this a point of advocacy to the province.
We directed the Mayor to write to the province to “advocate for immediate resources to be provided to landlords and tenants to prevent evictions due to loss of income caused by COVID-19.”
I hope the province will take quick action to help those struggling to make rent over the next couple of weeks and months. I trust they’ll do so in a way that doesn’t cost significant hardship to smaller landlords and which doesn’t allow chronically challenging tenants to take advantage of the situation.
A lot has happened in the last two weeks, and the City has been focused on its immediate response. Today, I was glad we could start talking about the next few months.
We’ve got a lot of hard conversations coming up. I hope you’ll stay track with what we’re talking about and offer your thoughts throughout.
Thanks for reading!
-Dylan