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Preliminary budget numbers for many Thompson-Okanagan towns and cities are showing huge tax increases while people are struggling with a housing crisis, rising inflation and stagnant wages

For Kamloops, that’s looking like almost 11% while Osoyoos residents are facing a 37% tax hike and increases of more than 110% in utility fees.

At the lower end of the scale, Kelowna city council is considering a 4.79% increase for 2024.

READ MORE: Kelowna proposing lower tax hikes than Kamloops or other Okanagan cities

The BC branch of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation says this a terrible time for these kinds of increases.

“There’s absolutely no excuse for that, especially when inflation remains relatively high and especially when we know that food banks across the province are struggling to make ends meet and folks are reporting it’s difficult to save any money and it’s difficult to keep a roof over their heads,” Carson Binda, BC director for the federation, told iNFOnews.ca. “It’s unjustifiable for city councils to be raising their property taxes by hundreds of dollars a year.”

Most BC communities are looking at increases in the 5-10% range, he said.

“Just because it’s pretty much in line with the rest of province, doesn’t mean it’s OK,” Binda said. “We know that inflation has hovered between three and four percent over the past year so those are the targets city councils should be going for, at the absolute most.”

He doesn’t buy the argument that cities face higher costs for things like construction materials than regular consumers.

“No I don’t think that’s particularly valid, especially in somewhere like Kamloops where, of that 10.8% increase in property taxes, about three-quarters of that is earmarked for public sector union pay bumps."

RCMP, firefighter and unionized worker pay increases account for 7.6% of the Kamloops tax hike.

READ MORE: Tell Kamloops council what you think about the proposed 11% tax hike

Kelowna faces the same RCMP hikes. That city also gave its unionized workers a 4% bump-up on Oct. 1 and will give them another 4% on Jan. 1, but it’s still keeping its overall tax increase under 5%.

Just because the unionized workers are getting raises, that doesn’t mean the same should go for management or politicians, Binda argued.

“Bureaucrats work for the taxpayers not the other way around,” he said. “I don’t think anyone goes into civil service thinking they’re going to get rich out of it, especially at a time when taxpayers are facing these kinds of inflationary pressures. Government needs to trim the fat around their bureaucracy so, maybe, forego pay hikes for bureaucrats this year to offset some of those costs.

“Politicians should not be taking pay raises at a time when the people they are supposed to represent can hardly afford to feed their families and don’t have savings at the end of the month. That’s a slap in the face to all their constituents who are scraping by to make ends meet right now.”

Instead, politicians should be going through their budgets line by line to see what can be cut.

“Cities potentially should wait until the inflation rates start to cool down and people have more money in their pockets before they start going forward with these giant capital projects,” Binda said. “They should be looking for sponsorship opportunities for those big capital projects.

“Let’s say a town needs a new sports complex or a new community centre. They should be working with local businesses and members of the business community to see if there are ways to negotiate sponsorship opportunities or sell naming opportunities and things like that. Unfortunately, we’re not seeing enough of that across the province right now.”

The City of Kelowna is going ahead with its largest capital project ever, a $242 million rebuild of Parkinson Recreation Centre.

That will trigger annual tax increases for the next five years but will amount to only 0.16% of the 4.79% increase in 2024. The highest increase will be 1.25% in 2027 but city staff have laid out a plan to keep overall annual increases under 5% throughout that phasing-in period.

In West Kelowna, a new $22 million city hall — coming in at $4.4 million over budget — is being largely funded by a $700,000 annual levy that was brought in a few years ago.

Similarly, a new firehall, expected to cost $14.3 million, will largely be funded by a $520,000 firehall reserve fund started in 2022.

West Kelowna won’t announce its projected 2024 tax rate until Friday.

“That’s a good template that municipalities could, and should, be using,” Binda said.

Local governments argue that putting off major projects is just going to increase costs when they have to be built in the future.

That may be, but there are still cost-savings steps that can be taken to minimize tax impacts in these currently tough economic conditions, Binda argued.

“I think that’s a mindset that does sometimes cloud the judgement of our decision makers,” he said. “They need to still make those hard decisions. Maybe it’s not as easy as kicking a big capital project one year down the line. It may be more difficult for them to redesign the project or take a look at the requirements and see if they really need all those bells and whistles.

“No politician wants to put something off for a year or kick it down the line but, sometimes, that’s what needs to happen to save taxpayers money and make sure our communities remain affordable for normal people.”

He also doesn’t buy the argument that governments are needing to play catch-up after giving breaks during COVID.

“Even during COVID, the vast majority of municipalities in BC still saw property tax hikes,” Binda said. “COVID is a convenient excuse for politicians to use, but that excuse is running dry with taxpayers. We all had to make sacrifices during that time and that doesn’t justify the politicians’ big spending now.

“I can tell you that, at the federal and provincial level, they spent a lot more money during that pandemic than they ever had before and, at the end of the pandemic, those numbers have just kept kicking upwards.”

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