Hearty congratulations to the voters of CVRD Area E for soundly resisting the bullying by their director and the CVRD board and staff trying to force them to pay new and extra taxes for the North Cowichan pool.
Most Area E residents do not use that pool. When the CVRD board wants to hide a new tax on residents they use the Alternate Approval Process (AAP), a negative billing option that is illegal for use by the private sector in Canada, to force new taxes on taxpayers. Under this system you are forced to accept a new tax unless you submit a written objection. Fortunately Area E residents were alert and gathered twice as many objections as needed to stop this fiasco that is always used to avoid a real vote by taxpayers in a referendum.
The CVRD has successfully used this nasty, undemocratic AAP process more than 50 times in the past to raise taxes forever without a referendum. Once the tax is in place the board simply increases it over time and the result is an ever increasing huge tax bill that no one ever voted for.
Right now the CVRD is doing it again forcing ALL the taxpayers in the Valley to pay for another new tax on their homes to support the arts and culture special interests. That tax will raise more than $130,000 per year unless more than 6,000 taxpayers send in their forms objecting to the process.
These can be found at www.cvrd.bc.ca/DocumentCenter/View/67342 and must be in by Nov. 18.
In the complicated and difficult to understand AAP advertising for these unfair tax increases the CVRD confuses the public by using a tax rate per $100,000 of assessment rather than identifying how much the new tax will cost the average taxpayer or telling them this is a new “forever” tax.
In comparison to the $79 million spending by the CVRD each year the amounts in the now rejected Area E pool tax and the planned Arts and Culture tax total less than $200,000 per year.
There is more than enough waste in the CVRD empire that the board could easily find that amount to fund their pet projects rather than taking an entitlement attitude to taxpayers’ wallets. All tax increases should be subject to referendum using new online voting processes to minimize costs.
W.E. (Bill) Dumont
Cobble Hill